At K’s codefest yesterday I spent most of the time reading some papers on using linear algebra to approximate spring embedders for three dimensional graph layout. Lots of pretty pictures in graph drawing papers, alas the eigenvectors melted my brain. Today I tried to find the old uni linear algebra textbook but it eluded me.
Instead I hacked on a chroot builder for Red Hat 8.0 and 9 that I’d started on Friday – I didn’t work on it yesterday at the codefest due to the interesting quirk that Red Hat’s i386 packages don’t really like installing on a powerpc architecture, which I suppose could have been solved with the –ignorearch option but I didn’t bother to delve. Anyway, back at home the trusty workstation built minimal Red Hat roots many times during the day. This is just stage one in my master plan.
It sucks to have three or four projects to be working on at once: I find I never do any of them… or they block on a hard problem and end up stagnating as I procrastinate and do something else. Needless to say the garden is looking cleaner and the dishes get washed regularly.