Leonard Nimoy Bilbo Baggins

Wow, and I thought I'd seen everything!

Emacs, Flyspell/Ispell, Aspell, and Windows

I use Windows a lot. I know it's not the techiest OS out there, but hey, I grew up with DOS, Win 3.1, Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP/7... and now 8. (I skipped Vista).

I also use Emacs a lot. I used to program mostly on Linux, and my school courses were all done with Emacs, so I got used to it. Now Emacs feels more like my index finger than a programming environment, but I digress.

I generally use Emacs for Latex as well, but until recently, I never bothered spell-checking my Latex on Windows (I just did it on whatever flavor of Unix I had installed on, or let my co-writers handle those changes).

But now, I really really need to finish my thesis, so spell-checking is important now at all times. So I can't find a decent howto for this, so here goes. (For my own sanity as well)

1. Install Aspell. You'll need to download the binary installer (GNU Aspell-0.50.3 (win32)) as well as the dictionary (I use English), (Aspell-en-0.50-2-3.exe).
   
2. Add
   
(add-to-list 'exec-path "C:/Program Files (x86)/Aspell/bin/")
(setq ispell-program-name "aspell")
(setq ispell-dictionary "american")

   to your .emacs/.emacs.el/whatever initialization you use.
   
3. Restart or M-x load-file .your_file_name_obviously_not_this_exact_name.
   
4. M-x flyspell-mode or M-x ispell or whatever should work now.
   

As always, with unsolicited free Internet advice, YMMV.

Bill Murray and baseball

Track of the Day - TV on the Radio, "Caffeinated Consciousness"

I recently realized they are my Favorite Band ®. Kind of like realizing your best friend forever is your soul-mate. All that time spent listening to MGMT, I could've been rocking out to you TVOTR --what was I thinking.

Track of the Day - Stagnant Pools "Solitude"

Latex Tables from Google Spreadsheets

Basically, I'm writing my thesis now, and so I needed to make a lot of latex tables. I have R->latex and matlab->latex scripts lying about, but as I've lost the inclination to redo experiments, I find it easier to just use the existing latex tables in my documents. However, reformatting them is kind of a pain.

So I would generally use Excel for this, but I find Google spreadsheets to be easier to use because I'm using more than 2 computers more often these days. I hate having to copy things back and forth and as friendly as google-drive is, Excel is less so. My workstation in the lab, for example is the French language version, which I can barely use (the commas kill me.)

Anyways so here it is, Google docs spreadsheets have a Javascript runtime that is exposed much like VBA. You can use it to write custom functions and other things. I wrote a handy button that will take my selected range and output a latex table.

Once you have your sheet filled out, you can then hit Tools->Script Manager from the menu bar. Hit "spreadsheet."

In another browser window, the javascript editor will show up with a handy example provide by Google. Here's what I did with mine.

 function latexify() {  
  var range = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveRange();  
  var numRows = range.getNumRows();  
  var numCols = range.getNumColumns();  
  var values = range.getValues();  
  var cs = new Array(numCols);  
  var strRows = "";   
    
  for(var k = 0; k < numCols; k++){  
   cs[k] = 'c';  
  }  
  strRows = "\\begin{table}\n";  
  strRows += "\\centering\n";  
  strRows += "\\begin{tabular}";  
  strRows += "{|" + cs.join("|") + "|}\n"  
  strRows += "\\hline\n";  
    
  for (var i = 0; i <= numRows - 1; i++) {  
   var row = values[i];  
   for (var j = 0; j <= numCols - 1; j++){  
    var cell = row[j];  
    strRows = strRows + cell;  
    if(j < numCols-1)  
     strRows = strRows + " & ";  
   }  
   strRows += "\\\\ \n\\hline\n";  
   }  
  strRows += "\\hline";  
  strRows += "\\end{tabular}\n";  
  strRows += "\\label{table:table}\n";  
  strRows += "\\caption{\\small{}} \n";  
  strRows += "\\end{table}\n";  
   
  Logger.log(strRows);  
 };  

Lovely, isn't it? Choose Run from the menu in the editor, and then View->Logs to show the output. Documentation is available from the Help menu, but I found the API Reference most useful.

Track of The Day

Love this song by Ty Seagall, called Goodbye Bread. Yes it's derivative and all, but holy cow.

Track of the Day

Little behind in my tracks. Also my EC-2 server is down, so old links don't work. Either way, a lot of those have been nixed due to the good old RIAA. Anyways, I'm going to try a new experiment with grooveshark. If you don't know about grooveshark, well, now you know. Soon to be killed by Apple, I suspect. Anyways, here's the actual track.

