November2004More in Retroblogging22 November 2004 I've spent today hunting down an annoying bug in my current Python project. On the surface it seems trivial - about 10 lines of code - but it's only triggered on the 5196th iteration of a loop meant to run 52368 times. No error codes, the loop just finishes. Running just the iterations from the 5190th to the 5200th gives no problems. So we're basically down to testing hypothesis out by running the full program, which takes 40 minutes to do 5000 iterations... So, I'm using this time to bring this diary up to speed. 1st-7thSpent first week after SOFG scoping out various interesting projects related to ontologies in Bioinformatics and inference engines. Discovered Redland, GraphPath and 4Suite amongst other things. Also got to manically try and keep track of continuing changes in the Evoke backend which the new eVOC ontology website is using. Thankfully I've given up on that for now. :) The weekend was doing SCA stuff - the shire was hosting an Adjunct University to the big Kingdom University taking place in Europe. We got to give a class on chainmail and attended classes on dancing, rithmomachia, dancing, illumination and shoe-making. 8th-14stNumerous visitors arrived at SANBI for the week. Mostly prospective PhD students from central and eastern Asia (I think they are all from the University of Singapore) who I didn't really get to meet because they went everywhere in a tight group and had (I think) their co-supervisor as a dedicated tour guide. The other visitors were Oliver (who will probably start work here in January) and Marlena (who may do her PhD here but is not affiliated with the previous group). The week included numerous social functions (farewell drinks at Janet and Johan's, catered lunches, drinks at Win's). Played the V:TES (Vampire: The Eternal Struggle) with the usual group plus Philip on Friday. We're slowly getting the hang of the rules and Philip is organising a tournament for the 27th. Saturday featured a somewhat epic hike from Constantia Neck, up and long to MacClear's Beacon, across to the cable car station, down the cable car and then along the Pipe Track to the car left on Kloof Neck. Most the "epic" was a result of my selection of the Pipe Track for the final leg of the journey. We got down in time for sunset drinks and dinner at the Blues Cafe. A cool day which made me remember the joys of hiking. Will be going up Lion's Head with Lucas this week. Saturday evening was Hila's birthday party at The One Ring. We gave Hila a gold and silver box bracelet I made during the week. It was also a good opportunity to belatedly give Michelle her 21st present (a box necklace). Claire had her handbag stolen in the Pick 'n Pay in Gardens on Saturday afternoon so we gave Lucas and her a lift through. Didn't end up staying long as we were wasted. Sunday saw the first game of frisbee played in ages. Was wasted from Saturday and it was damn hot. It was decided to move the game to Sunday evenings and to switch venues to the sports field next to the Rotunda in Camps Bay. 15th-21stSpend the beginning of week tweaking the eVOC site and cleaning things up a bit. The later half of the week saw the beginning of the current saga to create lists of eVOC terms mapped to Unigenes for Win. During the week I got started on a box necklace using two different sized links. I quite like the effect (it's less chunky looking with the smaller rings) and it meant we had a present for Vera on Saturday. On Friday we retrieved Mercedes (one of our cat's) from next door were she had been camping out for the past few weeks. She stayed with us for the night but left again when I went to sleep. I think we'll be fetching her from new abode at least until Ziggy (Lucas' cat) moves out at the end of the month. Saturday afternoon was Vera's party at Andrew and Stacey's place. I got to swim for the first time in ages (and now have a cold for my efforts). Saturday evening we watched the end of Trigun. It was a good end to a very good series. Sunday morning we went to Claire's place to work on the illumination pieces we started at Kingdom University a few weeks ago. MyrdemInggala has completed her piece and I've got outlining and white work left to do. Frisbee on Sunday evening was windless and cool (which I'm sure contributed to my cold). The Camps Bay venue has some things going for it but the angle of the sun at 18:00 is mildly irritating. I think I'll need to get a pair of sunglasses. We were joined by Dan (from my work). It shows that he's played in the US (by which I mean he throws much better than the rest of us :). |