CFD Whore

Something disturbing in my inbox yesterday. In addition to our contact info (name, phone #, company URL, etc) our e-mail signature file is now required to include an advertisement for our latest software product. To my eyes, it looks tacky and unprofessional. I really wish they wouldn't make us do shit like this. Makes me feel cheap.

Screwed Up Again

I lost track of a the schedule for a project for the Number One Client. I thought I had two weeks left to finish it, but he called me on Wednesday and reminded me that I had promised results by this Friday. Oops. I told him I would be able to send him first results on Monday, & he said that was cool. So now I'm busting my ass to get it done. Finished building the model in three days, which is pretty impressive if I do say so myself. Had to make a few compromises, but nothing too severe. The new Opteron really helped - trimmed the whole thing in an hour by using all four processors. Gotta go into the office today to finish setting it up and get it running. These types of models usually run pretty well on the first try - hopefully this will be typical.

Color Me Surprised

Well, it took a few days. Just When I thought she'd forgotten, she surprised me one morning before I went to the gym. Great way to start the day. :-)

Got Lucky

Got some from my old lady last night. Drove her so wild she said I was "a wonderful lover" and "I want to do it again tomorrow", which is pretty damn unusual. We'll see if she remembers that tonight...

It's Hammer Time

We got a new machine to build meshes on, and it is hot. It's got four 1.6 GHz Opterons, which are faster than just about anything in the building. It actually arrived about nine months ago, but came with only 1 GB of memory and an 18 GB disk, which made it pretty much worthless. I've been pointing out for months how useful this thing could be if we just upgraded it, but what finally tipped the scales was the Number One Client saying that he wants us to double the size of the models we're building for him. So management finally plunked down a credit card and bought a 74 GB disk and 16 GB(!) of RAM. We've been pushing it hard this week, and it hasn't blinked once. We finally have a machine which can do big models quickly.

Damn near had an orgasm when the thing trimmed a ten million cell mesh in only four hours. And that was only using one CPU. It's twice as fast as our big Sun or the Itanium.

What I've Been Reading

Some comments on three books I've read recently: The Sundering, the second installment in Walter Jon William's latest series, Dread Empire's Fall. The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown's insanely popular bestseller, and Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Jesus's Childhood Friend.

The Sundering continues the saga of Blank and Caroline Sula, two young officers in the service of a galactic empire which most resembles Victorian England, if Victoria had married Mao Tse-Tung instead of Prince Albert. The civil war which began in the previous installment is now going badly, with the badly maulled fleet abandoning the capital to fight a guerilla campaign. The two lead characters again come together, with considerable passion, only to have Sula's secret past drive them apart again. Like almost all of William's books, the action is well paced, the characters are intersting and multi-dimensional, and there is a nice sprinkling of humor. Very enjoyable.

The DaVinci Code, on the other hand, was crap. Crap, crap, crap. It's supposed to be about two brilliant people figuring out the clues to lead them to a secret society which has been hiding the secrets of Jesus' life for two thousand years. Except that the secrets have all been documented by art historians, the secret society no longer seems to care if anyone remembers the secrets, and the clues are easily figured out twenty pages before our two so-called geniuses stumble onto them. The book is full of basic factual errors, and it makes no sense that a secret organization which has been hiding from an all-powerful Catholic Church for centuries would at the same time be flaunting its secrets in major pieces of art. Makes me think of a naked man prancing around shouting "You can't see me! I'm invisible!"

And now for something completely different: Lamb. This very funny story plays with the idea of "What if Jesus had grown up with a wiseassed but loyal guy named Biff?" Complete fiction, of course, but so is much of the legend of Jesus. The main difference between this and the New Testament is that Lamb is much, much funnier. Looking forward to reading more of Chris Moore's work.

Stanford is ranked #1 in the country in men's basketball. Wahoo!

Taking a well-deserved vacation from life, starting tomorrow. The not-so-short-anymore one and I are flying out to Colorado. She will be skiing, I will not. People are always telling me how much I'd enjoy skiing, and they're probably right. I imagine I would. The problem is the joints in my legs are already pretty messed up. My knees are bow-legged, my ankles severely pronated, and my fleet are completely flat. I'd like them to still function in another 40 years, but I figure the odds aren't better than 50-50 as it is. I read once that on a typical downhill run, a skiers knees absorb enough energy to shatter an acre of glass. I don't think my knees could handle too much of that without reducing their lifetime expectancy. So no skiing for the Captain.

The last time we visited my folks in Colorado, I spent one day at the ski resort. That day, one person had to be evacuated by helicopter, and two more were pulled out on sleds. I've never seen anyone get injured on a roller coaster. Yet people still ask me, "Aren't they dangerous?" Bleh.

Still no official word on when A Feast For Crows will ship.

So I haven't updated in a year. Maybe I should try to stay more current. I'll think about it.

Quick summary of the past few weeks:
The big project for the Major Client got done. Everybody happy. The Big Boss said thanks for all my efforts.
The company is having budget trouble. Guess we weren't as recession-proof as management thought. Big surprise there. So everyone gets a 5% pay cut. The owners took a 10% cut, which sounds pretty noble, except that the prez just hired his wife a few months ago, so he's still getting more money than he was a year ago. Plus he gets to benefit from Dubya's tax cuts a lot more than us grunts.
Took a vacation to Williamsburg. Cool place. Lots of neat stuff if you're into history. Plus some good roller coasters at Busch Gardens. Wasn't as relaxing as the last couple of trips to Disney World, though - never really got a chance to turn my brain off.