♪ The Radio Dept - "David"

Whoa

Sorry, deserted my blog, lots of broken stuff. Anyways, I kinda got busy, with, you know, life, so I didn't update. But then I posted something randomly on a Mets blogspot website of all things which reminds me that I should update this. Anyways, yes I am a big enough dork to post things randomly on Mets minor league websites AND make blog posts about how I should post more. But hey, we knew this.

Track of The Day

Via p4k:

Janelle Monae, international superstar, channels James Brown and rips the Late Show a new one. Seriously it's that good.

Track of The Day

♪ Xylos - "Not Enough" [MP3]

Sounds like JJ, hanging out with "some dudes." Soon to be a summer hit. Random spelling note: no more "alot," mmmkay?

Track of The Day

BSS new album can now be heard at NPR's website. By the way, check out the sleeve-face homage.

Stuff I like

Following that health video... Eric Wareheim is my newest hero.

Major Lazer "Keep it Going Louder" from Eric Wareheim on Vimeo.

Stuff I like

F'ed on all fronts, but hugely entertaining video on them all too..

HEALTH "We are Water" from Eric Wareheim on Vimeo.

Stuff I like

Conan Obrien... covers Creep... favorite things colliding. 1:46 <-- Funny.

via pitchfork, via via.

Track of the Day

♪ Small Black x Washed Out - "Despicable Dogs (Washed Out Remix)" [MP3]

On infinite repeat for the foreseeable future.

Track of The Day

♪ Javelin - "Vibrationz" [MP3]

Add one part MGMT to one part Passion Pit, shake well. This album (No Mas) could kickstart, well, just about anything.

Research (Nuts and Bolts)

I have been trying to work with hadoop for my parallelization needs, but I find it to be somewhat difficult to get certain things to work in the system. At University of Rochester, CS, the cluster that I work with doesn't seem to have OpenMPI or any kind of MPI set up on the cluster machines, but at Montreal, the machines do, except that all of the nodes (except for usually 5) are always used by some crystallography program that seems to eats bandwidth and I/O on the NFS filesystem. So I've been doing stuff and copying back and forth, which was just killing me. (Not because it was taking so long and being difficult to do, but the principle damnit!)

So I was avoiding installing openmpi on the Rochester system because I figured it would be difficult at best, and impossible at worst. But eventually I gave up on getting hadoop to play nice and find that it is remarkably easy to set up OpenMPI on a given cluster. If you have a cluster with a common NFS mount, all you have to do is download and unpack and set your path to wherever you installed openmpi. Let me just blog this in case you're wondering how to go about it.

First, I downloaded the tarball from here and unpacked it into ~/openmpi. Then in that directory,

$./configure --prefix=/u/rim/opt/openmpi
$ make all install

Thats pretty much it, other than setting

PATH=$PATH:/u/rim/opt/openmpi/bin
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/u/rim/opt/openmpi/lib

in my .bashrc file. YMMV depending on your favorite shell.

Now I had to write my MPI program, which actually I already did, but here it is for completeness, or at least the main function. This generates a kernel matrix, which is relatively easy to do parallel, I just give row indices of the test matrix to each node and ask them politely to kernelize that part of the final matrix.

When they're done they send them back to the master node, which copies these columns into the big matrix. The only tricky part with ublas is to make sure that the MPI receive and send copy the respective right parts of the matrix. Here, since we're copying rows of the final kernel matrix, we want everything to be row major.

int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
 
  matrix<double> Xtrain;
  matrix<double> Ytrain;
  matrix<double> Xtest;
  matrix<double> Ytest;

  MPI_Status status;
  int size = 1;
  int rank = 0;

  MPI_Init(&argc, &argv);
  size = MPI::COMM_WORLD.Get_size();
  rank = MPI::COMM_WORLD.Get_rank();

  char name[MPI_MAX_PROCESSOR_NAME];
  int len;
  memset(name,0,MPI_MAX_PROCESSOR_NAME);
  MPI::Get_processor_name(name,len);
  memset(name+len,0,MPI_MAX_PROCESSOR_NAME-len);

  if(!load_data(argv[1], Xtrain, Ytrain)){
    cout << "klr_test (error): Bad train filename" << endl;
    return 0;
  }

  if(!load_data(argv[2], Xtest, Ytest)){
    cout << "klr_test (error): Bad test filename" << endl;
    return 0;
  }

  kernelType kernel = RBF;
  if(string(argv[3]) == "CHI2"){
    kernel = CHI2;
  }
  if(string(argv[3]) == "POLY"){
    kernel = POLY;
  }
  if(string(argv[3]) == "LINEAR"){
    kernel = LINEAR;
  }
  if(string(argv[3]) == "EUCLIDEAN"){
    kernel = EUCLIDEAN;
  }

  double param1 = atof(argv[4]);
  int N = Xtest.size1();
  int D = Xtrain.size1();

