An absence of news
Some people were wondering, so yes, I’m still alive and well. Had “winter head syndrome” much of last week, thanks to the sudden chill in the air — aggravated perhaps by having spent the week before last in wonderful Florida weather. Snow is nice and I’ve learned to not mind winters up here so much, but there’s no question about which feels better physically.
Kind of a dull week at work… ; drew up plans for the shop to build some stuff, and shopped around for a new workstation to replace one of the older ones. Machines start out as workstations for data processing and eventually age into machines for data collection; the one it’s replacing is new enough that it’ll represent at least a 5-fold advance over the one I was using to collect data before. Which means I can run both parts of the experiment on the same machine at the same time, instead of needing very-awkward-and-slow communication between them to synchronize the camera and the rest of it. (We had been using a rather ridiculous 3-stage signal sequence where LabVIEW told the camera computer to start firing, waited for the camera computer to agree that it had done so, and then waited the time the shutter was supposed to be open before asking if it was done. All by analog I/O lines in NI’s hardware. It worked, eventually, but it’s far too slow for next year’s experiments, and very prone to failure.)
The new machine is from Adamant, and will cost about 2/3 of the same machine from Dell would’ve. Might even be faster; I tried to talk the boss into an AMD chip instead of a Pentium 4, but couldn’t find any test results that showed the Athlon 64 faster (or at least as fast as) the P4 running Matlab. Anyone know of any? (I should have looked harder. Could be more complete, but looks like Athlon XPs beat P4s in anything except perhaps sparse matrix handling and 3D graphics, neither of which (I think) our code needs much of. Mwahahahah.)