draft
Our elected representatives need our help to understand what we want done. Figure out how to contact him/her and let them know. I will be making a list on this blog. You should do the same.
Sunday, November 18, 2018
Saturday, November 17, 2018
How to Contact Glassner & Blinn
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To my astonishment, both Andrew Glassner and Jim Blinn are easy to contact, as they maintain web sites with a contact form.
https://www.glassner.com/
http://www.jimblinn.com/contact/
To my astonishment, both Andrew Glassner and Jim Blinn are easy to contact, as they maintain web sites with a contact form.
https://www.glassner.com/
http://www.jimblinn.com/contact/
What Everyone Who Studies Intelligence Knows about Wikileaks
draft
Many Americans don't like what they think is the "intelligence" business. There are good and bad reasons why this might be, but its sufficiently important that I think that people should know more about it so that they can make more accurate or possibly nuanced judgments about it. It is, after all, *their* intelligence community and is genuinely working, for the most part, in what they believe is the nation's interest as ordered by the POTUS and the relevant committees of Congress.
Even though there is a lot we can not and will not know about the world of intelligence there are lots and lots of things that we can know by paying attention and knowing the history of these things.
And so, in light of this, here is one comment on current events.
It has been obvious for years, certainly at least a decade and possibly more, that whatever else Wikileaks may be, it is probably also a tool of foreign Intelligence. From the material released and the timing of that release it is likely that Wikileaks has been chosen as the "public mouthpiece" of materials collected by foreign intelligence agencies that have collected the material from one source or another, and are looking for a way to get this material into the world at a time of their choosing to influence some political process ongoing in the West. This has been completely obvious, and if it is not true, a lot of people will be surprised. But what does it mean? What should we do about it? And what does it not mean?
It does not mean that the people running Wikileaks are insincere or believe that they are doing anything but what a freedom loving person of the world should be doing. They may be completely uncompromised in their goals. Nor does it mean that they have necessarily committed any crimes, although they may have. But even so, be aware that a crime in one country may not be a crime in another. On the other hand, I think it is likely from what little I know that they very well may have knowingly committed some crimes that are in fact illegal in this country, but that is to be seen.
All I am really saying here is that you should not be so naive as to think that Wikileaks is a completly independent, do-good-for-the-world, totally disinterested organization. They serve a very useful purpose for people who are not friendly to this country. That said, they may provide a useful service for the rest of us, that would depend on your point of view on many other issues.
Many Americans don't like what they think is the "intelligence" business. There are good and bad reasons why this might be, but its sufficiently important that I think that people should know more about it so that they can make more accurate or possibly nuanced judgments about it. It is, after all, *their* intelligence community and is genuinely working, for the most part, in what they believe is the nation's interest as ordered by the POTUS and the relevant committees of Congress.
Even though there is a lot we can not and will not know about the world of intelligence there are lots and lots of things that we can know by paying attention and knowing the history of these things.
And so, in light of this, here is one comment on current events.
It has been obvious for years, certainly at least a decade and possibly more, that whatever else Wikileaks may be, it is probably also a tool of foreign Intelligence. From the material released and the timing of that release it is likely that Wikileaks has been chosen as the "public mouthpiece" of materials collected by foreign intelligence agencies that have collected the material from one source or another, and are looking for a way to get this material into the world at a time of their choosing to influence some political process ongoing in the West. This has been completely obvious, and if it is not true, a lot of people will be surprised. But what does it mean? What should we do about it? And what does it not mean?
It does not mean that the people running Wikileaks are insincere or believe that they are doing anything but what a freedom loving person of the world should be doing. They may be completely uncompromised in their goals. Nor does it mean that they have necessarily committed any crimes, although they may have. But even so, be aware that a crime in one country may not be a crime in another. On the other hand, I think it is likely from what little I know that they very well may have knowingly committed some crimes that are in fact illegal in this country, but that is to be seen.
All I am really saying here is that you should not be so naive as to think that Wikileaks is a completly independent, do-good-for-the-world, totally disinterested organization. They serve a very useful purpose for people who are not friendly to this country. That said, they may provide a useful service for the rest of us, that would depend on your point of view on many other issues.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Notes on Building My Servers
draft
At the end of the day, I ended up with two servers. One running Linux for rendering, machine learning, and other image processing. The other for using the Samsung HMD for VR that my friend Ken Perlin sent me. They are both running the Xeon Silver 4108 8/16 CPU with lots of memory.
Their were two major issues on this build. I kept getting bad parts, many CPUs were bad and much of the early memory was bad. Now I buy the memory directly from Kingston and whatever I was running into with CPUs seemed to be fixed. I also had a bad PSU. It was just endless.
At the end of the day, we settled on memory from Kingston, chassis from Chenbro from Newegg, power supplies from Supermicro directly, Samsung SSDs from Newegg, Nvidia GPUs from Newegg, and Supermicro motherboards from 3rd party vendors through Newegg.