  //split the matrix into row matrices
  int offset = floor((double)N / (double)size);
  int start = rank*offset;
  int end = (rank+1)*offset;
  end = end > N ? N : end;
  int M = end - start;
  if(rank + 1 == size){
    end = N;
    M = end - start;
  }


  ublas::matrix<double, ublas::row_major> K(N, D);

  if(rank == 0){
    K.assign(ublas::zero_matrix<DBL_TYPE>(N, D));
  }else{
    K.resize(M, D, false);
    K.assign(ublas::zero_matrix<DBL_TYPE>(M, D));
  }


  for(int k = start; k < end; k++){
    matrix_row< matrix<double> > u1(Xtest, k);
    int j = k - start;
    for(int i = 0; i < D; i++){
      matrix_row< matrix<double> > u2(Xtrain, i);
      K(j, i) = kernelize(u1, u2, kernel, param1);
    }
    if(VERBOSE && (k % 100 == 0))
      std::cout << k << ": " << rank << " " << name << std::endl;
  }

 if(size > 1){
    if(rank == 0){
      for(int i = 1; i < size; i++){
        start = i*offset;
        end = (i+1)*offset;
        end = end > N ? N : end;
        M = end - start;
        if(i+1 == size){
          end = N;
          M = end - start;
        }
        MPI_Recv((void *)&K.data()[start*D], M*D, MPI_DOUBLE, i, TAG_MATRIX_PARTITION, MPI_COMM_WORLD, &status);
      }
    }else{
      MPI_Send((void *)&K.data()[0], M*D, MPI_DOUBLE, 0, TAG_MATRIX_PARTITION, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
    }
  }


  if(rank == 0){
    ofstream output(argv[5], ios::out);
    for(unsigned int i = 0; i < K.size1(); i++){
      for(unsigned int j = 0; j < K.size2(); j++){
        output << K(i, j);
        if(j < (K.size2()-1)){
          output << ",";
        }
      }
      output << std::endl;
    }
  }

  MPI_Finalize();
  return 0;
}

Now to make and run, just edit your Makefile to do something like

MPICC=mpic++
...
$(MPICC) kernelize_mat2.cpp -o kernelize_mat2 $(LFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) $(INC) $(OLIBS)

where everything to the right of -o kernelize_mat2 are just settings and flags I otherwise needed. The only change I made was to add the mpi wrapper for the g++ compiler, mpic++. The other bits are stuff that I already had/needed.

After building, you can run. On the cluster, they use Torque for scheduling, so you can either do it via shell script or via the interactive start. I generally prefer to use the shell script since it's less wasteful, but here I use the interactive start up because I wanted to make sure it was all kosher.

$ qsub -I -lnodes=5,walltime=3600,mem=1000M

I like to use funny names for my pbs jobs, but I skip that here. That command line requests 5 nodes with an hour of cpu time and a gig of memory each, which is about what I wanted.

$ mpirun -np 5 --hostfile $PBS_NODEFILE /path/to/kernelize_mat2 train.csv test.csv RBF .7 kernel.csv

-np tells how many processors you want to use and the --hostfile $PBS_NODEFILE says which hosts you want to run your process on. You can, of course use less, but thats a little silly, no? You can also run it locally if you exclude hosts in the hostfile. That is you can also specify

-np 4 --host node33

In any case at each step I was expecting the thing to say, root access required or something, but I guess that's being silly. Anyways, the whole thing worked like a charm and took roughly 20 minutes to set up and get running (almost all of that time was spent compiling).

That's pretty much it, so now you too can write cool apps for the cluster, and if you're using the one I use, then by all means, you can just set your paths to mine (although names were changed to protect the innocent). By the way, does this code really need comments? I don't even know where I would put one.

Montreal

So, finally I figured out how to get money into my US checking account, which is a huge relief. The way to do it is paypal. Just set up a new Canadian paypal account through paypal.ca. (I had to use a new email address) add your Canadian bank account and verify it. (This takes a week basically). Then pay your US paypal email account and you accept the payment. Now I'm waiting for the echeck to clear. So far I've paid about 5 dollars on the 100 dollars I've sent myself as a test, so I'm just waiting to see how much more I'm going to have so I can pay bills. Also, when I was in New York I deposited a Canadian check, which took 10 business days to clear, which is two weeks pretty much, but either way it sucks the big one. Is it better for Canadians who move to the US? or is it harder for USians to move to Canada?

Stuff I like...

doesn't even begin to describe this.

TWOYOUTUBEVIDEOSANDAMOTHERFUCKINGCROSSFADER.