Ubuntu Please Implement support for OpenCL API
Just heard that the next version of OS-X (Snow Leopard) is going to support using the GPU for number crunching tasks. It’d be absolutely awesome if ubuntu could do this too.
Now that OpenCL 1.0 is final, prioritising support would not only inspire developers to use linux, but also prove that we have the development toolkits, guts and motivation to compete against OSX Snow Leopard and Windows 7. If we don’t support it rapidly, we will only fall further behind OSX, especially since it will give their developers extra time to utilise it properly (we shouldn’t be waiting until its already popular). The faster we get this implemented, the quicker developers can use it, and the faster Ubuntu will be!For those who don’t know, OpenCL is a royalty-free standard for developers to program general purpose highly parallelised applications over GPU and CPU (combining their power even). Its more advanced then CUDA in that it combines CPU and GPU power and is accessible outside of Nvidia’s video cards.
In summary, OpenCL is expected to become very popular with developers and users, and will make everything damned fast (especially considering we are already seeing video cards with 1600 processing threads, and Intel CPU’s with 16 virtual CPU’s will be out Q3 2009). If every program used OpenCL, processing power will seem almost infinite to end users.
Activision, Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Electronic Arts, IBM, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Apple and Samsung are all on board. All major gaming companies, CPU and GPU manufacturers are on board. So yes, it will be a slaughter without support… ATI is dropping “close to metal”, and as Nvidia will support OpenCL, CUDA will probably be depreciated slowly too (at the moment they are recommending CUDA only as a higher-level development platform).
my wordle
In response to Rod Page’s post I’ve created a Wordle too. It actually says a lot about somebody!
Kehan's Wordle
Image is
Testing Flock
Flock is an interesting browser. It is based on Firefox, but has been optimised for social networking, and by default has plugins for numerous web2.0 websites. It also has a built in blog editor (see screenshot), which automatically acquired my screendump from my windows clipboard, and uploaded it to my flickr account for me.
There’s apparently a zotero plugin for flock, and I think it’s compatible with firefox extensions. Certainly an interesting tool to keep track of – would reduce the need for numerous memory hogging firefox extensions which try to keep track of these things for you.
Blogged with Flock
Kew bulletin online!
Wayhey – Kew Bulletin is now available through JSTOR so long as your institution has a subscription. Certainly a step forward – we should be able to get some decent citation metrics now!
Americans are NOT stupid – WITH SUBTITLES
Just watch it. Almost beats miss Teen South Carolina
GrassBase User map thanks to Google Analytics
How anybody can even think about running a website without using something like Google Analytics is beyond me. I’ve just done an update (last friday) of our species descriptions and am now tracking views of all pages thanks to this amazing facility. It’s really gratifying to see that we’re being usedby all sorts of people, all over the place.
iptc | drupal.org
This is very encouraging – this means that pictures that I have classified within Picasa, F-spot, G-Thumb, etc.
iptc | drupal.org
iptc is a module that will extract iptc caption and keyword tags from images added to drupal.
It depends on the image module.It uses a plugin system to allow different libraries to be utilised to extract the data from
an image.Currently it’s supporting the standard php functions, the exiftool binary, the exiv2 binary.
This module is sponsored by photoscout.co.uk
BPH-2: Periodicals with Botanical Content – Please make them electronic!!!
I’ve been using the famous BPH-2: Periodicals with Botanical Content to standardise journal names in GrassBase, and I have endless frustration with the fact that this work is a standard for TDWG but it is not available electronically. If the standard hopes to be useful towards projects like the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Encyclopaedia of Life, then it should also be freely available to all the peoples of the world, not just the relatively few specialist botanical libraries that have the money to pay for it. It’s published in 2004, so the text must have been electronic at some point in its lifetime, so even if you didn’t use a database when writing it, it would be a lot easier to search if it were electronic (even a PDF would be great). And please use a Creative Commons licence 
Plus if you do it you’ll get lots of Kudos. And a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Oh and you may well get cited a lot more.
Compiled by Gavin D. R. Bridson. 2004. 2 volumes. v–xx, 1,470 pp.; 8 1/2 x 11″; 10 lbs. Cloth bound, $130 plus insurance ($3.20 domestic; $3.40 international) and shipping and handling. ISBN 0-913196-78-9.
