Day 1

Intro Note

Hi,
A couple of hours ago I discovered that Kubuntu came with a nice Outlook-like tool called Kontact, so I decided to have a closer look at it. One of all the potentially (but not really) useful things it had was Journal, and I thought "well, keeping a journal is something I haven't done for a good while, so it might be fun", and decided to write this in it. Chances are, I'll get bored with writing notes very quickly and since Journal is an off-line tool (actually, I might be wrong), nobody will ever see these notes. However, if you're reading this it means three things:
1. I didn't get bored.
2. Keeping a Journal is fun, apparently!
3. I decided to publish my journal


S-s-o. Currently I am working on a project of optimising a massive chunk of open-source Python/C code called Topographica through parallelisation with OpenMPI and mpi4py, as part of my Honours studies. This journal is going to be primarily about that, so if the previous sentence didn't make any kind of sense to you, DON'T READ!!! Otherwise the information you receive from this journal will be misinterpreted by your Lateral Geniculate Nucleus which might result in static electricity being generated in some parts of your brain, which, in turn, might interfere with normal magnetic flows resulting in neural malfunctioning, examples of which could be nausea, fever, blindness, internal bleeding, brain tumor, heart attack or even lack of appetite! However, usually you only get constipation which is not a very nice thing, but at least not fatal.

I warned you!

Also, I'm not an English native speaker. On top of that, there's no spellcheck in Kontact's Journal [update: however, there is a spellcheck in my browser, so there will be less errors in my blog], so if you spot some grammatical errors / typos / sentences that don't make any kind of sense, I don't give a f... do apologise.

A few words about the project: I started it a couple of months ago, and because of Topographica being a massive project and many other reasons, all that time I was mostly busy setting things up, reading stuff, figuring out how and what I am supposed to do and so on. Only now I came to the point when I am actually able to write some code that is supposed to do some useful (-ish) work for Topo. Plus, I have no idea how many days exactly have passed since I started working on this project (and even if I knew calling this day a "day 67" without having "days 1..66" would've been weird). Therefore today will be the Day 1.

Ok, That's probably all I wanted to say in my introduction, so ... if you're still reading (and weren't terrified by the Lateral Geniculate Thing), then thanks for reading. Hope someone finds this useful.



Day 1
Ok, It's December 1st now, semester has finished, and apart from the Project Management exam on the 14th, I don't have much to do for about a month or so. It seems like a perfect time to get some work done for the Project.

What I have:
A. Topographica installed and working on:
1. My laptop
2, My university account (further related to as DICE)
3. Cluster network (further related to as Jupiter 1, 2 or 3)
B. Small mpi4py implementation of a master-slave application that I've written a few weeks ago that does something similar to what I want Topo to do.
C. Some knowledge of how Topo's code works, however still weak. With all respect, God, I hate Python syntax!

What I want to have:
Implement a proxy-like model of ConnectionField, which will be slower than the surrent version but might give me some ideas what to do next and will be a good exercise in any case.

Strategy and approach:
1. Tomorrow, the first thing to do: create a detailed plan of implementation.
2. Try not to forget about the Management exam. This shouldn't really be a problem, but it's a good idea to start taking care of such things as early as possible.
3. Write some code ffs!!!

Ok. First note. Over.