Indeed it has. So much has happened within the past month or so. Mom and Lowell came to visit. Benedikt our German intern moved in downstairs. My son Ben has grown a lot, holding his head up, smiling, etc. We even took him to Sears for a photo session. He was such a ham. I'll get some of the photos up sometime. I got offered a cool opportunity at work to present a scientific paper in November. Becky, Ben and I went to Anchorage for her cousins wedding. We shopped a lot, I had Arby's =), and we met up with a friend of hers. Yeah a lot has been going on.
I've been spending most of my time working on the science project. I was told I'm the only person at the facility that could possibly pull it off so naturally I accepted. The appeal to my ego worked it seems and now i'm spending many late nights in the office cranking out code and building a number crunching machine. That, actually, has been a real pain in the but. It's an 8-core xeon rig, with 12GB ram, and about 10TB storage. I've been having networking issues that after about 5 full days and extremely late nights of troubleshooting ended up being that it was plugged into a network switch that was failing. Good going linksys. Your $20 switch cost us about $1000+ in man-hours. Stupid.
Over the past month I've been coding a lot in python. It rocks my face off so hard I can't begin to describe. Part of my project involved doing a baseline set of image processing. I had the majority of the code completed in about two days because python handled a lot of the tedious stupid stuff like file management, memory management, and options parsing. I spent the next few days learning about the multiprocessing library so i could fork the number crunching software to multiple cpus. I only had 70 images to process for this round, but it took a whole 13 hours because i only had 2 cpus on my desktop. With my new server I can fork them to 8 cpus running about the same speed. Essentially it will be a switch from having a cpu limited process, to a throughput limited process. Each image is about 1GB, and I can only push data around from the hdd's so fast.
Anyways I should get going for now.
Laters
