Kevin Lamonte's Blog

Full duplex sliding windows

2011-10-18T06:39:00.000-05:00

I just uploaded a new alpha 1.0 version of Qodem that now features full-duplex sliding windows in its Kermit implementation. It's been about 20 years since I first wondered how Qmodem(tm) managed to do what it does. Over the last 8 years, I have now implemented some decent versions of VT100, Zmodem, and Kermit. I've also had to learn in a deep way Unicode, ncurses, termios, various POSIX-isms,

Chicago

2011-09-05T14:12:00.001-05:00

So a few months ago I got a very interesting call from a recruiter looking to hire an engineer for a polysilicon manufacturer. Long story short, it was an awesome opportunity and I jumped at the chance to work in a green energy field, in this case solar power. Polysilicon is the key ingredient to the most common class of solar panels, and is also the most expensive piece of the process.

New iPhone

2011-05-25T07:48:00.001-05:00

I finally got the iPhone I've been wanting for a few years and I've gotta say I am impressed as hell with it. Besides all the "pocket computer" stuff (like m48, an awesome HP 48GX emulator) the location-based apps are astonishingly useful. And then there's the autocorrect built-in to the text pad that makes writing a lot easier (but it's still a learning curve writing with thumbs) and having

Celebrating my first new failure!

2011-01-19T06:57:00.000-06:00

It sounds weird to be happy about failing, but it denotes that I've really tried to do something new (for me at least) and now I have something to really play with. I found some old articles in J Phys Chem at the library at work. I was looking for one from 1993 that was used to produce some visuals of the phospholipid bilayer that were used for several years in teaching, but our archives

2011-01-17T06:22:00.001-06:00

Test of my very first molecular mechanics demo, an avi of the gromacs gmxdemo tutorial:

Chapter 2 - Single Point Energy Calculations

2011-01-16T07:27:00.011-06:00

The first exercise from ECwESM is to see what one can get from a single-point energy calculation. We start with this Gaussian job: #T RHF/6-31G(d) Pop=Full Test Formaldehyde Single Point 0 1 C 0.0 0.0 0.0 O 0.0 1.22 0.0 H 0.94 -0.54 0.0 H -0.94 -0.54 0.0 Converting this to psi3, I have an input file that looks like this: psi: ( wfn = scf reference = rhf % print_mos = true

TMA-LiPc

2011-01-09T07:59:00.006-06:00

My first task in computational chemistry is finding a good way to draw structures and obtain a reasonable geometry. Since I'm already familiar with tetramethylammonium lithium phthalocyanine (TMA-LiPc) from my thesis work, let's start with that. TMA-LiPc is an interesting molecule in a few ways. It's a trimer consisting of a flat phthalocyanine anion with a -2 charge due to the two missing

Open-Source Computational Chemistry - Introduction

2011-01-08T10:22:00.001-06:00

Over the next few years I intend to translate my skills with commercial computational chemistry tools (primarily the Gaussian 2003 and DL_POLY I used for my MS thesis) to open-source tools, starting with those already available in Debian testing. I'll be writing about the things I learn -- both about the tools and the chemistry. My general model will be to do the exercises in the classic

2011 is looking to be....

2011-01-05T07:00:00.002-06:00

...one heck of a year!Our house has only painting, a small kitchen remodel, and some bathroom work and then it will finally be "done" as in close to what we had envisioned when we bought it almost 3 years ago. My health goals are getting close also: just this morning I ran a mile on the treadmill for the first time in about 4 years. I'm hoping to reach my target weight around May.At work, it's

Test of blogger-cli

2010-10-24T13:23:00.001-05:00

Test post from the command line Blogger client blogger-cli.

Daniel Suarez' Daemon and Freedom™

2010-09-24T22:48:00.001-05:00

Just finished the two novels. All I can say is "wow".That is a very. cool. story.

1994 called...

2010-09-06T00:35:00.004-05:00

It wants to change its priorities.I've been reading "Telecommunications: Protocols and Design" by John D. Spragins (with Joseph L. Hammond and Krzysztof Pawlikowski) copyrighted in 1991. Very interesting book, and the first time I ever heard of the "Texas Towers" (offshore radar posts that were integral to the cold war).At the time it was published Windows 3.1 was barely out, MacOS System 7 was

General update...

