MPI on a PS3

No, really!  Some folks at Dartmouth have not only done this, but posted a step-by-step guide for anyone who wants to do it themselves. I am not one of these – I don’t own a PS3, a Wii, or any other gaming device. 

The trick is to install the 64-bit Fedora Core 8 via a DVD and a thumb drive (for booting) and then run MPI as usual. Since the PS3 apparently has 8 cores in it, this may not be as nutty as it sounds. The Dartmouth claim is that you can build a super-computer for under $4K. Considering that 10 PS3s would give you 80 cores, well, that might be fun!

Setting Up Tomcat 6 with JSF

So, I’m setting up Tomcat 6 and want to run some JSF 1.2 apps with MyFaces core and Tomahawk. Got everything configured properly except the JSTL jar and spent some time banging my head against a class not found error, specifically the Config class in the JSTL jar.

I found this very useful post, which advied me to install glassfish and pull a couple jars from its lib folder. I did this, and it did not work: I wonder if this is because I am using MyFaces instead of Mojarra. However, the following note, lefd me to the solution I needed:

“Tomcat will ignore .. any JAR file [inside your app's WEB-INF/lib folder] completely if it contains the class javax.servlet.Servlet)”

So, I moved the jstl jar file to tomcat’s lib folder, rebooted the server, and bang everything started working.

JavaFX 1.0 Released – Finally

Sun has finally released JavaFX 1.0!  Is it too late to matter? No, not really. Although Flex is doing well, its competitor, SliverLight, will not receive any meaningful adoption until MS-Visual Studio tools are released for it. This will be in 2010 when MS-VS 10 ships. Does Microsoft ever ship software late? LOL – maybe they should have called it VS 2012.

To me JavaFX is a great idea that doesn’t look very usable yet, but this is from playing with the betas etc. that were released prior to 1.0. Not sure when I’ll have time to play with 1.0, but I’ll try. Check it out yourself at the JavaFX home page.

Here’s an interview with Tony Wyant, lead engineer for JavaFX media, and here’s an excerpt:

” …[JavaFX] provides both a cross-platform video format and plays the formats available on the client machine. The FXM media format can be played wherever JavaFX can be played. Furthermore, when running on Windows, FX Script can play all the media formats that Windows Media Player can play, and on the Macintosh, all the formats that QuickTime can play…”