Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
I’m building a keyboard layout analysis and generation tool. The engine is mostly complete so I’m spending more time working on the UI this weekend.
Working party building more of the new jetty and the last youth training session of the year at the sailing club. If it stays moderately dry I should attack the garden for hopefully the last time this year.
Also working on a ruby wrapper for Tailscale’s localapi (caius/tsclient), to be used by an omniauth tailscale provider (caius/omniauth-tailscale), to make use of in a rails app I’m writing for a work retreat later this year (caius/scroungr). Scroungr has a proof of concept where accessing it over the tailnet Just Works™ in terms of knowing who you are, which is quite pleasing. (Omniauth support is then because I also want Google SSO supported in the app for non-technical folk in the business.) All very much a WIP, but starting a new rails app and not needing
nodeavailable is pleasing.You can’t have this profile description and not tell us what your thesis is about!
These days it’s more like Programming by day, ultrafast spectroscopy by night since I’m working a full time software engineering job while I put the finishing touches on my thesis :)
Long story short I built lasers with time resolutions of 100fs and 5ns in order to study how the molecules in a particular protein involved in photosynthesis transfer energy between each other. I also did some quantum-mechanical simulations to try to explain my results.
Lasers with that time resolution already exist. My contribution was making the lasers circularly polarized rather than linearly polarized, which is what comes out of most lasers, and building a detection system to measure small changes in the intensity of that circularly polarized laser.
This is useful because molecules that are strongly coupled (e.g. molecules that are close to one another) will absorb light differently depending on whether the circular polarization rotates one way or the other. This difference (“circular dichroism”, CD) is sensitive to both the distance between the molecules and their orientation. In my case I’m looking at a protein that contains 8 chlorophylls that are identical molecules, but they behave differently because of the protein envelope/scaffolding around them and their arrangement relative to one another.
By collecting both CD and the more typical time resolved absorption data we now have two different axes along which we can compare experimental data with simulations and try to figure out what causes the difference in behavior between the 8 chlorophylls in this protein.
The motivation here is that we want to be able to predict electronic properties (how molecules absorb light and transfer energy) of these proteins based solely off of the positions of all the atoms. Modeling until now has had a lot of wiggle room because the experimental data has been limited. My technique/spectrometer/data helps to constrain and guide the modeling.
Yep, this is why I come to lobste.rs :-D. I will readily confess that I did not learn much about high-speed spectroscopy in class, and I forgot almost all of it, so I have exactly zero useful insights to offer here, and will instead wish you good luck with the defense in November!
Thank you :)
Almost done with first version of “Computing from the Command Line” ebook. Going home for Diwali (festival of lights).
After I come back, hope to finish final sanity checks and publish the book by end of October.
Going to the Baltic Sea by train/bike for a week long vacation with the family.
I’m learning Rust by writing an App in Yew and Actix.
Continuing my intentional break from writing about markup. Taking a little time to tend some back-burner shell profile projects (https://github.com/abathur/shellswain, https://github.com/abathur/shell-hag) that I’ve been neglecting.
Got basic bats test suites together for both of them and have been picking at refactoring the ~higher-level of the two. Hope to finish that this weekend and maybe start on refactoring the lower-level module.
My LEGO project is done so I’m back to more intense work on my novel, but I might carve out some time for my hyperspace VR project.
I’m building a git clone, that natively syncs to s3, and uses xxhash. I wanted a version control system that would allow me to store large (multi gigabyte) binary files with relative ease, but I also didn’t want to have to run any services to manage it. I considered DropBox or backblaze or Icloud as options and they all had annoying caveats whether it was price, or multiplatform support, or accessible versioning.
https://github.com/aconbere/sssync.git
There are a ton of obvious issues with this approach, but so far it’s been working to help me manage a large collection of digital media across a handful of computers at roughly the cost of S3 storage.
Going to see MiMo and party like it’s 2005.
Finally gonna learn how to drive stick after lying about being able to do it for years.
Biking to a nearby community garden to drop off organic scraps that have been accumulating in my freezer to compost. Sadly Atlanta does not have a municipal composting program.
Hosting a watch party for the UFC fights on Saturday. I got into jiujitsu this year and there are a few grapplers in the lineup. It will be my first time watching a UFC event. I used to think they were dumb gladiatorial fights but now have a great appreciation for just how much skill and training is involved.
Doing some renovations on my Hugo blog. Have finally figured out how to write my own shortcodes. I want to explore ways to embed (or just link, with image preview) youtube videos without google injecting a bunch of spyware bullshit into the page, even with -nocookie enabled.
Travelling to Winnipeg to meet my team for the first time!
I’ve also started to work on a new frontend framework based off generators & managed effects, its looking very promising.