M. Eng in 7 days

My final week of my summer is about to start. Next week this time I would have finnished my first day of classes in the Masters of Computational Engineering program - if I have any classess that day. I have to take 7 courses during the program to graduate with this degree and I should be all done by Dec 2007. The plan is to take 3 courses now, another three next term and one more course in my final term. Ill be working on my project during this time as well.

I already talked to my professor and Ill be working on a way to optimize MRI magnetic coils and their placement around an object. I should be visiting St. Jose Hospital in Hamilton to see this MRI in action. I think I made a good decision to pursue this, its an excellent field and I should hopefully find a good job next year.

Windows XP on Apple Power PC? Why??

Although I prefer Mac OS, Windows still has some advantages...one actually. There are a few applications I use that are only available for Windows. For example, I play this web based online game called Utopia. You can download a calculator to help you do some calculations that can help you make decisions in the game. Unfortunately this calculator is only available for Windows and the developer does not want to port it to Mac OS for whatever reasons he has so I need to use Windows for that. I have another laptop with Windows but this weekend my friend's cat decided to chew the power cable and now the laptop cannot charge its battery. So I spent the weekend looking for a Windows emulator for Mac OS that is FREE. I came across something called Q and it looks like it works, but its really slow. Heres a screenshot of Windows XP on Mac OS:


Strange? Yup it looks strange!

OpenGL Programming

In an effort to get more involved in 3d programming which may be my field of study when I finally sort out my Masters of Engineering here at McMaster I downloaded what is referred to "The RedBook" which is the official guied to learning OpenGL.
OpenGL is an environment for developing 2d and 3d graphics applications from simulations to games. Its widely used in industry since its first release in 1992. FlightGear and VDrift which I have been working with during my employment with the Flight Simulator use OpenGL to render the graphics and gameplay. I think its really good to have it on my resume and downloading this official guidebook is a good start. Ill be posting updates on this as I get more involved.

Moog screenshot

Here is the screenshot you were promised yesterday:

Some more changes were done today..its getting better everyday..hmm..The stop server button is not aligned properly...grr..

Modularize Modularize Modularize

Four years of software engineering and years of getting that word hammered into my brain and I still failed to follow that concept at work which got me in trouble later as I have been modularizing my work for the past three days..If I did it from the start I would not have had this happen. The problem is that everything was together and I had no easy way of modifying the interface. Modifying anything on it required creating a new interface file, then copy the generated code and replace the old code in that one file I had. So I got sick of that, plus it would not be a good idea to hand that source to my prof as it was not organized at all. Now all the functionalities of the interface are in one file, and the look of it is in another that gets produced automatically by Fluid which comes with FLTK. (If you remember what I was talking about a month or so ago).

Heres a screenshot taken today:

..great...my blog does not want to upload a photo..I shall put it up later.