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About |
Born out of necessity (to get github project pages working), I started a blog in 2009 - primarily note things that would otherwise get buried in mailing lists.
Since that time, the blog activity has largely ceased and various other things have also changed.
My background is in Computational Fluid Dynamics.
In the past I worked with commercial CFD software (AVL/Fire 7, STAR-CD, STARCCM+) as a user and in method development. The idea of "method development" is to make software do what you want and, most importantly, to create optimized workflows for production purposes for yourself and others to use. The best way to encourage best practices is to make it easy. I call it "standardization by laziness". For some of this, STARCCM+ was extended with a custom NetBeans module with a guided workflow, but one that was also based on a variety of plain config files for setting meshing and flow properties. I was fairly neutral about Java, but the absolutely astounding amount of code that one has to generate pushed me away from it. For other tasks, Perl played a central role (I consider an excellent tool for data munging and for a variety of other things, but those particular skills have largely atrophied in the meantime).
As a further outcome of practicing CFD, which generally requires parallel processing to achieve acceptable run-times, I configured and maintained a smallish Linux cluster using GridEngine as the resource management (queuing) system.
In 2006 I started using OpenFOAM (a patched version 1.3) to explore extending and/or replacing commercial CFD software with an open-source solution. This provoked an upgrade in my C++ skills to match. Since 2016 I have been able to shift my focus entirely to OpenFOAM (with a corresponding change in jobs).
- I maintained and enhanced an orphaned rxvt many years ago when my underpowered workstation found XTerm to be a memory hog.
- Ever since moving from VM/CMS xedit, I have been using the jed editor with emacs keybindings. The main selling point was its cross-platform availability and that it the executable and libraries fit onto a 1.44 MB floppy (doesn't sound very relevant any more).
- My first Linux system was a slackware distribution. Currently use openSUSE for most systems, with a few Ubuntu laptops kicking about as well.
The contents of the blog represent my personal opinion and are not authorized by any of the companies or institutions mentioned, nor is any affiliation implied. No responsibility is taken for the contents of external links.
- OpenFOAM® is a registered trademark of OpenCFD Ltd.
The site layout can be reused with (cc) some rights reserved. Some layout elements are borrowed from YAML.