Lev Lafayette

The role of President from September 2010 to September 2011 period was initially one of accident; in my role as Public Officer I attended the Annual General Meeting and left the evening as President of the association. Thrown into this somewhat unexpected role I set as a priority ensuring that we had speakers for our LUV-main and LUV-beginners events, which was achieved quite quickly. Previous experience on the committee indicated that there is nothing worse than a last-minute panic to find speaker.

The GNU Debugger (GDB) is the standard debugger for the GNU software system. It is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, C, C++, FreeBASIC, FreePascal and Fortran.

Installation is trivial, but slightly interesting for illustrative purposes. First download and unpack:


cd /usr/local/src/GDB
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/gdb-7.3.tar.gz
tar xvf gdb-7.3.tar.gz
cd gdb-7.3


The R Project is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics.

To install R download the tarball to an appropriate place and extract e.g.,

cd /usr/local/src/R
wget http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-2/R-2.11.1.tar.gz
tar xvf R-2.11.1.tar.gz

MFIX (Multiphase Flow With Interphase Exchanges) has been developed by the U.S. National Energy Technology Laborartory, providing transient data on the three-dimensional distribution of pressure, velocity, temperature, and species mass fractions.

EGSnrc (Electron Gamma Shower) is "a package for the Monte Carlo simulation of coupled electron-photon transport. Its current energy range of applicability is considered to be 1 keV to 10 GeV". The previous instructions for installing it remain the same. EGSnrc has an additional program, BEAMnrc.

Dear Mr. Kaspersky,

You are, of course, one the most well-known IT security experts in the world. Your company, Kaspersky Lab, is one of the largest and most successful providers of a suite products that protect users against various forms of malware. It was with some interest then, that I attended your presentation at the University of Melbourne on May 25, 2011.

I'll start off with a caveat, I am an open-source advocate, a long standing committee member and current president of Linux Users of Victoria (http://luv.asn.au). My overall approach is that computer programs are scientific problems, and therefore there is an inherent tendency towards a better solution when the source code can be freely analysed, distributed and developed; release early, release often and with many eyes all bugs are shallow (to paraphrase Eric Raymond's famous essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar').

Armadillo is a C++ linear algebra library (matrix maths) that supports integer, floating point and complex numbers, as well as a subset of trigonometric and statistics functions.

The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model is a next-generation mesoscale numerical weather prediction system designed to serve both operational forecasting and atmospheric research needs. It features multiple dynamical cores, a 3-dimensional variational (3DVAR) data assimilation system, and a software architecture allowing for computational parallelism and system extensibility. WRF is suitable for a broad spectrum of applications across scales ranging from meters to thousands of kilometers.