Travels and Thoughts

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WEEK 9 2006

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Saturday 4 March 2006

Saturday - on the road.

Friday 3 March 2006

Friday - things may be proceeding at work - jobs now run under MPI correctly, and finish (save for some flush errors). I'll check results next week.

I'd planned to be on the road north today, but a snowstorm on the passes means tomorrow is a better idea.

Went to the LPAC instead and saw some African Acrobats. Think Chinese but with more of a sense of enthusiasm & fun!

Thursday 2 March 2006

Thursday - someone sent me a picture of an America's Cup boat being unloaded from an airplane. The airplane was an Antonov 225 - or I thought so at first, the biggest aircraft in the world. Looking at it again, it may have been an Antonov 124, based upon the type of horizontal tail. Still very large. I imagine that syndicates that put up millions for one use race boats can afford it.

I was watching a presentation this morning, and something caught my eye. There was a slide with various lighter-than-air vehicles on it, and one of them was the Aereon. It rang a bell. Wasn't that the craft mentioned in The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, by John McPhee? I asked the presenter, later, and he said yes (although a later version). Man, it's been decades since I read that book.

I made some progress on the code - I can now get it to die with horrible messages like "file descriptor error". It's progress of a limited and annoying sort. At least the MPI portion is trying to do something, which it wouldn't before. I know now more than I ever really wanted to know about #ifdef's and preprocessor macro's. Hint: FORTRAN doesn't care about the case of variable, but the the preprocessor is probably written in C, and apparently does.

Wednesday 1 March 2006

Wednesday - last night there was just the thinnest crescent of a new moon in the west. It was about as thin as I can remember seeing - I wonder if there is a calculator out there to show just how new it was at about 6:30 pm, PDT? (Update & Answer: about two hours old. Man I love the internet.) Tonight it was much thicker.

Today the winds were forecast to be gusting to 55mph. It was, instead, warm, nearly cloudless, and windless.

I am learning more than I ever really wanted to know about configure and make. Things are, slowly, proceeding.

Tuesday 28 February 2006

Tuesday - I made a little progress today. I was able to compile some simple MPICH programs. I couldn't use the mpif90 command - it's all messed up, so by dint of sweat and swearing I was able to figure out libraries, archives, and the switches. Some switches are pretty odd, -Vaxlib, for example, fixes trailing underscores for getarg and other variables, inside the libraries. I'm not using a Vax, but I suppose the first time someone had this particular they were using a Vax.system, hence the name.

Monday 27 February 2006

Monday - Back at work, sacrificing a pound of flesh to the parallel processing gods, and another to the Linux gods, so that I may prosper in my endeavors.

What, you didn't know that there was an 'invocative' mode to UNIX?

Sunday 26 February 2006

Sunday - not feeling 100%, again. This is getting ridiculous, my health varies with the weather. Rain:sick, sun:good, rain:sick again... Of course, when it's raining, and you're sick, then you've probably nothing better to do than read -

Book #12 is Old Soldiers, by David Weber. More military Sci-Fi, not especially memorable. The tank, on the cover, is one of Keith Laumer's 'Bolo' tanks. It's actually too small, in the book it's described as being eighty five meters long - or 279 feet.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Oddly ballasted freighter, heading downriver, mostly or completely empty, down at the stern.
(picture courtesy of my father)

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