Religious wars (was Re: [Beowulf] A press release)

[Robert G. Brown]

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Joe Landman wrote:

> I like line numbers to help me figure out if I have a really long line of 
> text.  Most text editors do a poor job of handling this case, happily 
> wrapping it, without telling you, so your key navigation across the long 
> lines looks really funky.

Agreed, but not jove.  jove simply continues on to the right and marks
it with an exclamation point.

Of course, C just continues lines transparently until it hits the
terminating ";", so this is still a runish problem.

Speaking of which, wouldn't it be a kick to design a programming
language CALLED Rune, one that only can be used on GUI systems, that
uses elvish runes for all the standard commands and parameters?
Programming has become too easy; we need to make it more arcane again to
guarantee the high salaries that support our dissipated lifestyles.  If
we ensure that Rune only does arithmetic in reverse polish with
load/store instead of any equivalent of an equals sign we can be certain
that no more than fifty people on the planet ever really master it, and
that even they cannot read six month old Rune code.  That way
applications will have to constantly be rewritten and we can all get
rich.

> And back to the beowulf topic ...
>
> I seem to have discovered the issue I was running into last week.  Some sort 
> of weird timing problem with MPI_Waitsome on OpenMPI with Infiniband (and 
> shared memory).  I tested the IB stack and MPI stacks, and all report full 
> functionality.  I can run MPI over the IB.  And it works well.  The problem 
> is when I run this code which uses MPI_Waitsome for part of its algorithm. 
> With gigabit ethernet, it behaves well (under OpenMPI 1.2.7-rc2).  With 
> Infiniband, it does not.  Also the OpenMPI seems to get awfully confused if 
> you have IPoIB enabled (mostly for diagnostics for the user).  Turning that 
> off helped stability.
>
> Of course, since it was remote, I used vi (vim) as my editor.  And a little 
> pico.

This is the sad truth.  I can survive without using emacs, and besides,
I can use it in an emergency.  But nobody can manage systems without
knowing vi.  You may use it only long enough to edit /etc/hosts and your
firewall and your yum repo data so you can install and rebuild jove, but
that much cannot be avoided...

> This is a Fortran 9x code.  I added a few extra debugging bits around the 
> troublesome MPI calls.  Nice to do remotely, hard to do with a remote gui 
> over slower links.
>
> I may just give in, and go full force into VIM.  It is active, has lots of 
> features, and I already know basic vi from use for years.  And its undo 
> feature doesn't blow chunks.

Aaaiiieeee!  Spawn of Satan!  Get thee behind me, Devil!

Speaking personally, I'd rather burn off my pre-cancerous old-age spots
with a wood-burning kit than use vi for more than two minutes at a time
("... only long enough..." see above) but to each their own, I suppose.

    rgb

-- 
Robert G. Brown                            Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443
Duke University Physics Dept, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb
Book of Lilith Website: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Lilith/Lilith.php
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