Why can I not clone myself yet?
Saturday night and I’m not going out. What the hell is wrong with me — you (and I) ask?
Sad truth is: I’m swamped with work currently. Today I sat down and finished the last protocol of a university lab course, so at least that is done for now.
Bachelor Thesis
I’m not a slacker (even though I’d like to be one!) so I also recently started working on my Bachelor thesis. I’m doing something on EPR simulations, esp. pulse EPR with “big” molecules. It’s actually pretty interesting and I already learned tons of stuff. Most notably I could finally try out Eigen. It’s as good as I imagined, and probably even better ;-) My mentor at the university, who used BLAS up to now, is amazed by the readability of code you write. It is often nearly a one-to-one mapping of a mathematical formula to code. Since I personally never learned the BLAS interface, and find it’s API hideous, I’m very pleased to be able to use Eigen from the start. Thanks to Gael and Benoit (and the others) for writing it. Since I like living on the edge, I use Eigen 3 already and - to give something back - started to update the benchmarks for them.
Anyways, back to my thesis. If anyone is interested in the code and would like to give feedback, you can find it here: https://github.com/milianw/bachelor
I really enjoy to get to know yet another different world in programming. As you might know, I started as a web developer back then. Server backend PHP programming is totally different from user interface JavaScript programming is totally different from Desktop application programming using Qt/KDE/C++… And now there is computational science… So far I never had to care about rounding errors in code I write. Nor did I estimate memory consumptions in dozens of GigaBytes or thought about how many hours my app would need to crunch the numbers on hundreds of CPU cores. It really is quite an experience.
KDevelop
So, between two days working for KDAB (which I greatly enjoy) to earn some money, and three days of - interesting - thesis reasearch, and the usual real life, where is the time for KDevelop? It’s diminished, I have to admit. Today I finally got around to at least get the release announcement for KDevelop 4.2 finished and handed it to the Dot editors. But other than the occasional commit reviewing or bug triaging, I did not do much these past weeks.
This makes my really sad, as I’m passionate about KDevelop. One more reason to look forward to FOSDEM 2011, as I’ll do a lightening talk on KDevelop this time. And of course I hope to get some first grade hacking time in Brussels :) Oh this reminds me, I should get my talk prepared until tomorrow - hm :)
Anyways, I bet I’m not the only one who would like to clone himself to get more finished. Sadly it’s not possible yet (and the waiting list for people-to-be-cloned in KDE is quite long, and dominated by names like David Faure and Dario Andres anyways ;-) ). So take my ramblings with a grain of salt :)
Comments
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Comment by Thijs (not verified) (2011-01-30 10:34:00)
So, any plans for including fortran in KDevelop now? ;)
Comment by Milian Wolff (2011-01-30 16:41:00)
Hehe one more clone and I’ll do it, no worries :) Though thankfully I can write C++ code for my thesis.
Bye