Spring semester

I admit, fall semester was not very productive. I spent most of the semester trying to figure out why simrender quit working after I reinstalled everything when I got a new harddrive (100GB! beautiful). Meanwhile I tried to add gravity and buoyancy to the vector updating, and played with a function that would (hopefully) take a 3D point and display it on a 2D plane so that it kind of looked 3D. However, it bothered me because I couldn't really trust what I was seeing.

At the end of the semester I borrowed a laptop from the Westmont CS department, put my old harddrive in and put the two side by side, comparing all the settings for compiling simrender. I verified the old one worked, and then as a test, recompiled it, and it stopped working! So I copied off a fresh version from the backup CD I had made after the summer (so glad I made that). Eventually I realized the problem: at the beginning of the semester I had gotten the bright idea to install a new version of DrScheme because it had some new features. It didn't like some of the functions that were in my code, so I tweaked it, and it would run. What I didn't realize was that simrender did not like this new format. So I went and got the old version of DrScheme and it worked great. I made note of what version to use in the readme for my code.

So now it is spring semester, and I need to write up an application for research credit before the add/drop deadline (Wednesday). Part of that is figuring out what I want to accomplish this semester. I'm hoping that I can get the little parasites bouncing around according to physics by summer. I need to make it sound better than that though. It is discouraging that my goal has gotten that non-ambitious, but I just don't have the physics background. If I can get gravity and buoyancy working, then Tarynn can come out and I'll have a few days to make her explain all the other equations to me.

I did make a breakthrough tonight though. I've been trying to think of how to figure out how simrender handles time short of e-mailing the guy who wrote it and asking. So I set up a few tests. As it turns out, one timestep corresponds to one "second" in simrender. Very handy. Whether it's actually a full second or not depends on how fast your computer can go and such. So now all I have to do is set up the physics stuff so that a timestep is a second. I hope the units come out ok.

I wish I could condense my code--there is so much of it. But then if I'm going to have to re-write it in a different language anyway, there isn't much point. But I don't know if that'll happen...