July 9th 2008
After some general books on grid computation, I needed to change the subject of my readings a little bit. As Intel Threading Building Blocks always intrigued me, I chose the associated book.
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June 17th 2008
Peer-to-peer. These words are unleashing in France a fight between the legislators and the developers. And this old - I say old because it was written in 2001, and 7 years is old for a book on this topic - book presented me the issues debated in journals, blogs, … in a new way.
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June 3rd 2008
Today, I’m publishing a tutorial on two C++ profilers on my French website. The question I’m asking myself and you is: should I translate it ?
If some of you are interested in my French tutorials, I may translate them from time to time, depending on their content (I don’t want to translate an article on Boost for instance, the documentation does provide everything). But I’ll do that only if people tell me “Go on”. So I’m all ears…
May 27th 2008
Since the beginning of this year, I was trying to figure out what to do in my future. I’m still doing my PhD, but what could I do after that ?
My current job is to find a model for datasets.
A lot of datasets can be explained by a small number of parameters. For instance identity photos of a single person can be explained by 3 translations and 3 rotations. So my algorithms did that: find the parameters (or something that is close enough) and create a mapping between the parameters and the original space.
During this research, I learnt what is scientific computing. I did not explore everything in this field, but I covered the basics. That’s where I found about Python, but also C++ (which is the first language I really used). My thirst for information lead me to read a lot of books on several matters (architectural design, process, but also parallel computing and its different flavors). This led me to search for a job that would interest me the most.
So starting from September I’ll move to Pau, a town in the South of France. This is where the biggest research center of Total S.A. is located. I will work on oil exploration.
Although the theory behind this are well known (acoustic wave propagation and inverse problem), this does not mean that research in this field is over. For instance, the power needed for solving these problems are enormous. So their implementation must be well thought. And even if you managed to find a solution to your problem, you are not done. Total’s goal is not to be able to see if acoustic waves propagate fast in some places and slowly in others. Its goal is to find oil and gas. So now that one has an acoustic model, one must see with the geologists if there are some odds that there is oil or gas. And that’s also a big interesting challenge.
For those who were interested in manifold learning, don’t worry, I’m not finished in exposing my research. I will go on with some new posts about the mapping between the two spaces and how it can be used to test new samples. The scikit is now almost available. I still have to finish the tutorial and test if everything is OK.
I hope I will be able to continue with other subjects on this blog, there is no reason I cannot do this. Although what I’ll be doing at Total is secret, there are a lot of fields I’d like to talk about.
May 6th 2008
I was looking for an introductory book on peer-to-peer (P2P) application and their application to grid computation. Web services was a bonus, as it is something I don’t usually play with.
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April 28th 2008
This book is different from the two last books I read. Indeed, it tackles a specific Python library, Twisted, and how to use it.
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April 21st 2008
After Advanced Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing, I’m going to review another book from the same serie. As the title hints it, the goal of this book is to introduce the tools that may be used in parallel, grid and distributed computing. This is the layer above the architecture the last book presented.
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April 11th 2008
This is my first review. I read this book some time ago but I still want to write about it because the topic is very interesting.
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March 27th 2008
This week, I’ve updated my blog engine and I’m using Wordpress now.
Why ? Because it is a real blog engine, there is a huge community that writes a lot of useful plugins (syntax highlighters, sitemaps, …) but mainly, it allows me to specify multiple categories when I’m posting, and this was needed for some blog aggregators (O’ Reilly, planet.scipy.org, …).
The theme is almost the same as the last one, everything is not yet available (like everything that was on my blogroll), but it will be back soon 
January 9th 2008
Today ships my first book on Python for the scientists. Although IT people can learn a lot of Python with it (mainly if they are working in labs are research centers), scientists will be more interested as it presents a viable alternative to Matlab : fast, efficient, a real language with a large standard library.
After an introduction, the Python language is exposed as well as some main modules. The three central chapters are dedicated to Numpy, Scipy and Matplotlib. Each library tackles a specific problem, storing data, using it or display it. Finally, the last chapter exposes ways of speeding up Python with the use of C or C++.
The link to my publisher : here
