OpenFOAM® offers a standard way to access user-specified constant data by means of dictionaries. However, dictionaries are by default read during the start-up phase of the main code. If a boundary condition requires to access the same information, the value can be looked up from the internal database used by OpenFOAM to store objects. The procedure is quite simple, and I show an example below, in a general case. Let’s assume our solver uses the “transportProperties” dictionary, which contains a subdictionary, called “mySubDict”. This sub-dictionary contains a dimensioned scalar, named “myScalar”. In the BC, you can recover “myScalar” as follows: // Extract the dictionary from the database const dictionary& transportProperties…

Happy holidays and a great 2011 to everybody!

This blog is hosted on a professional hosting service (Linux-based, of course 😉 ) offered by Netsons, an Italian hosting provider which operates in Italy and Europe. I would like to thank them for the highly professional and extremely fast service they offer. Recently my account had a minor glitch with the database server. Netsons staff fixed it in minutes, after I reported the problem, and their personnel was very professional and friendly. Good job Netsons!

DudaLibre.com is trying to establish if the Linux desktop users are more than 1% of the total desktop users. If you are a Linux desktop user, you can report it there, specifying your distribution.

A friend, and openSUSE board member, Bryen, also known as suseROCKs on the openSUSE network, has been robbed of his 17” laptop, an Amazon Kindle, 1 TB external hard drive, and his camera and lenses while traveling in Spain. These tools are very important to him, since he is almost blind and deaf, and he needs them to be able to perform activities we give for granted. Stephen Shaw from Novell/openSUSE organized a fund raiser to be able to help our friend at least a bit. If you can, donate here. Thanks 😀 Update: As you can notice from the counter above, donations exceeded the established goal! Bryen decided to…

Good news for Iowa! Forbes named Des Moines (Iowa) the best city where to raise a family in USA, thanks to good schools, affordable housing, safety, short time required to go from home to work, and community.

NIST announced the release of an updated version of their handbook of mathematical functions. Resources are available online at the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions. You will need a Math-ML enabled browser like Firefox to properly see the page.