BPH-2, a second edition of Botanico-Periodicum-Huntianum (1968), is an alphabetical title list of periodicals with botanical content. Spanning 1665 to 2002, BPH-2 includes more than 33,000 titles from around the
HOW TO: Drupal as database: A one to many scenario for displaying the data | drupal.org
HOW TO: Drupal as database: A one to many scenario for displaying the data
Drupal 5.x
The Scenario:
This scenario works from a point of view that a drupal node-type is equivalent to a database table. This scenario uses CCK, Views and Contemplate and optionally prepoulute to achieve its results. There are other scenarios and other modules that can relate and group nodes and node-types, which are not addressed within.
A good way to work a relational database with CCK
He’s got a job
A very moving video – really makes you think
uBrowser | drupal.org
uBrowser looks pretty cool – allows the user to drill down quite quickly – pretty good for a taxonomic classification.
Has a demo on: http://www.ubercart.org/drupal_module_and_jquery_guides/ubrowser
Geo Module
The Geo Module looks like a great way to have full GIS support within drupal.
The geo module is the next generation geo-spatial module for Drupal. Like location, it provides storage for points, but it also supports the full range of OpenGIS Simple Features, such as lines and polygons. Geo takes advantage of spatially enabled databases (PostGIS and MySQL Spatial) for native storage, which leads to faster, more informational queries.
Geo is currently is early development, but much of the power of the system is very apparent. Feel free to download the code from CVS, but beware that support will be very limited.
Glastonbury!
Here’s a test post from my phone at glastonbury. So far the pain has stayed away and not too much mud, but i’m sure this will all change.
iPhylo: Google Earth phylogenies
Rod Page has extended some cool work and made a nice tree viewable in GoogleEarth. Take a look at the picture below. And he may well add this as a facility in his amazing TreeViewX – bump. Rod, where’s the KML file (or am I missing something?) – I wanted to see if this would work in Google maps as they now support loading KML files.
iPhylo: Google Earth phylogenies
Now, for something completely different. I’ve been playing with Google Earth as a phylogeny viewer, inspired by Bill Piel’s efforts, the cool avian flu visualisation Janies et al. published in Systematic Biology (doi:10.1080/10635150701266848), and David Kidd’s work.
Google Maps in Drupal for specimens
Thanks to Vince for his recent post on Google Maps Mashups. Does enabling cache speed up page loading for this? Or is it the javascript? – I had that problem when trying to overlay shapefiles onto google maps. The “proper” way to do this is to have a map server only serving up the points that are visible from a particular zoom and doing the clustering itself (and drupal doesn’t have this – yet).
Good to see CCK being useful. I read yesterday that Drupal 6 is going to have a proper database API which will perform all of the CRUD actions for you. This is going to be called the Schema API. Should be extremely useful for doing DB related stuff (you don’t have to type CREATE TABLE bunkum; – you just tell your schema to add a record or data type or data structure.
INSERT INTO bunkum;.....
Biological Taxonomy in Drupal by Vince Smith
Vince Smith’s post on Biological Taxonomy in Drupal is an interesting read. He has developed a nifty little tool that will help people using his ‘Scratchpads‘, or actually pretty much any Vanilla Drupal installation to import their classifications.
I think this is a great approach as Drupal takes it’s core concept of taxonomy from a biological background. A slightly different way of doing this that I have been thinking about is using Drupal’s Content Construction Kit (CCK) modules to model biological data types such as Taxon Concepts, meaning that metadata about names can be included. There is another drop in replacement for the drupal taxonomy module called Category which has a number of nifty additional features including the ability for drupal node to become a category:
ie:
- Create your taxon concepts in CCK
- Make the TaxonConcept node type a Category
- Tag all your other information relating to that Taxon with that Category
Time I started sharing my ideas I’ve been developing some of these ideas.
Also I was reading about the Relationship Module and it’s possible for node relations to be expressed in RDF and to plug additional RDF ontologies into drupal. All sounds promising and even a little bit TDWG’y
Hope this makes sense.
