26 January 06 - 16:05
NAGTY Engineering

Finally I've recieved details about this "Engineering Desisn Challenge" with NAGTY through Cambridge University - and it looks like it should prove to be quite fun. I was looking at the specifications for the project, which are quite demanding and will probably be very... challenging to adhere to, but aren't bad. What excites me most about this so far is that it looks like we'll get a temporary license for Pro/Engineer; We get to use Pro-Engineer too :D. It's the most complicatedly amazing engineering CAD software in the world, useful for stress testing and everything. Conveniently, College is installing this on computers in the next few weeks for students doing Tech to use. I've heard that the school is holding a huge launch party next month as well, because it's the first College in the world to use it (being previously confined to Universities and actual businesses). I thought before that this online project would only allow be a web-interface of some sort ("Wildfire" seemed to imply one), but Wildfire is instead just the codename for the latest version of the software... If this is what we recieve, then it'll be interesting to see if it works on x64 (which I hope that dad ordered today). PTC (the company that makes ProE) have developed a version of ProE for x64; and the implications of that (it was a very prompt release) seem to be that the 32 bit version don't work on x64. There is however, also a Linux version available which I might be able to use.
It all depends on the people that run it and what they say - hey; I'm not even certain in what form we'll recieve the CAD stuff.

Oh yes, the challenge is to design an undercarriage for an aircraft which will produce the least possible amount of noise when on a simulated landing run (i.e. a wind tunnel). We're a team (as yet, I don't know what the team is) who must complete this all by the end of March, with the 10th of March being our deadline for initial design drawings, which Cambridge people will feedback on. We go to Ucam for a day to assemble the design and test it; which should be great fun.
One of the most interesting things about the project is that it is entirely online, using phpBB and probably some other online collaboration tool (there's a VLE).

Nathan - Development - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

22 January 06 - 16:43
Gentoo

Is very nice; though once again it shows how far behind x86 amd64 is. I've spent the past week or so installing it, kicking it and booting it into some semblence of a working operating system that I can use. (I still don't have a copy of Windows...) And I'm... nearly successful :D. I have full 3D support working (which I didn't in Ubuntu) and a stable everything else (which I did have). What I need to work on is getting this interface to be proper and nice (I had that, but only laziness forbids this here) and my sound, which has no bass and is generally incompetent across all ranges, except speach (I had this working properly on Ubuntu, so it's only technical incompetency which stands in my way here).

Portage is very pretty, though I don't see why it is reknown as being more powerful / better than apt. Well, ok, maybe I do. Portage has this lovely masking feature, which means that you still have links to a particular software package, but you can't download it unless you completely absolutely force it too. Knowledge of knowing how to therefore infers that you're willing to accept the consequences of the computer completely borking up on you... As it is, I've accepted the entire ~ arch (unstable), which many say "don't do it!" and a few say "I've never had any problems". I'm not going all-out with it though, making sure that I manually upgrade only those packages that I want to upgrade to (I'm staying away from kde3.5 for example, because that way leads to many hours of compilation).

I've spent much of the past week attempting to get 3D support going, and this involved infinite tinkering with ati-drivers, fglrx, the order in which modules are loaded, multiple kernel recompilations and an update, and many boots into Ubuntu in order to restore xorg.conf to a previous version. Finally, I solved it earlier by downgrading ati-drivers to 8.18 from 8.20; yay! I can now run Darwinia and am therefore very happy that I can finally play a game! I mean, look at this picture.

Nathan - Technology - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