Welcome back, e-mail fans

I’m 99.98% sure that the e-mail my blog thing is working again. I suppose we’re about to find out.

The pain of software

Am spending today working on merging some fairly significant chunks of code from one branch of OMPI to the trunk. Unfortunately, it’s not going super well, as we kind of made some silly mistakes in how long we let the divergence go (we knew all along that the code would have to be merged). Ah well, such is life on a project without any real project management. Interesting, but sometimes a bit on the painful side. At least it usually goes fast :). I was actually surprised – the merge (while not complete) was not as painful as I originally thought. I managed to get the tree compiling in under three hours. I think there are still some artifacts causing problems, but not as painful as I thought they might have been. I’m hoping a couple of hours with the debugger will be enough to figure out what is going on. And if that fails, I’ll have to ask Tim and Jeff for some debugging help. Ah well, what can you do?

Welcome to Durham

I’ve been in Durham since last Sunday (leaving this evening), hanging out with Laura. Working from Durham seems to go pretty well – some minor slowdowns, but nothing major. All in all, I still managed to have a fairly productive week. Even managed to get some scale tests running out on odin and thought some about the EuroPVM/MPI paper. Need to get the trunk (see above) settled down so that I can start writing up the framework for the data for that paper. Durham’s warmer than B’ton – there were three or four days I really wished I had my bike out here. Of course, that would probably end up with me getting run over by a redneck in his truck…. But I suppose NC is no worse than the area around B’ton in that regard, so I shouldn’t complain too much.

INIlib lives again

After 3 years of complete neglect, I finally got around to fixing a bunch of outstanding bugs in INIlib. Surprising part was that I actually have users. And they downloaded and tried the new beta. Very frightening to have users of your software. I might start developing it again, if only to add a couple of the features in the feature request tracker. Or maybe not – we’ll have to see. The documentation could really stand to be updated, as it has some rough spots with respect to the code (nothing critical, just doesn’t track the lastest code changes as well as it could).