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WEEK 49 2005

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Saturday 10 December 2005

Saturday - since the garage band kids down the block were rockin' out last night, I went over to a friends house for dinner and relief from the noise. Indeed, I stayed so late, watching Return of the Sith, that I just sacked out in their spare bedroom for the night. In the morning we went to yard sales, then went to watch their boy 'testing' in Karate - he passed, and is now a blue belt, huzzah! Then we all had a very late lunch and I returned here.

And puzzled about the open door to the spare bedroom. I thought I had closed it. Odd.

The house the band was playing at was totally TP'ed. Certainly the most toilet paper I've ever seen stuck to a house. Sheesh. I wish I'd been around to watch...

Then, surprisingly, late in the afternoon, my brother in law shows up. He has a key to my place, and was working down in LA, and stayed at my place last night. Hence the open door...

Sometimes you just can't face seeing a movie again. It's A Wonderful Life, for example. It was on today, but I didn't, couldn't, wouldn't, watch it. Instead I went for the 30 second version, performed by bunny rabbits.

Friday 9 December 2005

Friday - Book #48 is: Compass, by Alan Gurney. It was a book about the development of the mariner's compass throughout history. The focus was primarily on the British development of the 'dry' compass, and it is an entertaining and edifying romp through history. Occasionally, as in the description of some of the many wrecks caused by bad navigation, it can be horrifying. Some of the characters from last weeks' Book #47 A Thread Across the Ocean make cameo appearances, and you see a somewhat different side to them. We meet again, for example, Captain Cook, William Bligh, Joseph Banks (Book #1 !), Isambard Brunel, William Thompson (Lord Kelvin). There are numerous personages over the centuries of development, and if the book has a major fault, then it is the fact that the expository biographies of many people often strays so far from the books ostensible purpose as to become distracting. Despite this, recommended.

Went to a Preliminary Design Review (PDR) for an aircraft modification project. It lasted about five hours, and was fairly interesting. Aircraft are complicated objects -even fairly small changes need to be carefully thought out and checked before being implemented. At the time of a PDR the contractor has some sketches, early drawings and analyses, and lays out what he intends to to for a detailed design. At the PDR the customer (NASA, in this case) has a chance to look at and critique the proposed design before it has gone too far.

Dryden's policy is that just about anyone can show up at a PDR and ask questions - it's sort of the flight test equivalent of the statement "There are no stupid questions." Generally you will probably see the structures guys asking about structures, the aero guys concentrating on the aerodynamics, the radar people worried about the radar - but it's OK to ask about other disciplines, no one will mock or think the less of the questioner, and there are, indeed, a lot of cross discipline query's.

Thursday 8 December 2005

Thursday - one thing yesterday, that I didn't mention, was the Dryden Peer Awards ceremony. These are awards, voted on by the appropriate center personnel, to individuals and groups for the year. I knew several of the people getting awards this year - Kurt Guenther, Jennifer Hansen, Earl Adams, Keith Krake, among others. I'll have to stop by their office's (cubicle's) and congratulate them.

Today was a mixture of things. Got the GUI going ( the manual was wrong, and had transposed the comments for the sending event, a slider, and the receiving text box that received the results of the event. Oh well. ). Talked to the tech monitor about a proposal due in the next year. Called tech support because my phone doesn't ring when people call me from outside the center - it works fine for people on site and on base. Weird.

Wednesday 7 December 2005

Wednesday - working a bit on the MATLAB GUI. It's not quite working. It seems similar to the Visual Basic stuff I've written in the past, though, as well as Visual C. I'll get it, I'm sure.

One of the things I don't like about these new "fourth generation" languages is that they are hiding the "await event" routine. Consider: when a program is running, and there is a nice graphical interface, everything is really in a loop, waiting for a user to do something, the event. In GraPHIGs (a superset of PHIGs) for example, you actually had a subroutine to call, i.e.:

1001 call gpAwaitEvent( ireturn, event_data )

or something to that effect. The code would simply sit in the gpAwaitEvent subroutine until something happened, a mouse click, keyboard input, whatever. The values of "ireturn" and "event_data" would tell you exactly what happened, and you could program a bunch of CASE statements after this subroutine call, to deal with the event. When done "dealing" with the event you just stuck in a goto statement below the CASE structure -

goto 1001

and voila, you were back in the gpAwaitEvent subroutine.

