Ed Hill's Home Page

Date: 2006-05-18 20:16:39.215341
Chapter Name: blug
Meeting: blug 2006-05-18
Body: Joined in virtually tonight and created an RPM for GTS, the Gnu Triangulated Surface Library.

Date: 2003-03-26 23:00:00
Chapter Name: golden
Meeting: 20030326
Body: Drank a lot of coffee, enjoyed the conversation and demos of the others' projects, and worked on a colorimetry project.

Date: 2003-02-26 23:00:00
Chapter Name: golden
Meeting: 20030226
Body: Drank a lot of coffee, enjoyed the conversation, and worked on some shell and MatLAB scripts for X-ray data analysis.

Date: 2003-01-15 23:00:00
Chapter Name: golden
Meeting: 20030115
Body: Fixed Mike's XFree86 configuration problem. Apparently, SuSE 8.1 will automatically configure the framebuffer on the first console and that caused problems with the ATI Rage Mobility P/M chipset. This is yet another reason for beginners to avoid SuSE since having the framebuffer device is nothing but useless eye-candy during the boot-up sequence and it caused serious conflicts (screen corruption) with XFree86. Note that the Rage Mobility is an incredibly popular laptop chipset and this would NOT have been a problem (everything would have "just worked") with Red Hat or KRUD. Spent time talking with Percy about GSXM and FFTs as implemented in FFTW. Also enjoyed some yummy coffee and caught up on email.

Date: 2003-01-08 23:00:00
Chapter Name: golden
Meeting: 20030108
Body: Enjoyed the conversations and the Belgian chocolate flavored coffee. Looked at a demo of Percy's Gxsm (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gxsm) and was impressed. Wrote something like two whole lines (!) of code for my X-ray tomograph simulator. Really enjoyed the after-meeting talk where Jonathan suggested a slick idea for platform alignment with a laser and photodiode.

Date: 2002-12-18 23:00:00
Chapter Name: golden
Meeting: 20021218
Body: Enjoyed the conversations with Percy, Sean, and Jax over an eggnog latte. Worked on some X-ray simulation code, switching parts of it from Xerces-C++ to libxml++.

Date: 2002-12-11 23:00:00
Chapter Name: golden
Meeting: 20021211
Body: Did no coding as the KRUD 8.0 install on my laptop took up the entire evening. I'm very pleased with it, so many thanks Tummy.com folks! ;-) Enjoyed the coffee, the conversations with new acquaintances, and the after-hours tour of the CESEP lab.

Date: 2002-08-29 23:00:00
Chapter Name: blug
Meeting: 20020829
Body:

Got a good dose of Sole caffine, IRC, email, and conversation. Hacked on a user-space version of a serial port driver for an Amptek MCA8000a (www.amptek.com) and, apparently, was able to successfully send my first few dozen bytes to it. Yey! It has an ugly (IMHO) and unusual hardware flow control design which uses the RTS, DSR, and DTR lines for *every* byte sent. Yuk.



Date: 2002-08-22 23:00:00
Chapter Name: blug
Meeting: 20020822
Body:

Got fairly wired on the yummy Cafe Sole brew. Started writing a C (POSIX) library and demo program for serial communication with an Amptek (www.amptek.com) MCA8000A Multi-Channel Analyzer. Talked with Chris about coordinating a joint CU-Mines Linux Installfest.



Date: 2002-07-18 23:00:00
Chapter Name: blug
Meeting: 20020718
Body:

Updated the "multi-distro-dev" mini-howto, worked on my ugly InitiateCapture hack for the PTP camera driver within gphoto2-2.0, and enjoyed the conversations. A *BIG* thanks to Jonathan who, a few weeks ago, spent nearly an hour listening to my vexing serial communications problem. His suggestions lead to a solution just a few days later.



Date: 2002-06-27 23:00:00
Chapter Name: blug
Meeting: 20020627
Body:

Hacked on C code (called from LabVIEW) for decoding X-ray spectra as measured and encoded by a Princeton Gamma-Tech SYS4004 photon detector. This has to be the most esoteric device employed (remotely!) for the evening. Enjoyed the conversations and coffee.



Date: 2002-06-20 23:00:00
Chapter Name: blug
Meeting: 20020620
Body:

Enjoyed conversations with many folks. Prepared a bug report for OpenSSH installs on Solaris 8 (their entropy collection scheme fails to run--hangs!--in certain cases). Compared, contrasted, and complained about the difficulty of installs of various Free and Open Source packages (eg. OpenSSH, PHP) on Solaris versus Linux. Forget about cost, ease-of-setup alone is reason enough to see Linux marginalize all commercial Unixes. Did some much-needed package upgrades and caught up on emails.



Date: 2002-06-06 23:00:00
Chapter Name: blug
Meeting: 20020606
Body:

Asked for Solaris admin pointers and got some very helpful advice (thanks, Kevin!). Hacked on my serial-snooper (ssnooper) and X-ray analysis (QAXA) codes. Enjoyed the conversation and some coffee.



Date: 2002-05-23 23:00:00
Chapter Name: blug
Meeting: 20020523
Body:

Worked on a serial "snooper" (sourceforge.net/projects/ssnooper) to help me debug problems I'm having with a serial driver for a photon detector in our lab at Mines. The current version of the ssnooper code is mostly garbage written in a hurry. I'm rewriting and adding the ability to save and replay logged sessions. Also enjoyed the conversations--especially how Cafe Sole got wireless.



Date: 2002-03-28 23:00:00
Chapter Name: blug
Meeting: 20020328
Body:

I came to work on coding up some new estimators for material presence by differential X-ray absorption but I didn't have the theory finished. So the time was spent working on the theory and no coding happened...



Date: 2002-03-21 23:00:00
Chapter Name: blug
Meeting: 20020321
Body:

Attended my first Hacking Society meeting and (1) tried out WLAN for the first time (many thanks to Jonathan and Kevin for loaner cards and helpful advice), (2) downloaded, built, and started learning the Matrix Template Library.