Updating NVIDIA Drivers

Downloading and installing the NVIDIA binary blobs (or drivers as they're known) from the website is an absolute nightmare for Linux. It usually involves killing the xserver and ensuring that you have the right kernel modules matching up.

Anyway, there is a simple way of keeping your NVIDIA display driver up to date by adding the following ppa to your repositories:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current 

Algorithmic Trading in the Headlines

With the spectacular melt down of Knight Capital (resulting in a $440million loss) this week due to a piece of buggy 'dormant' software, the newswires have been alive with talk of HFT and algorithmic trading. Below I pick a selection of the best headlines that are worth a read. How long will this last?

High-frequency trading and the $440m mistake - Tim Harford (BBC News)

Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading - Wired

History of Algorithmic Trading - Bloomberg News (Opinion)

And also a nice little video to explain HFT.

A Brief History of Supercomputers

Interesting infographic from hpc4energy.

AutoDesk Maya Fluid Simulation

Very very cool footage of how Maya can now use OpenCL for fluid simulation - 10x more performance from the GPU compared to the CPU!