RE: weekly status report

[Allan Stokes]

Hello all,

First I wish to apologize for falling under the radar for the past several
weeks.

The first two weeks of April I was completing another project which I had
taken on to fill in the gap before the Pooma work started.  During this
period I tried out a new therapy (mostly vitamins) for the muscle spasms
which I sometimes experience while sleeping.  It seemed to help, but it left
me feeling very tired, and the fatigue became cumulative.  By the middle of
April I was walking around in a thick mental fog.  I gave up the treatment,
but the fog persisted, the back spasms soon returned, my sleep was terrible,
and I was pretty much ready to fold up the tent on my small corner of the
universe.

These last few weeks remind me of my canoe trip last September.  It poured
buckets for the first three days.  On the forth day the sky became less
black and we figured maybe the sun would come out.  Then it poured for
another two days.  On the sixth day we saw the sun for a couple of hours.
Just long enough to remember what dry felt like.  Then it poured and blew
and sprayed for five more days.  The rain cleared an hour before we pulled
ourselves up onto the beach at the end of the lake.  We drove home under a
beautiful sky.

It wasn't until last week I started to feel myself again.  The whole time it
had seemed like the sun would burst through any minute, and it went on like
that for a darn long time.

This week I've been reinflating my sail.  The hours I put in were devoted to
setting up the DocBook authoring environment and planning the conceptual
documentation.

Next week I will begin the process of documenting something.  I have plenty
of notes from my explorations in March of the Pooma domain/layout code, and
I expect something will emerge from that to get me started.  Part of the
process will be to generate some discussion about what kind of documentation
people find most useful.  Jeffrey has already made some requests which I
will follow up next week.

KAI's latest release for Redhat 7.1 was due today.  Back in March I
installed a version of KAI experimentally under a Redhat 6.2 virtual machine
(VMWare) under w2k.  It worked OK for compiling stuff, but it didn't allow
useful performance testing, so I rebuilt the machine as a multiboot system.
Next week I will install the new KAI on a native Redhat partition and that
will become my primary environment.

If the sun shines I am also interested in taking a look at the performance
characteristics of Jeffrey's hydrodynamics kernel.  I haven't spent much
time yet observing Pooma in operation.

Allan