2010-08-28T07:41:00.002-05:00

On the work-ish front, several things are happening:1) Qodem made a major release this month, including scripting for the first time. This represents a major milestone: qodem now has all of the major features I wanted when I started that project in 2003. Beyond some minor features and rounding out what is there, qodem is essentially "done". Two more years may be sufficient to reach the 1.0

I miss the BBS days...

2010-06-21T18:14:00.004-05:00

I've been thinking about the days of BBSes again. Why do I miss them so much?From a technical perspective, many things are better now. I don't have to wait hours to get through the busy signals; I don't have to sacrifice available "modem time" for one BBS at a time; email can get around the world in seconds rather than days; IRC and IM are far more convenient than BBS two-way chat.And socially

Test from text-mode...

2010-06-18T18:05:00.000-05:00

I finally broke down and re-installed Linux as a fully-bootable system rather than running it under VirtualBox. The catch though is that I (deliberately) made it 99% text-only. I have an extemely minimal X environment using the 'scrot' window manager for the times I need a real X display.I've discovered a lot of neat command-line software. 'elinks2' for example blows 'lynx' out of the water (

Life after grad school...

2009-06-04T05:34:00.002-05:00

It's hard to believe only one year has passed. In the last twelve months:1) We've gotten into a house.2) We've paid to replace the roof, floors, windows, primed the walls and ceiling, painted the ceiling, fixed some electrical issues, and will soon have ceiling fans in all rooms.3) We've de-jungle-fied the back yard.4) I've cleared my first year at work, and saved the company about 4x my

Long time no Internet...

2008-06-15T10:25:00.002-05:00

The last three weeks have flown by. I came up to Longview Memorial Day and started working the next day. The first week was a blur of new people and new ideas floating through my head. It's been so long since I've had a well-defined job that it took some getting used to just thinking within the boundaries of my role. But OTOH it's a nice feeling that when I get stuck somewhere there is almost

Lots of stuff...

2008-04-05T20:52:00.003-05:00

My thesis cleared the Thesis Office two days ago. Now I'm all set to graduate once the last two classes are over. Yay!Over Spring Break we traveled to our new town and found a house to buy. We now have it under contract and should have the financing worked out this week. I gotta say the company has been fantastic from their end: they moved my first day of work up three weeks and they'll

Woo!

2008-02-29T16:31:00.001-06:00

I just passed my thesis defense.

Just one more week to the thesis milestone...

2008-01-30T06:50:00.000-06:00

I have been working crazy hours the last few weeks to get the thesis ready for defense. So far it is up to 90 pages with only about 20 of those being the fluff (table of contents, approval pages, etc.) and raw data tables. I still need about 10 more of real text between all of the images and graphs, and still about half a dozen more figures to add...But it looks like I am about 3-4 days ahead

The job search begins....

2007-09-21T06:24:00.000-05:00

My first word for Texas A&M's engineering career fair is "wow": there were a heck of a lot of companies out there looking for workers. My second word is "ow": two days of going around the booths, delivering resumes and whatnot have left my feet a bit sore. But it was in the end a very good experience and I think I made about a dozen good contacts. I have one interview set up already, another

Release day...

2007-09-06T15:24:00.000-05:00

Something rather cool happened two weeks ago: out of the blue someone asked me for help getting my Zmodem code (from Qodem) to talk to ZOC (a shareware Windows terminal emulator) correctly. Apparently they were going to use the Zmodem code in an embedded system. Woot!So I've spent a few days over the last couple weeks getting Zmodem fixed, and also testing Xmodem and Ymodem with some code I

The joys of coding...

2007-08-20T11:11:00.000-05:00

The last two weeks have been a bit unusual. A family friend of my wife is coming to A&M as a freshman so she and one of her friends (another soon-to-be freshman) stayed at our place through their orientation conference things. While they were in town I needed to work from home and somehow got into a great coding groove working on the molecule GUI for ChENL. It's QT4 + OpenGL (QGLWidget), can

General update...

2007-07-29T08:15:00.000-05:00

Ever since we returned from the Bay Area I've been swamped with work. I finally had to break out OOo Calc and make a spreadsheet of all the jobs running on all the systems so I can stay caught up with keeping the calculations moving along. We're also working on the results section of my first paper (woo!). We've discovered some interesting things in the meantime and made a few interesting

Back from San Francisco...

