… another great tune by “The Kills”

Just one day after the big game against Germany you can purchase merchandising stuff at half the price … sad

I hope you don’t find this picture too funny, because maybe you will also have to impress like that when you are old, your husband/wife died and your kids don’t care of you …

At least when you try to get onto a plane at London’s Heathrow Airport wearing a T-Shirt showing Mr. Prime. Here is the whole story.

The event, this post is referring to, took place in April 08. So I’m reporting rather late about it but I think you should tell when you meet a star or get close to one like I did no metter when it happened.

The “Styrian Spring in Vienna” is an event that promotes Styria and its treasures to the people living in Vienna. But what are Styrian treasures? Governor Schwarzenegger? Well, he definitely is pure gold for Styria but not one of Styria’s treasures in the context of this posting. The treasures mainly are Kernöl, Styrian Wine and Apples.

To bring a little country-side feeling to the big city the Styrians put up some tents, benches and tables in front of the Vienna City hall:

This would be the City Hall

Here we’ve got the tents, benches and tables

Never forget to put a name tag on things people shall remember

So what about the star I met. Well, it turned out that one of Austrian’s best known cooks Johann Lafer was just 5 meters away from our bench. He cooked for the VIPs in a little hut that was separated from the public. But we could peek at him through one of the hut’s windows:

Johann Lafer cooking for the VIPs in a hut in front of Vienna’s City Hall.

Meeting Johann was a really amazing moment of life

Jack White of the White Stripes on his second project - The Raconteurs.

Intelligence is something we are born with. Thinking is a skill that must be learned

Edward de Bono

So true Edward, so true.

when you see cars like this in the streets you can be sure that the next football championship isn’t that far away from your town. So, welcome to Vienna, European Football Championship 2008!
The red writing on the car reads “MA48″. This is the Number of the garbage department of the city of Vienna - very cynical.

Yesterday was the first time I used a machine with massive processing power for my research purposes: Calculating a Maximum Entropy Model for Sentiment Detection. I had to switch from my local machine to one that is a bit stronger (5 Cores and 10GB RAM) because I ran out of main memory - the 4 extra cores came as a nice benefit.
Well, after performing the model calculation I met my boss at the hallway and told him about my experiments. I told him that with the additional ram I now can build larger models and that it runs a bit faster. Then he asked me the following question: “Is the load distributed upon the 5 cores?”. I could only answer “To be honest, I don’t really know”. What followed were 2 hours Bash Scripting to answer his question in a more precise and confident way.

A friend of mine told me that there exists a file called /proc/stat under Linux that gives you information about the time the CPU is idle or busy. On my system cat /proc/stat returns the following (cut after 5th line and 5th column, the rest isn’t interesting for my purposes) for the time t1:

The first column tells you the name of the core (cpu0-cpu4). The 2nd, 3rd and 4th column display the time the CPU was busy for the user and the 5th column is the CPU’s idle time. All numbers are initialized when the system starts. To compute the load of the overall CPU and each single core one has to measure two times at t1 and t2 (between t1 and t2 a longer calculation should occur).

Then the results gathered at t1 have to be subtracted from the ones at t2. Column 2, 3 and 4 (user times) can then be summed up and put in proportion to column 5 (idle time).
This shell script implements the idea above and outputs the load for each core and the overall CPU. Feel free to use it and inform me about errors please.

Usage:

at t1 ./cpuload start numCores … before you start your calculation (numCores is a number)

t1-t2 do some calculation

at t2 ./cpuload end numCores … when your calculation is finished

at tn ./cpuload result numCores … displays the results of the last load calculation again (t1-t2)