Kurt Grandis

ALT Summit Debrief

May 29, 2008 – 11:11 pm
The North Carolina Advanced Learning Technologies Association (NC ALTA) did a great job organizing the first Advanced Learning Technologies (ALT) Summit, which aimed to bring industry and though leaders together to discuss the state and future of advanced learning technologies. Some time has passed now, but I wanted to mention the summit and some of the highlights. Something Big is a Brewing I think NC ALTA has really started a powerful ball rolling by creating a common focus on which a number of industries and research disciplines are beginning to converge. To demonstrate this let me list areas represented by the some of the people I encountered at the conference: Game engine developers Serious game developers Developers of virtual worlds including frameworks like Second Life or Croquet. This also includes the corporate facet aimed at facilitating remote work and collaboration via a virtualized workplace. Researchers dealing with immersive visualizations and virtual experiences. This includes some of ...

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Games, Local Business | No Comments »

Fair Well Gentoo…

April 9, 2008 – 11:20 pm
I get the feeling I am bit late to the party. It looks like the Gentoo exodus probably began sometime after Daniel Robbins stepped down as chief architect and things slowly began to crumble. I stuck it out over the years hoping that things would get better and the distro would return to its glory days. My Gentoo boxes slowly started getting less and less attention due to fears that an upgrade might break something. In its prime Gentoo's portage system was awesome: it picked up sprawling webs of dependencies and cleaned up after itself like a champ. And the packages were optimized for my hardware; I know I squeezed every last drop of compute power out of those machines. I experienced XEyes as it was meant to be run. Need to upgrade KDE? just emerge it and take a walk trip. Want to upgrade KDE and use your processor for ...

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DGXPO 2008: Game Developers’ Conference in the Triangle

April 2, 2008 – 11:14 pm
The Triangle has a big presence in the game development industry. According to Wake County we have over 30 video game companies in the area. That count includes the three big developers of game engines: Epic (Unreal Engine), Vicious Cycle (Vicious Engine), and Emergent Game Technologies (Gamebryo). You have heavy-weights in the area of serious games and simulations like Virtual Heroes. So, why not a game conference? The Digital Game Expo (DGXPO) is a local game development conference hosted by Wake Tech. This is not a massive industry conference with a convention center filled with vendors and game dev shops passing out tsatskes. One of DGXPO's goals is to give aspiring developers and developers from other industries a peek into the game industry. Registration for the expo just opened this week over at http://www.dgxpo.com . It doesn't look like the sessions are posted yet, but there is a list of speakers. Student Work The ...

Posted in Games, Local Business | 1 Comment »

Edward Tufte: Presenting Data and Information

March 30, 2008 – 2:13 am
I had a chance to attend an Edward Tufte class this past week and it truly was a pleasure. He has published a number of beautiful books on presentation and the visualization of data. So, it was quite a treat to sit in on a presentation by someone that teaches about giving presentations for a living. The class was engaging, full of content, and certainly left me with a sense of excitement. the class One big take away for me was that clutter and the sense of being overwhelmed by data is not an attribute of too much information, but rather a consequence of poor design. How many times have you looked at an information dashboard or a chart in a meeting only to get a headache from trying to grasp what was trying to be communicated? But yet we are capable of navigating and internalizing large amount of information if it ...

Posted in Data, Presentation | No Comments »

Another Amazon EC2 Beowulf Cluster Joins The Grid

March 21, 2008 – 10:21 pm
Have you ever been working with a dataset, started crunching some numbers and said to yourself, "damn, I should distribute this across the cluster," only to realize that your cluster is already saturated with your last job and will be for the next day or two? If you answered yes, then we probably share the same data-craving/slicing/mining sickness.Well the above scenario happens to me and often enough for me to pose the question to others. I could simply invest in a larger cluster --- an expensive investment, especially since the scenario often only requires bursts of compute time. This would make an on-demand cluster a perfect solution. On-Demand Beowulf I had heard some chatter about Peter Skomoroch's ElasticWulf and found myself walking through his series on creating an on-demand beowulf cluster using Amazon's EC2. You can find his very helpful posts here and here (with another on the way). ElasticWulf is ...

Tags: Distributed Computing, Python

Posted in Distributed Computing, Python | 1 Comment »