GN: Had an interesting email exchange with my PhD supervisor - there's a good chance I may be doing some Real ScienceTM soon
BN: If things do pan out, then this summer's little expedition to Leftpondia won't be able to happen
GN: Real Science!
BN: It may involve FORTRAN 2008
Oh that would be a crap decision to have to make Simon. Real Science or the Tour Divide. Whatever you choose, I hope it makes you happy (though I was looking forward to the ride reports.....)
To be honest, it wouldn't be that difficult a decision - the Tour Divide will come around again, an opportunity like this may not.
Besides, if I do end up doing TEH SCIENCE then I'll have to make occasional visits to Wales, which means plenty of potential for interesting off-road shenanigans
Yebbut, FORTRAN??? I suppose, in lieu of the ride reports, we'll have an entertaining rant thread
The perils of legacy code, innit?
The bulk of the code was written in 1993-4, and it used a bunch of third party libraries to do the Scary Sums
TM associated with reaction kinetics, one of which dated back to the early 70s. The main reason I never rewrote everything in C was because writing suitable interfaces to aforementioned scary third party libraries was too horrifying to contemplate.
It still is.
Even so, the code now compiles and runs on my Badass Number Crunching Babbage Engine and it was quite gratifying to watch simulations that took 3-4 days to run in 1994 get chewed up and spat out in a couple of hours
and with the correct results
Things are progressing, slowly, so it's looking like:
GN: !!SCIENCE!! albeit on a part-time, consultancy-style basis
BN: Probably no Tour Divide this year
However, there's no way in Hades I'm going to let an opportunity like this slip away.
BN: To implement the really cool stuff that we've agreed needs to be done, I'm going to have to get my head round FORTRAN 2008
GN: Plan B, silly bike ride wise, involves Scotland - with particular reference to the far north-west thereof.