Group for Apps and Services on Exascale Research Infrastructure is a research, development, and teaching unit at FIDIT + MedRi.
Browser wars Photo source: Ray Hennessy (@rayhennessy) | Unsplash Last week in Rijeka we held Science festival 2015 . This is the (hopefully not unlucky) 13th instance of the festival that started in 2003. Popular science events were organized in 18 cities in Croatia. I was invited to give a popular lecture at the University departments open day , which is a part of the festival. This is the…
The follow-up Photo source: Andre Benz (@trapnation) | Unsplash When Linkin Park released their second album Meteora , they had a quote on their site that went along the lines of Musicians have their entire lives to come up with a debut album, and only a very short time afterward to release a follow-up.
Open-source magic all around the world Photo source: Almos Bechtold (@almosbech) | Unsplash Last week brought us two interesting events related to open-source movement: 2015 Red Hat Summit (June 23-26, Boston, MA ) and Skeptics in the pub (June 26, Rijeka, Croatia ).
Joys and pains of interdisciplinary research Photo source: Trnava University (@trnavskauni) | Unsplash In 2012 University of Rijeka became NVIDIA GPU Education Center (back then it was called CUDA Teaching Center). For non-techies: NVIDIA is a company producing graphical processors (GPUs), the computer chips that draw 3D graphics in games and the effects in modern movies. In the last couple of…
What is the price of open-source fear, uncertainty, and doubt? Photo source: j (@janicetea) | Unsplash The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (JPCL) , published by American Chemical Society , recently put out two Viewpoints discussing open-source software: Open Source and Open Data Should Be Standard Practices by J. Daniel Gezelter , and What Is the Price of Open-Source Software? by Anna I.…
On having leverage and using it for pushing open-source software adoption Photo source: Alina Grubnyak (@alinnnaaaa) | Unsplash Back in late August and early September, I attended 4th CP2K Tutorial organized by CECAM in Zürich. I had the pleasure of meeting Joost VandeVondele 's Nanoscale Simulations group at ETHZ and working with them on improving CP2K . It was both fun and productive; we…
AMD and the open-source community are writing history Photo source: Andrew Dawes (@andrewdawes) | Unsplash Over the last few years, AMD has slowly been walking the path towards having fully open source drivers on Linux. AMD did not walk alone, they got help from Red Hat , SUSE , and probably others. Phoronix also mentions PathScale , but I have been told on Freenode channel #radeon this is not the…
I am still not buying the new-open-source-friendly-Microsoft narrative Photo source: Patrick Bellot (@pbellot) | Unsplash This week Microsoft released Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) on GitHub , after open sourcing Edge's JavaScript engine last month and a whole bunch of projects before that. Even though the open sourcing of a bunch of their software is a very nice move from Microsoft, I am…
Free to know: Open access and open source Photo source: Álvaro Serrano (@alvaroserrano) | Unsplash !!! info Reposted from Free to Know: Open access & open source , originally posted by STEMI education on Medium . Q&A with Vedran Miletić In June 2014, Elon Musk opened up all Tesla patents. In a blog post announcing this, he wrote that patents 'serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions…
The academic and the free software community ideals Photo source: Giammarco Boscaro (@giamboscaro) | Unsplash Today I vaguely remembered there was one occasion in 2006 or 2007 when some guy from the academia doing something with Java and Unicode posted on some mailing list related to the free and open-source software about a tool he was developing. What made it interesting was that the tool was…
Celebrating Graphics and Compute Freedom Day Photo source: Elena Mozhvilo (@miracleday) | Unsplash Hobbyists, activists, geeks, designers, engineers, etc have always tinkered with technologies for their purposes (in early personal computing, for example). And social activists have long advocated the power of giving tools to people. An open hardware movement driven by these restless innovators is…
Enabling HTTP/2, HTTPS, and going HTTPS-only on inf2 Photo source: Arkadiusz Gąsiorowski (@ambuscade) | Unsplash Inf2 is a web server at University of Rijeka Department of Informatics , hosting Sphinx-produced static HTML course materials ( mirrored elsewhere ), some big files, a WordPress instance ( archived elsewhere ), and an internal instance of Moodle . HTTPS was enabled on inf2 for a long…
Why we use reStructuredText and Sphinx static site generator for maintaining teaching materials Photo source: Patrick Tomasso (@impatrickt) | Unsplash Yesterday I was asked by Edvin Močibob , a friend and a former student teaching assistant of mine , the following question: You seem to be using Sphinx for your teaching materials , right? As far as I can see, it doesn't have an online WYSIWYG…
Fly away, little bird Photo source: Vincent van Zalinge (@vincentvanzalinge) | Unsplash The last day of July happened to be the day that Domagoj Margan , a former student teaching assistant and a great friend of mine, set up his own DigitalOcean droplet running a web server and serving his professional website on his own domain domargan.net . For a few years, I was helping him by providing space…
Mirroring free and open-source software matters Photo source: Tuva Mathilde Løland (@tuvaloland) | Unsplash Post theme song: Mirror mirror by Blind Guardian A mirror is a local copy of a website that's used to speed up access for the users residing in the area geographically close to it and reduce the load on the original website. Content distribution networks (CDNs) , which are a newer concept…
Markdown vs reStructuredText for teaching materials Photo source: Eugenio Mazzone (@eugi1492) | Unsplash Back in summer 2017. I wrote an article explaining why we used Sphinx and reStructuredText to produce teaching materials and not a wiki. In addition to recommending Sphinx as the solution to use, it was general praise for generating static HTML files from Markdown or reStructuredText. This…
Don't use RAR Photo source: Tim Mossholder (@ctimmossholder) | Unsplash I sometimes joke with my TA Milan Petrović that his usage of RAR does not imply that he will be driving a rari . After all, he is not Devito rapping^Wsinging Uh 😤 . Jokes aside, if you search for 'should I use RAR' or a similar phrase on your favorite search engine, you'll see articles like 2007 Don't Use ZIP, Use RAR and…
Should I do a Ph.D.? Photo source: Santeri Liukkonen (@iamsanteri) | Unsplash Tough question, and the one that has been asked and answered over and over . The simplest answer is, of course, it depends on many factors. As I started blogging at the end of my journey as a doctoral student, the topic of how I selected the field and ultimately decided to enroll in the postgraduate studies never really…
Alumni Meeting 2023 at HITS and the reminiscence of the postdoc years Photo source: Jahanzeb Ahsan (@jahan_photobox) | Unsplash This month we had Alumni Meeting 2023 at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies , or HITS for short. I was very glad to attend this whole-day event and reconnect with my former colleagues as well as researchers currently working in the area of computational…
My perspective after two years as a research and teaching assistant at FIDIT Photo source: Darran Shen (@darranshen) | Unsplash My employment as a research and teaching assistant at Faculty of Informatics and Digital Technologies (FIDIT for short), University of Rijeka (UniRi) ended last month with the expiration of the time-limited contract I had. This moment has marked almost two full years I…