Handling a queue of GPU jobs without resource manager

How do you execute a lot of experiments? Say you want to run as many as you can over night, and examine them in the morning. The jobs can be executed one after the other as easy as bash run.sh when you have a single GPU. The problems arise when you have more than one so you want to make sure each GPU is occupied with exactly one task at a time and new task is fetched when previous finished. A clever way would be to use a resource manager such as slurm or torque, but I leave it as...

Lessons to learn from C

C is my favorite language, though I acknowledge that it has its warts. I’ve tried looking at languages people hope will replace C (Rust, Go, etc), and though they’ve improved on some things they won’t be supplanting C in my life any time soon. I’ll share with you what makes C a great language to me. Take some of these things as inspiration for the next C replacement you write.

First of all, it’s important to note that I’m talking about the language, not its standard library. The C standard library isn’t awful, but it certainly leaves a lot to be desired. I also want to place...

The only problem with Python 3's str is that you don't grok it

I’ve found myself explaining Python 3’s str to people online more and more often lately. There’s this ridiculous claim about that Python 3’s string handling is broken or somehow worse than Python 2, and today I intend to put that myth to rest. Python 2 strings are broken, and Python 3 strings are sane. The only problem is that you don’t grok strings.

The basic problem many people seem to have with Python 3’s strings arises when they write code that treats bytes like a string, because that’s how it was in Python 2. Let me make this as clear as possible:

Actually, you CAN do it

I maintain a lot of open source projects. In order to do so, I have to effectively manage my time. Most of my projects follow this philosophy: if you want something changed, send a patch. If you are running into an annoying bug, fix it and send a patch. If you want a new feature, implement it and send a patch. It’s definitely a good idea to talk about it beforehand on the issue tracker or IRC, but don’t make the mistake of thinking this processes ends with someone else doing it for you.

Every developer who contributes to a project I maintain is self-directed. They work on...

State of Sway December 2016 - secure your Wayland desktop, get paid to work on Sway

Earlier today I released sway 0.11, which (along with lots of the usual new features and bug fixes) introduces support for security policies that can help realize the promise of a secure Wayland desktop. We also just started a bounty program that lets you sponsor the things you want done and rewards contributors for working on them.

Today sway has 19,371 lines of C (and 3,761 lines of header files) written by 70 authors across 2,067 commits. These were written through 589 pull requests and 425 issues. Sway packages are available today in the official repos of Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, NixOS, openSUSE, Void Linux, and more. Sway looks like...

Audio texture synthesis and style transfer

by Dmitry Ulyanov and Vadim Lebedev

We present an extension of texture synthesis and style transfer method of Leon Gatys et al. for audio. We have developed the same code for three frameworks (well, it is cold in Moscow), choose your favorite:

A broad intro to networking

Disclaimer: I am not a network engineer. That’s the point of this blog post, though - I want to share with non-networking people enough information about networking to get by. Hopefully by the end of this post you’ll know enough about networking to keep up with a conversation on networking, or know what to search for when something breaks, or know what tech to research more in-depth when you are putting together something new.

The OSI model is the standard model we describe networks with. There are 7 layers:

Layer 1, the physical layer, is the electrical engineering stuff.

Layer 2, the link layer, is how devices talk to...

Electron considered harmful

Yeah, I know that “considered harmful” essays are allegedly considered harmful. If it surprises you that I’m writing one, though, you must be a new reader. Welcome! Let’s get started. If you’re unfamiliar with Electron, it’s some hot new tech that lets you make desktop applications with HTML+CSS+JavaScript. It’s basically a chromeless web browser with a Node.js backend and a Chromium-based frontend. What follows is the rant of a pissed off Unix hacker, you’ve been warned.

As software engineers we have a responsibility to pick the right tools for the job. In fact, that’s the most important choice we have to make when we start a project. When you...

2016-11-20

slock 1.4 released: download

Getting on without Google

I used Google for a long time, but have waned myself off of it over the past few years, and I finally deleted my account a little over a month ago. I feel so much better about my privacy now that I’ve removed Google from the equation, and self hosting my things affords me a lot of flexibility and useful customizations.

This one was the most difficult and time consuming to set up, but it was very worth it. I’ve intended for a while to make a new mail server software suite that’s less terrible to set up, so hopefully that situation will improve in the future....