Not so, in VB or MATLAB - you just have a bunch of subroutines or functions that some invisible event handler is calling. It's probably because it is a higher level language and interface, one that uses "callbacks" to actually modify the GUI. It's actually a lot less work to program the new way. But it bothers me, just a little bit, so I mentally put the AwaitEvent in...

After work I drove a friend down to the Bob Hope International Airport in Burbank. We arrived about 7:00, so it was after the rush hour and traffic, while heavy, was moving well. After dropping him off I went to the Fry's across the street (you can see it from in front of the terminal, though the railroad tracks require a somewhat circuitous route to get to it). I then wasted a couple of hours there, looking at various things. I looked at the Olympus Evolt 500 SLR, for one thing.

It was bigger than I thought it would be, but also quite a bit lighter - it has a polycarbonate body (plastic) rather than magnesium (I think). I'm sure it didn't have batteries in it, which would make it feel lighter, but it did have the 3X zooms lens, so I played with that a bit. Most of the digital SLR cameras seem enormous after my C-3040 and the little Pentax Optio. I think the Konica-Minolta's SLR's were fairly small, but they didn't stock the Pentax 1st DS(2?).

So, after indulging in an orgy of widow shopping, and even though I was driving my friends' very nice turbocharged Passat Wagon, I didn't get home and into bed until after midnight.

Tuesday 6 December 2005

Tuesday - it was down in the 20's last night, but it was a particularly cold 20. Everyone at work agreed. High relative humidity, perhaps.

Which reminds me of the "warm ice" issue: but I think I already blogged once about it, so I won't revisit.

And yes, it's too cold tonight to put up lights, as well. Though not as cold as yesterday.

Which was, pretty much, my position on "warm ice".

Playing around (familiarizing I'd call it in a progress report) with MATLAB today. So, I practiced script writing by calculating "pi" the hard way. I'd heard of this somewhere and managed to recreate the algorithm after a bit of tinkering.

MATLAB has a nice random function, that generates a random number array between zero and one. I created a vector of size 2*N of random numbers, then grabbed a vector of these numbers by groups of two, treating them as N (x,y) pairs, and calculated the distance to the origin using the Pythagorean formula. If less than or equal to 1.0 I counted it as being within a circle of radius one, centered at the origin, but if greater than 1.0 it was outside the circle.

The chance of a point being in the circle is the can be gotten from the ratio of the areas of the circle with a unit radius and the square circumscribing it, namely Pi*1^2 = Pi and 4.0. So I should get pi/4.0 as the inside/outside ratio, and by multiplying that ratio by 4, get pi. There is a nice vectorized function in MATLAB that gives you a new array, with 1.0's for those values greater than or equal to one (and zeros for the rest), and another nice function that sums up that arrays "ones". So the ratio I'm looking for is just that final sum divided by the total number of samples, N. (Now it true that the random number generator only generates numbers between zero and one, so I'm only getting values in the first quadrant - but the ratio of the areas is still the same!)

And hey, it worked. Each run the value for pi, even for the same number of samples, N, is a bit different. The greater the number of samples the higher the precision. I left it running for 1,000,000 samples when I went home. Now to add a GUI and a figure showing the sample locations...

When I get my Fortran compiler I can write this as an external *.mex routine.

Monday 5 December 2005

Monday - back to work. It was an hour plus wait at the EAFB West Gate (ORE time). Sheesh.

And it's turning cold. I'd go out and put up Christmas lights, but it's cold cold cold out there.

I have reasoned out, I think, why one of the cats recently started peeing in corners and behind doors. I caught Phoebe in the act the other day, swatted him, rubbed his nose in the wet spot, and generally let him know that this was bad. Then I started to think: Phoebe is, I mentioned, afraid of the recently acquired goldfish. I thought it was sort of funny, but hadn't considered that the cats' litter box was next to the fishtank. Poor guy, he probably couldn't take care of business any other way, and was trying his best to keep his stuff out of the way...

So, I've moved the litter box. D'oh!

Sunday 4 December 2005

Sunday - went for a walk, watched some Tivoed stuff, generally tried to relax. But I had to clean house as well. It's astonishing how messy the house gets, now that I'm not home to clean it up regularly.

Watched March of the Penguins yesterday. What a remarkable film - both the filming of it, the antarctic landscapes, and the life story of the Emperor Penguins.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Burnt tree on the Librie Peak trail.

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