Okay, now for what's on my mind.
Buffy ends tonight. I am majorly bummed.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer is only the second show I have watched from beginning to end. This doesn't count ones that ended after just a couple of episodes. The first was The Muppet Show, which ended a quarter-century ago. I came late to MASH, and Murphy Brown and Mad About You just got stale and I dropped them before the end. But tonight I have to say goodbye to Buffy, Xander, Giles, Spike and the Hellmouth. and especially Willow. This is gonna be painful.

As of yesterday, the big project for the Major Client was at 500 iterations and running strong. Amazing. A high detail model in just over six weeks. All it took was two senior engineers and one rookie working a gazillion hours of unpaid overtime. I sure hope the Big Boss realizes that this cannot be the norm in the future, or it'll be time to dust of the resume...

Last year I built a model of an F-18 for Lockheed-Martin for some studies they were conducting. It was a huge model and took a lot of effort on my part to get it going. Long before I got any meaningful results I was being hounded by people in our sales department for some images they could show around, presumably so that potential customers would think that we've all got huge penises. So I checked with the client and he said it was OK to show some pics. I passed a few on to the sales guys, with the instructions that they could show these pictures, but they were not allowed to leave them with clients.

Guess what I saw today. A picture of my model, emblazed across the cover of a brochure. A brochure! Jesus Freakin Christ. Now, Lockheed-Martin doesn't build the F-18, and I'm about 99% sure that the geometry data they gave me was stuff they got out of the public domain, so I doubt anyone will get pissed about this particular image. But I know for a fact that we didn't have anybody's permission to publish this in one of our documents, let alone on the front cover! It'll be a cold day in Hell before I let the sales guys see anything I'm working on without a gold-plated certificate from the client saying we can do whatever we want with his data, including submitting to Fark for a photoshop contest.

Getting close to the deadline on the big project for the Major Client. It sort of runs but not really. Spent all weekend at the office. Going in a couple of hours early to get more work done. I'm really tired of this damn thing.

Got a week of productive work in. Started assembling the meshes today (yes, working on a Saturday again). Made good progress on the dreaded box. Figured out how it can be generated after the debugging is done - makes it much easier that way. Trimming in multiple overlapping sections turned out to work very well. Much better than the vaunted es-parallel-flavor-of-the-month. Yea on me.

On the down side, time is running short. Got two weeks before I go on vacation and leave poor Sato on his own. Well, Joe's there, but he's still learning the ropes. That means we've got to get a geometry write done no later than Thursday. Eek.

Apparently the Major Client checked with his boys, and they said, "no, we don't need 4. 6 is good enough." So we're going with 6. I'll back off from my penis boasting comments. Still trying to generate a clean box to meet the new requirement. Major pain.

Got another job that ran for a month. I was getting ready to send results to the client and discovered that it was all wrong. Worse, it would have been easy to catch if I'd been paying attention. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Gotta do better on these simple ones.

More instructions from the Major Client today. We were already going to go with a cell size of 5 for the key components, with 2.5 for the grill. Not enough he says. He wants 4. But we're supposed to keep the total count under 9 million. Excuse me? Nobody's done one finer than 6, and he wants 4??? Only way to meet both criteria is to coarsen everything else. Wheels, exterior, even the grill. I'm beginning to think this is more about penis size than it is about doing the best analysis. So I play the whore and say "Sure, 4. Why not?"

Prediction: Next fiscal year, they'll be wanting 2.5. Only way that'll work is if they stop dorking around and give us CAD data that fits together - no gaps, no interfering. Otherwise it'll be pure penis boasting with no real value.

One more post to check formatting changes.

Spent much of the day negotiating with Sato over what cell sizes to use for the custom mesh. He wanted to keep the size high so it could be done on a linux box. I felt we had to go small even if that meant generating and cutting on 34 or 35, which are big (6 GB RAM) but slow. In the end we decided to break the domain up into three chunks which could be managed on any platform. Means tossing our fancy "Expert System" softare out the window, but that may be a good thing. The Big Boss says we gotta call the Major Client today and get their approval for whatever cell size we go with. Sometimes I wonder whose side he's on.

Not entirely satisfied with the look - too bright. One more post just to tweek it a bit.

Showed the results of Saturday's work to the Big Boss. He was less than enthused. Wants me to go with Plan B. More work for me. Wanker.

Lunux7's disk drives were full yesterday. 100% on u1, 97% on u2. One guy had 18 gigs on it. Told him to get his stuff off or I'd become him and rm -rf it all. (He's been promising for a couple of weeks to back it up and clean up). I think I finally got his attention - 5 or 6 gigs were gone immediately and he said he had a tape running. We'll see.

Red and Sky are both fully utilized these days. Good thing they got Red working finally. I think we need another 64 nodes soon, though...

Changed the template a bit. We'll see how it looks.

Gonna practice adding a link. monster.com. Ta-da.

Worked on the damn box around the hx package for six hours. Looks easy enough on paper, but the details get you. Lots and lots of details. Got a lot of them, still a few more to deal with. The Major Client better be satisfied with what I give them...

License servers were down for the Linux platforms. Glad thing I hadn't logged out when I left Friday.