Day of Pi, March 14 - 3.14

I loved math when I was a kid and memorizing Pi out to 50 digits was a class exercise.  Today Mar 14, 2013 is a day to celebrate Pi.  3.14.  March 14.

SJMercury has the activities for local bay area kids.

Bay Area math enthusiasts to celebrate Pi Day

Updated:   03/14/2013 07:15:32 AM PDT

 

 
 

Numerical celebrations are planned throughout the Bay Area for the mathematical Pi Day on Thursday.

Pi Day is celebrated on the 14th day of the third month, which aligns with the first three digits of pi, 3.14, which is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

Pi is an unending number, which has inspired several challenges including events at San Francisco's Mission and Washington high schools.

Students at a math class at Mission High School, located at 3750 18th St., will have a contest to see who can recite the most digits of pi, while another class at Washington High, located at 600 32nd Ave., will also have a Pi recitation contest -- all while eating plenty of pie, San Francisco school officials said.

Google has a Chrome hacking contest where the reward is $3.14159 Million.

Google Offers $3.14159 Million in Hacking Prizes

 

Whoever successfully cracks Google's Chrome operating system at this year's Pwnium hacking contest will walk away with a piece of the pi.

Google, which had previously offered totals of $1 million, then $2 million, in prizes for successful hacks, is upping the ante at the contest, to be held in March at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, B.C. The company is offering a total of $3.14159 million in cash rewards.

That's a nod to pi, math's most intriguing irrational number, and to the added challenges that come with cracking Google's ever-improving security measures.

It's unlikely that any single hacker will get the whole pi. Instead, many contestants could win $110,000 for each temporary compromise of Chrome OS, or $150,000 for each compromise that survives a system reboot.

Not even thinking about it I bought Life of PI in 3D yesterday and watched it.

Still, “Life of Pi” is spellbinding while it lasts. Lee’s film can be appreciated as many things -- a post-Darwinian meditation on coexistence as the key to survival, a reflection on the spiritual nature of suffering and transcendence, a beguiling bait-and-switch on the vagaries of belief itself.

Mostly, though, “Life of Pi” is a trip -- in every transporting, liberating, mind-bending sense of the word.

Oracle acquires Cloud Infrastructure SW company Nimubla

I met the Nimbula guys a few years ago and I was quite impressed.

What hasn't been impressive is Oracle's cloud efforts.  Well one way to solve this problem for Oracle is to buy Nimbula.

Oracle buys private-cloud pioneer Nimbula

 

6 HOURS AGO

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SUMMARY:

Oracle’s acquisition of Nimbula gives it some needed private-cloud savvy and a toehold in the OpenStack camp — should it choose to keep Nimbula’s product around.

An interesting observation by Derrick Harris is the difficulty of selling the private cloud.

Nimbula was on the scene early and, from all accounts, built a good product, but appears to have succumbed to a lackluster private-cloud buying market. It has a handful of publicly named customers, including Russian search engine giant Yandex, but like so many other private-cloud startups, it might have fallen victim to market confusion (i.e., “Can’t we just keep buying VMware?”) and an industry consensus around OpenStack as the private-cloud savior. Indeed, last year, Nimbula made a strong pivot and actually began rebuilding itself as an OpenStack distribution.

Google doubles its presence in Kirkland (Seattle), Seattle is a cloud development hub with Amazon and Microsoft

I moved to Seattle 20 years ago.  Part of Seattle are clouds.  And it makes you wonder if all those clouds are influencing software developers. :-)  As Google invests more in cloud development like Amazon and Microsoft cloud development teams in Seattle.

NYTimes posts on the Google expansion in Kirkland, WA.  Kirkland is probably more known as the Costco branded items.  Kirkland city is near Costco HQ. And Kirkland is where Google has its hub of offices in the Seattle area.

In a battle for dominance in cloud computing, Google is taking onMicrosoft and Amazon in their own back yard.

Google said Tuesday that it was doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, and stepping up the hiring of engineers and others who work on cloud technology.

It is part of Google’s dive into a business known as cloud services — renting to other businesses access to its enormous data storage and computing power, accessible by the Internet.

Here is a video by local Komonews with a tour inside the Google Kirkland facility.

Inspiration from Great Architecture, La Sagrada Familia

5 years ago I went to Barcelona to moderate a panel with Mike Manos (Microsoft at the time), HP, and Dell at Microsoft TechForum.  I was able to get away for an afternoon with another Microsoft friend and we visited the La Sagrada Familia.

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60 minutes just covered the latest update on the project.  Here is the written story.

And for the people who want to see more about the construction here is the story.

And another video.

I will write another post on what ideas I have used for inspiration.

Bunch of Retina MacBook Pro problems went away with 10.8.3 beta updates - screen flicker, Time Machine, Network Connectivity

I've had problems with my Retina MacBook Pro since Sept 2012.  And, posted what I thought was a fix.  I was wrong and eventually relegated myself to make appts to sit in the Apple Store in Bellevue to demonstrate the problem.  This didn't work either as the magic of the Apple store kept my screen in good shape.  How bad was my intermittent display problem.

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The frustrating part is this was not reproducible.  I would shut the laptop, open it up and screen is fine.

Then I got pushed the beta 10.8.3 12D76 MacOS release and it looks like the screen problem has gone away. Also, a strange Time Machine problem resolved and my network connections to my home network work better. Today I was pushed the beta 12D78 release.

I am keeping my fingers crossed that 10.8.3 will fix my screen flicker.