Much has been made of the fact that France, the has banned the burqa, l'affaire du voile, with the exception of places of worship. Earlier in the year a law was passed that scarves covering the face were banned in schools and hospitals, as well as on public transport. Women, who violate this requirement will be fined €150 Euros and given a course of lectures on the basics of the secular foundations of the French Republic. Men, who force women to wear burqa, will face up to a year in prison.

Open MPI is a message passing interface that combines the merger of three major MPI implementations (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, and LAM/MPI) to create a complete MPI-2 implementation. MPI is a language-independent communications protocol used to program parallel computers.

The following was written in my capacity as President of Linux Users of Victoria for a community group newsletter with minimal familiarity with computer systems.

Mono is used to develop an Ecma standard compliant, .NET-compatible set of tools, including a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime.

To install change to the appropriate directory. Download from Novell. Extract in the sensible place. Change to the extracted directory, check then run the sample config and run make, make install and make check. After this create a module for the environment variables and logout.


cd /usr/local/src/MONO/
wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono/mono-2.8.tar.bz2
tar xvf mono-2.8.tar.bz2
../config
make
make install
make check

BigDFT is a Density Functional Theory (DFT) parallel electronic structure code using a wavelet basis set. Wavelets form a real space basis set distributed on an adaptive mesh. Surfaces and isolated systems can be simulated with the proper boundary conditions and GTH or HGH pseudopotentials are used to remove the core electrons.

The Los Angeles Times has reported Obama's speech for 9-11, where he claims that it was the perversion of religion, rather religion itself that was the cause of terrorism. This is a challenging statement and whilst politically expedient, it certainly should be subject to scrutiny. After all, it is often in the name of religious justifications that some of the greatest secular crimes have occurred.

At the ICUU/ANZUUA conference there was some discussion of the possibility of a Unitarian-Universalist seminary for Australia. "The time is right", was a commonly expressed statement indicating a confidence in our current capacity and needs. The following is a preliminary sketch on how ANZUUA might proceed in establishing such a seminary with some references to how it is conducted at Meadville-Lombard and Starr King in the United States.

The taxonomy module is a very useful utility for Drupal sites, especially for those of any size. Primarily summarised from the Drupal Handbook on the subject, the following gives a basic summary of the subject.

Molden displays molecular density from the ab initio packages GAMESS and GAUSSIAN and others. Molden reads all the required information from the GAMESS / GAUSSIAN outputfile. Molden is capable of displaying molecular orbitals, electron density and molecular minus atomic density.

A surprise study published in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and reported by Scientific American suggests that the so-called Generation X group are more loyal to their religious background than the "Baby Boomers". By the same token the survey of some 37,000 Americans also noted that the number with no religious affiliation doubled in the 1990s and continues to increase.