A Few Thoughts…

It’s a feature I have found handy in one major place: highlighting every other row in an excel sheet. You’d think they would have a button to do it, but conditional formatting is a suitable alternative.

1. Highlight the area to apply the formatting to (all of it in my case)
2. Go to Format->Conditional Formatting.
3. Change the drop-down value to “Formula Is”
4. Enter “=MOD(ROW(),2)=0″ (without the quotes) into the formula box.
5. Click the formatting button and choose your format, and you’re done!

This information taken from Microsoft’s Help site.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a free minute to post, and I don’t have a whole lot of time today as it is. For the first time that I know of, someone was using my system as a launching point for emailing spam. I’ve noticed my network connection has bee quite active recently, and I wasn’t sure just why. The hacker got in through a hole I didn’t know about – my roommate’s ssh account. I set up an account for him to use to move files to my machine for me to work on some video things for him. As it turns out, he must have used a VERY insecure password. Anyway, I changed the password to something secure, and killed all the processes. I kinda wish I had held onto the scripts, but they’re gone now.

I think I need to get a network profiler back up again…

I was out being a good nerd looking up specs (in this case processor specs) on some systems that I could never personally own (we’re talking multi-million USD systems here), when I came across this little tidbit of information I was not aware of: the new Cray XT3 systems use Opterons on their Processor Element boards! That’s pretty cool! Cray has pretty much always stuck to custom vector processors in the past. A few other things on the XT3 page that piqued my geek interest, and I will probably look into more soon include:

• The Cray XT3 system incorporates a high bandwidth, low latency interconnect, comprised of Cray SeaStar chips and high speed links based on HyperTransport and proprietary protocols. The interconnect directly connects all processing elements in a Cray XT3 system in a 3D torus topology, eliminating the cost and complexity of external switches.
• The Cray XT3 operating system UNICOS/lc is designed to run large complex applications and scale efficiently to 30,000 processors.
• The Cray XT3 system maintains a single root file system across all nodes, ensuring that modifications are immediately visible throughout the system without transmitting changes to each individual PE. Â Fast boot times ensure that software upgrades can be completed quickly, with minimal downtime. Â In addition, the Cray XT3 system provides a set of administration tools for tracking and rolling back modifications to the root file system.
• To maximize I/O performance Lustre is integrated directly into applications running on the system microkernel. Data moves directly between applications space and the Lustre servers on the I/O PEs without the need for an intervening data copy through the lightweight kernel.

These Cray guys certainly are up to some cool things, which for someone getting ready to enter the world of grad school in CS/CompE makes me look at their work a little closer!