[9fans] physics, my httpd Re: generous scholarship for grad students from DOE.

[Sam Watkins <sam@nipl.net>]

On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 07:09:16PM -0800, ron minnich wrote:
> It's a great deal if you are interested in the areas, note that it can
> be a pure computer science style research deal. One thing that might
> work: you could work on scaling a new type of simulation on a 40,000
> CPU supercomputer, using Plan 9, and if you have an adviser who agrees
> with that you might get support from this program.

Sounds like a reference to a previous topic!
I would be interested in doing research like that, but I'm not at university
so it would have to be an "unaffiliated phd" :)

Are you into physics?  you might possibly be interested in a little paper I
wrote about determining the shape of a spinning planet.  I need to find someone
smart enough to debug it for me.  I can't see what's wrong with it but there is
some diversion from observed reality in the results.

  http://sam.nipl.net/planet.html

If the method I am using is right, it might be useful for many things.  I have
searched a little online, and haven't seen my method used for determining the
shape of a planet before, so perhaps it is novel (although I doubt it).

In other news, and I doubt this would be exciting for plan 9 users, I hacked my
webserver "tachyon" that I am writing (running on my linux server) so it can
access the contents of .zip archives etc using a virtual filesystem.  It's
working pretty nicely.  It also added a feature for find-like recursive
listings on request.  Tachyon's main feature compared to say apache is that it
automatically uses unix permissions and groups for authentication.  Say you try
to access a restricted page over http, it redirects to the same page on https
and requests authentication.  I find this useful.  Not sure if existing plan 9
webserver/s do that sort of thing?  tachyon is very fast and scalable, it's
written using micro-coroutines which switch nearly as fast as a function call.

Sam