2007-07-14T06:51:00.000-05:00

My wife and I went to the Bay Area last week, it was pretty fun. Took LOTS of pictures of course. The weather was just about perfect every day we were there, sunny in the 70's for our light walks and fogged in and into the 60's for the day we went backpacking through San Francisco.We got to see Napa Valley for a couple wine tastings (my personal favorites were the white Prager ports, mmm)...San

2007-06-22T17:11:00.000-05:00

Mwahaha! Observe the picture, result of five-ish days of coding! It's generated from a DLPOLY 2.x HISTORY file that contains 251 snapshots of tetramethylammonium lithium phthalocyanine and hydrogen gas. My code reads the HISTORY file, smooshes all the frames into one, selects a sub-region, computes the number of hydrogen gas molecules surrounding each point in a grid, and finally writes a

Whew!

2007-06-20T21:12:00.000-05:00

Man I've been busy the last three days with work and the Mac Mini. I ported the ChENL code to the Mac so that I could eventually run it on our cluster at work (an Apple XServe thingy), and that exposed a number of small problems that g++ was letting me get away with. Along the way I had to adjust the keyboard (in particular Home, End, and Enter) so that it behaves as I expect. Still haven't

First post...

2007-06-14T19:48:00.000-05:00

From within Safari for Mac.Currently downloading XCode, will see about getting Fink and all the other GNU tools installed. But so far I like it. Wireless keyboard and mouse, and DVD remote control! :)

Coming next week...

2007-06-09T10:00:00.000-05:00

Is one of these:We've decided that as a reward for a summer of exercise, we'll replace the home desktop with its 650-watt power supply and massive heat and noise generation (it's got 3-4 hard drives inside) with a small, cool, and quiet Mac Mini.Even though our desktop Linux system works well 98% of the time, sometimes it hits these little snags my wife needs me to fix for her. I think she'll

I really like KDE...

2007-05-23T08:22:00.000-05:00

...but Konqueror has an issue with its cache cleaner program that drives me nuts. kio_http_cache_cleaner is launched at random times (often right after a long period of inactivity and then I just sat down to do some more browsing) and when it runs the whole system thrases for over a minute.I reported the issue to Debian, which actually got a nod on bugs.kde.org. Now I've finally logged in at

Beginning of summer...

2007-05-17T07:23:00.000-05:00

...and school is finished! Grades also posted today: B in kinetics, A in molecular engineering, and satisfactory in research and seminar. This makes me happy -- in the last 4 years of classes I haven't had a single C. Marriage has really improved my grades. :)On the work side, I've got most of the basis finished now for converting my existing Lisp code over to C++. Lisp, I really liked you,

Fun...

2007-05-06T13:30:00.000-05:00

My neighbors have one of those peg board games you see at the Cracker Barrel restaurants. For fun I wrote some code to solve it. I'm a little late, a much more thorough solution is here, but it was a fun 90 minutes or so while my wife took a nap this afternoon. My code is on the full link page.----snip----#include #include #include #include #include

2007-04-18T06:33:00.000-05:00

I cut 'marrow' early last week, I'm pretty happy about that. Of course, I've already made some minor improvements as I stub in 'pillars', but it's nice to know that for the future I've got a seed that can become pretty much anything. (And if I do say so myself, the logging API combined with the Values class from 'pillars' is a pretty slick combination in DEBUG releases.) Over the next few

'marrow'

2007-04-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

Today's list revolves around my first file release for ChENL.1) Cut 'marrow'.ChENL was originally going to be a semi-organized collection of code that I had used to solve homework problems. In my first full-time semester it proved a mixed bag: it got the job done, but I spent so much more time getting the code 'nice' than I did actually solving my homework problems. After I had implemented

Immediate TODO

2007-03-27T12:22:00.000-05:00

The real purpose of this blog is to chart the workish kinds of things I do all the time, such as school assignments (for now) and some of the interesting things I encounter while learning (such as the fact that there is only 0.3 eV difference in energy between triplet diatomic boron and quintet diatomic boron, and in lower levels of ab initio calculations B2 will come out quintet). This will

First post!

2007-03-27T08:34:00.000-05:00

First post!