Summersault Blog

So you’ve done it, you’ve taken the plunge and decided to maintain your own website. You’ve figured out how to insert images into your documents and make them pretty but every time you insert the picture it’s MASSIVE and takes up the entire screen. So, you manually scale the image down so it looks like the right size and then you publish the page. What’s the problem with this you ask? Simple, you’re still loading that MASSIVE image even though you’ve squeezed it into a smaller area. So your page will take much longer to load than it needs to and your image will not look nearly as clear as it should. You need to physically resize that image!

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Today, the Palladium-Item published Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter’s recently released “safe online shopping tips.” I thought I would comment and expand on these tips, especially as they relate to Summersault’s experiences with online commerce.
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Congratulations to Charlie Peck and his student group from Earlham College, who just had their LittleFe project featured in the UK information technology journal, the Register: Educators boost US tech fortunes with cheap cluster. There are some good quotes from Charlie, who has served as a colleague and mentor to several Summersault staff:

“There’s something very visceral about it,” said Charlie Peck, a professor at Earlham College and one of the project’s leads, in an interview here at the Supercomputing conference. “If I can make learning this stuff accessible and interesting enough, then the students may be willing to put down their Gameboys.”

Little-Fe is a complete 4 to 8 node Beowulf style portable computational cluster used for teaching key concepts in parallel computing such as speedup, efficiency, and load balancing.