From now on, always test a new power supply for a build, and stay away from two socket motherboards, always going for a single socket and a more powerful processor if necessary.
Never install Windows on a machine with any other kind of data or OS anywhere near.
The built in graphics on the Supermicro motherboards work great for consoles, and it is recommended you have a VGA display of some sort so you dont have to go through a VGA->HDMI converter. All systems are still on the USB ethernet connection which works fine for what I need to do. Ultimately, we will use the onboard ethernet. All systems have a USB3 bay added to the front.
This is the first time I have had reasonable computing that is appropriate for the work in maybe 20 years. It makes a difference.
At the end of the day, I ended up with two servers. One running Linux for rendering, machine learning, and other image processing. The other for using the Samsung HMD for VR that my friend Ken Perlin sent me. They are both running the Xeon Silver 4108 8/16 CPU with lots of memory.
Their were two major issues on this build. I kept getting bad parts, many CPUs were bad and much of the early memory was bad. Now I buy the memory directly from Kingston and whatever I was running into with CPUs seemed to be fixed. I also had a bad PSU. It was just endless.
At the end of the day, we settled on memory from Kingston, chassis from Chenbro from Newegg, power supplies from Supermicro directly, Samsung SSDs from Newegg, Nvidia GPUs from Newegg, and Supermicro motherboards from 3rd party vendors through Newegg.
From now on, always test a new power supply for a build, and stay away from two socket motherboards, always going for a single socket and a more powerful processor if necessary.
Never install Windows on a machine with any other kind of data or OS anywhere near.
The built in graphics on the Supermicro motherboards work great for consoles, and it is recommended you have a VGA display of some sort so you dont have to go through a VGA->HDMI converter. All systems are still on the USB ethernet connection which works fine for what I need to do. Ultimately, we will use the onboard ethernet. All systems have a USB3 bay added to the front.
This is the first time I have had reasonable computing that is appropriate for the work in maybe 20 years. It makes a difference.
Donald, Why Dont You Shut Up
draft
No one believes you Donald, so why dont you just shut up. We are definitely into the next period of play. I dont know what will happen but I doubt old Donald is going to make it. At the end of the day he is not immune to all the laws of nature and politics although he thinks he is. How this will play out, and how long it will take, and what it will take to fix it if it can be fixed, is of course a mystery. It is for the Democrats and the Resistance to lose.
No one believes you Donald, so why dont you just shut up. We are definitely into the next period of play. I dont know what will happen but I doubt old Donald is going to make it. At the end of the day he is not immune to all the laws of nature and politics although he thinks he is. How this will play out, and how long it will take, and what it will take to fix it if it can be fixed, is of course a mystery. It is for the Democrats and the Resistance to lose.
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Lessons on the Path to Righteousness and the Installation of Tensorflow on Centos
draft
Tensorflow is one of the open source solutions to a machine learning back end. That, with a Keras layer on top, is one of the more popular machine learning environments out there. Among other things, it supports both central and graphics processing on most operating systems.
As in so many things in life, a clever or lucky choice can achieve a goal with no effort, but a similar choice can result in weeks, years or even decades of hell.
There are a number of surprises involved in installing these packages on your operating system of choice, and this note is intended to help you, readers, avoid shooting yourself in the foot or the head as the case may be.
1. Never, never, never try to install from source no matter who advises you to. It is perfectly possible to install from source on a bare metal machine without any virtual environments, or you could just hit yourself with a large hammer for a few weeks. Who knew that there were so many different ways to install Python, or that there were so many Pythons? And that is just the tip of a very nasty set of icebergs.
2. So whenever you are given an opportunity to isolate yourself from the real world by using a virtual environment, whether in Python or anywhere else, take it. In particular, for the Windows 10 version, a choice of the python virtual environment and a precompiled version of Tensorflow/Keras will result in a cpu only version in an afternoon. For some of you, you are done and can move on.
3. For those of us in Linux world, you now have to choose between a few specific versions of Ubuntu and everything else. You who would compromise your integrity and have no aesthetic sense are welcome to use Ubuntu. Go, it is there for you.
4. For the rest of us who might use an adult version of Linux, my operating system of choice is Centos / RHEL 7.5 which is the most recent version. I thought I had to compile from source, but this turns out not to be the case. What turns out to to one of the best paths through this jungle is to use the Docker (container) version as follows.
5. Install Docker by registering as a free user of the Community Edition. Having registered, and installed the preferred package from the preferred repository, you are now eligible to use containers that have been registered with Docker.
6. Tensorflow creates a new version more or less every day in a variety of flavors (no GPU, GPU, etc) and puts them out on the Docker registry with such adjectives as "latest" or "stable" for example.
