ChapterZero

The computer is in Papadakis’ office, so now I’m in there just about every day— I’ll even be going there this Sunday. The big rush is to get MicroView up and working, which is a lot more complicated than it should be, mostly because I don’t have root access to the math department servers. Then I could just install everything I need in the usual dl, compile, make install fashion, but I don’t, so I have to hack around it. Basically, I had to install Tcl/Tk, Python, and VTK under my home directory, which involves a lot of hunting for configuration switches and figuring out what arcane invocations are necessary to make them use each other instead of the system default installations (which wouldn’t work, since they don’t have the corresponding development headers and other stuff installed). All Friday I was working on that, and I got it to the point where Python depended on Tcl/Tk correctly, but I had to leave right after I think I figured out a way to get VTK to depend on Python and Tcl/Tk correctly. I forgot to tell Papadakis I have jury duty on Monday, so I’m going to try to get this done on Sunday so by Monday I can let him know if we need to bother the network sysadmin to try and do all this stuff at the network level…

On a less technical note, we got a new post-doc, Juan… who seems to have been one of John Benedetto’s grad students. I found that out when I asked Papadakis whether Benedetto is an EE or a math prof— he’s a math prof., at the University of Maryland. I haven’t really talked to him yet; I’m picking up a weirdly unanimated vibe from him, like he doesn’t really want to be here, working on this. I don’t know if I’m just imagining it or what; time will tell.