Older blog entries for macricht (starting at number 108)

Hmmm.....

Working on a space flight sim. Wondering what I should use for OpenGL rendering of the spaceflight.

Quaternions or rotation matricies. Ugh. Any suggestions.

Euler angles are just flat out of the picture. ;)

7 May 2001 (updated 7 May 2001 at 18:54 UTC) »

Forgive me for I have sinned, it's been a damned long time since I've written.

Papers, papers, papers

Paper is proofread, and submitted. It's only a two page preprint of sorts, but I am listed as an author. Page two is pretty much most of my work over the past six months or so. Lots of neutron scattering work, which is extremely fun to do. Nothing more fun than feeling like an 31337 d00d with a rad badge and access to nuclear reactors and particle accelerators... That, and it gives me the chance to experience what it's like to be at a computer terminal at 2 AM. Sources run 24 hours...mostly.

Only downside to the early morning work is the need to stay awake. Missing a bug is one thing. Getting hand in neutron beam is another (yes, Virginia, some setups will allow you to happily irradiate yourself, if you so desire).

NG3

For the past few days in early May, I've been down at NIST at NCNR on the NG3 beamline. It's a nice setup, different than the pulsed source I've been going to. NIST's setup has a rather high flux rate, but it being a reactor-based setup, I learned about the pain of "moving the detector". Ugh. The infamous "reactor setups sample some of the neutrons all of the time" does suck when you're in a hurry. At least the samples scatter very strongly.

Cable

Well, cable modem has been on the fritz hardcore, and MediaONE blames me for having faulty equipment. Well, for a while I thought they were full of it, until I moved the modem downstairs to the basement and plugged it in closer to where our CATV comes into the house.

Now, it works. Guess I wasn't getting much signal into my room. Still makes me wonder how it's been working all this time....

YES!

I'm going to be published soon. My advisor is going to present a paper at an upcoming conference, and I'm a co-author on it!

In other news, my meager home page is now XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. My widget still doesn't work, and I'm still me. Oh well, 2 out of 4 isn't bad.

And my boots should be in soon, I hope. For my birthday I decided to obtain some 20 hole Docs. Roomie who's a product of a British military academy is going to lace them for me in some strange manner. This will be fun.

Damn. My GTK widget still doesn't work, and all the GTK+ gurus are at GUADEC.

I am standing amidst the blasted remains of some insignificant town, and the sound of silence is deafening.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of Brass Monkey
Working on yet another GTK widget. This one has a Xwindow parent. Right now, the code does nothing but not work. Suck.

The widget's name? Gtk BrassMonkey. Why?

  1. Licensed to Ill -- but it's more subtle than you think.
  2. What I'm going to use it for.

Tickets
Well, my tickets came in, but I no longer have a date for that evening. Drat.

That, and I need to renew my license. Guess I'll have to get a Massachusetts one. Of course, in true Massachusetts tradition, it'll cost me 68 bucks since I'm from out of state. Indiana only would charge me 10 bucks. Doubt I'll save 50 bucks on the trip back home. Heaven help them if they want me to register the car I don't own in MA...

Finality
Well, a lot of nasty questions were answered today. Many of them with answers that what I didn't really want to hear...or I first thought. Now that I do have at least some closure, it isn't that bad. Funny how that works.

ldx #$1503 jsl $E10000
Well, seems like one of my favorite projects to track, KEGS (Ken's Emulated GS), has become stagnant in it's development. Sigh. And I wanted to get advanced border effects working. Luckily, mfleming works for Eazel, and I run into him from time to time on IRC. He's not the maintainer for KEGS, but he is a fellow IIgs hacker.

Unfortnately, he doen't know the specifics of the border effect, namely registers/softswitches you have to watch. Oh well. Was hoping if anyone else out in the Advogato community would know. I also have one or two last places to try...but I don't expect much. Finding old Apple][ hacks is getting harder and harder...

And yes, the Toolbox call represents my current state of mind. Sad, isn't it?

...from the bottom, it looks like a steep incline...
I've been stuck in a real valley recently. Hopefully things will improve. I think my research will get better, I now have all the tools I need at my disposal, and I should be able to finish this up. should have something to present at this year's AIChE conference, which would be nice.

Now if my personal life can just follow the same pattern. Alas, it appears that it's just one of those things where I've just got to get used to disappointment...

...from the top, another downhill slope of mine...
...and it's something that's damned hard to get used to. I'm slowly migrating to the belief that parts of my life follow the two laws of thermodynamics: first, you can never win, you can only break even, and second, you can never break even.

...but I know the equlibrium is there...
But as MC Hawking says : ...only in a closed system must the entropy count rise...

Here's to hoping my life isn't a closed system.

22 Mar 2001 (updated 22 Mar 2001 at 16:10 UTC) »
Work
Well, I think I must have the World's Worst Luck (tm). I couldn't go to GUADEC this year because I had something else happening, namely experiments at NIST's reactor.

So, that means that yesterday, well after the registration deadline and any chance to get something that resembles a reasonable flight, I get a little e-mail. E-mail says "reactor has had a coolant leak for a few months now. Today, it got really bad, and we'll need to take the reactor down for a few service cycles. Your experiment has been rescheduled to a future date."

The cycles are roughly 20 days long. Great. OLS might be out now as well.

Also, data analysis not going well again. I should have just stayed in bed this week, and not come out until Sunday.

Germ Warfare
Well, I'm not strep positive. Damn. Either there was something bacterial floating in my head (which I can still buy due to certain things), or it was one fast virus.

Go West Young Man!
Gee. All these people in Western Mass. First schoen (ok, he's from here IIRC), and now AilleCat. Anyone else out in Advogato-land hiding in Western Mass.?

Tpying
Needs to be improved.

P(q)
More curve fitting of form factor data. Results I'm getting are...well...interesting. Need to think a bit harder about the problem. Definite paper here.

Also, I cannot make GUADEC2 because of this. I'm going down to NIST to do some scattering from the 5th to 9th of April. Wish I could have made it, but it's becoming obvious that the only way I can go to conferences is if they're in my backyard. Sigh, the trials of a grad student.

Bacterium
Woke up yesterday feeling so-not-good. Day before, I noticed I was getting a slight sore throat. Bells went off in my head and decided to see a doctor.

Needless to say, with a pulse at 105 and 99.8F fever, something was NOT right. My lab tests come back on Monday, but I've started the penecillin. Most likely strep throat. Not really comfortable with taking antibiotics w/o a confirmed diagnosis...but the symptoms were just hard to ignore (sore, red throat, fever, lack of any other symptoms, just missing the white gook that usually collects in the back of the throat). That, and after being on it for about a day and a half, I do feel better (the fever broke, at least).

So for today, I'm staying in bed. Resting.

SFS
Well, MediaOne blocks the SMB ports on their cablemodem system. So, I was trying to find a good way to get my massive ogg collection to my work computer. I never got OpenAFS to compile, and there is no way in hell that I'm going to do NFS over the internet. HTTP works, but I can't seek on streams. Someone suggested SFS to me. Found it easy to setup, and seems to work well enough.

q
Finally got work computer. Now I can start fitting all that neutron data I've accumulated. Wheee.

Also noticed the (lack of) good graphing software in general. Currently using a version of Igor Pro for the simple fact that NIST-Brookhaven has some neutron data treatment routines for the software (you can even take the raw counts from the area detector and treat it from there).

I think I'll work on one...someday...when I have time...

Colours
Hair is now purple, I think. It seems to be different colors under different lighting conditions.

I like that.

Why do I even bother.

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