7. Using these magic words you can create the name of a container you want to run. You use one of the magic containers and it loads that part of the container whose layers are not already local, and if you so specify, you are in a shell, in a container, in which you can go into python, load tensorflow and keras and you are off to the races in a cpu version of Tensorflow.
8. Of course, at this point you are now using containers and you will need to spend a day learning about container file systems and other nuance. Its not too bad though.
9. For those of you who foolishly also want to use GPU acceleration, you have chosen a slightly more difficult path. You will have to install a different version of the "docker" program from Nvidia and Github. But once you do, and once you install the GPU driver on your Linux (a bird of a different feather) you can now use a container with GPU from that list mentioned above.
Good luck!
Tensorflow is one of the open source solutions to a machine learning back end. That, with a Keras layer on top, is one of the more popular machine learning environments out there. Among other things, it supports both central and graphics processing on most operating systems.
As in so many things in life, a clever or lucky choice can achieve a goal with no effort, but a similar choice can result in weeks, years or even decades of hell.
There are a number of surprises involved in installing these packages on your operating system of choice, and this note is intended to help you, readers, avoid shooting yourself in the foot or the head as the case may be.
1. Never, never, never try to install from source no matter who advises you to. It is perfectly possible to install from source on a bare metal machine without any virtual environments, or you could just hit yourself with a large hammer for a few weeks. Who knew that there were so many different ways to install Python, or that there were so many Pythons? And that is just the tip of a very nasty set of icebergs.
2. So whenever you are given an opportunity to isolate yourself from the real world by using a virtual environment, whether in Python or anywhere else, take it. In particular, for the Windows 10 version, a choice of the python virtual environment and a precompiled version of Tensorflow/Keras will result in a cpu only version in an afternoon. For some of you, you are done and can move on.
3. For those of us in Linux world, you now have to choose between a few specific versions of Ubuntu and everything else. You who would compromise your integrity and have no aesthetic sense are welcome to use Ubuntu. Go, it is there for you.
4. For the rest of us who might use an adult version of Linux, my operating system of choice is Centos / RHEL 7.5 which is the most recent version. I thought I had to compile from source, but this turns out not to be the case. What turns out to to one of the best paths through this jungle is to use the Docker (container) version as follows.
5. Install Docker by registering as a free user of the Community Edition. Having registered, and installed the preferred package from the preferred repository, you are now eligible to use containers that have been registered with Docker.
6. Tensorflow creates a new version more or less every day in a variety of flavors (no GPU, GPU, etc) and puts them out on the Docker registry with such adjectives as "latest" or "stable" for example.
7. Using these magic words you can create the name of a container you want to run. You use one of the magic containers and it loads that part of the container whose layers are not already local, and if you so specify, you are in a shell, in a container, in which you can go into python, load tensorflow and keras and you are off to the races in a cpu version of Tensorflow.
8. Of course, at this point you are now using containers and you will need to spend a day learning about container file systems and other nuance. Its not too bad though.
9. For those of you who foolishly also want to use GPU acceleration, you have chosen a slightly more difficult path. You will have to install a different version of the "docker" program from Nvidia and Github. But once you do, and once you install the GPU driver on your Linux (a bird of a different feather) you can now use a container with GPU from that list mentioned above.
Good luck!
Friday, November 9, 2018
The Big Lebowski and Carter Burwell
draft
This will be old news to many of you, but it was new to me.
I am slowly developing an appreciation for the movie The Big Lebowski (1998) by the Coen Brothers. I realize it has been out for a while and I am late to see its value.
What I had not realized was that computer music pioneer and composer Carter Burwell did the original music. Carter is distant cousin to my friends Carter Emmart and Jimmy Carter, and its really nice to see just how well he has done. He has worked on a movie that is sure to last as long as movies from our civilization last.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/
This will be old news to many of you, but it was new to me.
I am slowly developing an appreciation for the movie The Big Lebowski (1998) by the Coen Brothers. I realize it has been out for a while and I am late to see its value.
What I had not realized was that computer music pioneer and composer Carter Burwell did the original music. Carter is distant cousin to my friends Carter Emmart and Jimmy Carter, and its really nice to see just how well he has done. He has worked on a movie that is sure to last as long as movies from our civilization last.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/
Monday, November 5, 2018
Its Nice to Know Where You Stand
draft
An old friend is taking the day off work to go walk the precinct for someone he claims is the first openly bisexual candidate in the history of the American Republic, which I doubt. I think that is great, but do I really care if someone is openly bisexual?
He has not had the time to visit me, or for me to visit him, once in the last 10 or is it 12, or more, years.
Its nice to know how much our friendship counts.
No Free Speech on Twitter
draft
Apparently only the Orange Moron is permitted to express their opinion on Twitter. I am still keeping my account, but probably wont tweet much, too afraid of violating the rules.
Remember the Fifth of November
draft
Time to blow up Parliament. Oh, too bad! No patriots around here. Just rapists on our Supreme Court!
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