#csgf

crusty concept 3 of this 

time to play what the hell do these blobs mean half of the time it just says “scenes” 

Turns out it’s pretty easy to go several days without an entry. I’ve been using Day One mostly as a detailed version of commit comments for coding projects, but the idea was to also include some personal stuff and whatever else I might want to write about.

#kanji

I’m now ≈370 kanji into RTK1. It’s much easier this time than before, although I’m still less than 25% through, so we’ll see if it stays easy. For the most part I’m able to simply look over the character once in RTK, and then I have no problems when doing reviews in Anki. I can also blast through many lessons in a day (3 in a day is the current max, but I hope to have some even more productive days).

I’ve added all new kanji with a notebook in Notability, and I’ve been pretty good about doing reviews in the notebook too. I like doing that because it fortifies the correct stroke order, keeps the characters looking decent compared to when I air-write them when reviewing on the road, and makes for a fun notebook to look at once I have a few full pages of reviews (hopefully without any red marks).

MBPr

I took my Macbook Pro into Apple again, and they replaced everything except the keyboard and screen, so it’s a brand new computer basically. This was the second time they replaced the logic board, and I’m 50/50 hoping that there are no more problems so I can use the thing without worrying about losing data or productivity having to troubleshoot stuff and also hoping that it breaks again, because the next time they try to replace the logic board I’ll pull the same card I did with the last Macbook Pro and try to get my money back to upgrade to a newer model. If I can swing that deal and get my money back I’m tempted to get an iMac ($2600+ for one with 32GB) and a Macbook Air ($1200+ for one with 8GB) instead of a newer Macbook Pro ($2700 for 16GB + upgraded CPU), although it would be more expensive than I originally thought.

#DOE #CSGF

While Apple had my Macbook Pro for 4 days I worked mainly on the personal and research statements for the computational science graduate fellowship. I’m on the 4th draft now for each, and they’re looking pretty good. They both started in a good place though; the research statement basically a combination of the two statements from last year’s application, which got about 8 drafts with collaboration with Travis; and the personal is a shortened (from 3 pages to 2250 characters!) version of the personal statement from the NSF fellowship application that I’m waiting to hear back about, which got about 5 revisions with collaboration with Dr. Eberhart.

Aside from the two statements there’s also the program of study. I’ll just update that based on the courses that I’ve already taken and see if Dr. Eberhart still likes the selection. There’s a new section this year; a list of programming language and models the applicant is familiar with. This’ll be a strong point for me since I’ve got the major languages, several scripting languages and good experience with parallel programming. I also have experience with finite element and other numerical methods, so they’ll know that scientific computing is nothing new for me.

Parallels

Parallels + Time Machine

I was bluntly reminded after restoring my Macbook Pro from a TM backup that I didn’t have my virtual machines backing up. This isn’t the first time I’ve had the added headache of restoring VMs separately from TM.

I found out shortly after that Parallels has good support for TM, and so I’ve decided to do away with the extra partition on my backup drives (and my beloved/hated applescript backup/restore utility) in the interest of expanding the TM backup partitions to 1.5TB and using TM to backup the VMs. From what I read, not only will a restore now include all my VMs, but this method will also allow me to have many versions of the VMs available for restore, since the meat of the VM is backed up only once, and then snapshots maintain a timeline of the changes to the VM.

Yes, VMware Fusion promised the same thing: “Just turn on snapshots and then backup with TM as usual.” However, the outcome was that if I was using a VM constantly, the entire VM would get backed up with every TM backup! This resulted in a very full TM backup drive with not much else besides copy upon copy of whatever VM I was working on. The real clincher was that, because the backups were taken when the VM was in use, they didn’t even work if restored! Hopefully Parallels has a better version of “TM compatibility”. It wouldn’t surprise me, since Parallels is much more polished, fast, and less buggy compared to Fusion.

Parallels + Boot Camp

So Parallels 10 has a feature that lets it run your Boot Camp partition within Parallels, so you get the convenience of being able to run Windows side-by-side OS X, and the ability to boot into Windows natively and enjoy the speed from giving Windows 100% of your machine’s resources, all with a single Windows footprint in your storage.

Unfortunately, Windows 7 (and 8 and 10, and maybe Vista and XP) are wise to hardware changes. I suspected a problem here, and slightly confirmed it according to one other user’s experience on the Parallels forum. Each time you switch from Parallels to Boot Camp or vise-versa, Windows sees the different hardware, and there’s a lot of different hardware, since the drivers for everything change, the amount of memory changes, and the number of processors change (if you’re giving less than all your cores to the VM when in parallels). Windows then tells you to reactivate it through Microsoft’s activation service, which is a pain unless the activation is approved via the automated internet method, otherwise you’ll have to call in and deal with the automated phone system (takes about 10 minutes) or even maybe speak with a human and explain the situation if you’ve been flagged for reactivating too many times. And this will happen every time you switch between Boot Camp and Parallels.

Not to mention that, for me, I’d have to reinstall Windows and all the programs I use, from installation media, since there’s apparently no way to simply move a Parallels VM to a Boot Camp partition (although the opposite is painfully simple).

There are some other setbacks to using the Boot Camp partition in Parallels, like not being able to pause or suspend the VM, so you lose some time booting each time you want to use it. Also, you can’t backup a Boot Camp partition using Time Machine, and that’s a big problem, since imaging the entire partition is somewhat a pain.

Today I got the concatenation and resampling of saddle point stream traces with existing gradient paths working correctly. I realized that I need the saddle point stream traces to be offset from those seeded from neighboring nodes so that the resulting volumes are still triangular, so there's that to do before I can make surfaces.

Also still need to add the detection of whether a volume straddles more than one #IrreducibleBundle.

Improved the mesh optimization. It now uses the max of local triangle variance for convergence testing rather than the total variance. It's a bit slow though. I sped things up with some openmp inside the variance function, but it's still slow since the majority of the work is inherently serial. Makes me appreciate the benefit of having all your own functions for stream traces and stuff; don't need to worry about one thread making a stream trace and then another thread stealing it by calling getnumzones at the wrong time.

Might be able to speed up the mesh optimization by doing a few iterations of jiggle mesh before I start the actual optimizer. That'll let things move around to fit the constraints in a way cheaper way, then the optimizer just needs to do the fine adjustments.

Also made GBA play nice with Tecplot, announcing data loads and even mesh memory requirements.

That's one thing I need to do for the data loaders is announce the memory required to Tecplot.

Take another whack at some basic openmp parallelism in #Bondalyzer. It might work better in #VS2013.

Personal

Otherwise today was good. #Kaori got another paycheck, I finished digitizing the rest of my file cabinet—it's now useless, I did everything but the essays for the #DOE #CSGF application, we had pineapple fried rice for lunch and yasai itame for dinner.

Remind me to check that the transcripts I ordered from #Mines included undergrad and grad.