First of all, I’d like to say that I am a happy Debian user, and I will not change it for any other distro - I have my reasons.

At work I use Debian testing (lenny) in a ThinkPad T42 as my official operating system. Additional to Debian I installed the LTC internal Linux distro, based on Ubuntu Gutsy, that I use as a “security system”, if some IBM application decides not work on Debian. At home, I have a desktop with Debian stable (etch).

After read a VentureCake post about “Using Avant without Gnome panel“, I decided to look closer this new window manager (new for me, because I’ve never heard about it before). As my first step, I looked the Avant window Manger official site to learn more. There, I saw that there are not official and stable (at least for me) packages of avant for Debian. So, my unique option was try it in Ubuntu.

Once Ubuntu is a son of Debian, it was very easy install avant (I love apt ). First, I added the following lines in my /etc/apt/sources.list file:

Then, I had to download the repository key:

After that, it was time to install the packages:

OK. The avant was installed!!! Once installed, I gone to Applications → Accessories → Avant Window Navigator, and the little dock bar was running. I did some modifications on its default configurations (System → Preferences → Awn manager).

So, my screen now have a nice dock bar:

I’d like to share with you, a good post that my friend Alex Zanetti (trustlix) posted in our IBM internal Blog system.

He was trying to automatically add some fancy headers to the our projects *.py files. Searching a little, he discovered how do that using Vim, the text editor that we commonly use to develop.

To set up your Vim text editor to do the same thing, follow the points bellow:

• Create a directory named .vim/styles, where you’ll add some skeleton files (template text files, each one for a file type):
  • mkdir -p ~/.vim/styles

• In this directory create the skeleton.py file, with the desired content you’d like to add to every new python file:
  • vim ~/.vim/styles/skeleton.py

• After that, add the following lines into the ~/.vimrc file:

The vimrc code above will:

1. add the content of the skeleton file to every new *.py file created under vim;
2. replace the “Created: ” string with the current system date;
3. replace in the line 2 the “<year>” string with the current year.

To test it, type in your shell “vim blah.py”, and a new file called blah.py will be created with the content of the ~/.vim/styles/skeleton.py. In my case, the file created looks like:

The nice thing is that you can do it differently for any type of file you want, like *.c or *.java, justing creating a new ~/styles/skeleton/ file and adding a new block of code in the ~/.vimrc file to work if those.

Last year I attended the 19th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD) in Gramado, RS, Brazil. The web page of the event is here.

There were very nice presentations like the “Computational Characteristics of Production Seismic Migration and its Performance on Novel Processor Architectures” by Jairo Panetta (Petróleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil), “Impacts of Multiprocessor Configurations on Workloads in Bioinformatics” by Mauricio Breternitz (Intel Corporation, USA) and the Google Keynote presentation.

The event had many parallel Workshops and the most famous of them are the WSCAD (Workshop em Sistemas Computacionais de Alto Desempenho - Workshop in High Performance Computing Systems). This is a portuguese event, so I think that is not interesting point the presentations here, but there was a good CELL programming short course.

Summarizing the event I can point three things discussed in the keynotes and panels, to solve the problem of the new challenges of parallel and multi-core programming:

1. Use high level programming languages;
2. Use tools developed to do the work of parallelling the code;
3. Raise the level of abstraction of the problem.

These three points of view are defended by Kunle Olukotun (Stanford University), Mauricio Bareternitz (Intel) and Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), respectively.

As my first post, I’d like to talk about my developerWorks article published in Sept/29/2007. The article is about how to install Linux on POWER machines using the IBM Installation Toolkit for Linux on POWER, and it was published in IBM DeveloperWorks website. It was published in the “Linux”, “Power Architecture technology” and “IBM Systems” brands of the website.

This article is based in the last IBM Installation Toolkit version (2.1) that was released in Sept/25/2007. I think that it was a success, because it was translated to Chinese and Japanese.

I hope you like the reading and please, feel free to write comments about the article