What I Do At Work

So, today at work I got a little bored. I was doing some text editing, and so I decided to take occasional screen shots of me doing work. After the jump are two of the shots, with a brief explanation of what I was doing at the time. I might append to this post as the evening progresses.

First Screen Capture of the Day

So, a couple things going on in this screen capture. First, the front terminal window. This is my remote connection to the Brookhaven computer farm. In it, I'm currently drawing histograms on a canvas. The canvas is the all of the graphs in the far back. In-between the terminal and the canvas is the graphical file browser, which is letting me see what graphs I can put on the canvas.
Now, why am I doing this? While all of the graphs I've made running various pieces of software are available for any collaboration member to look at at any point in time, the file structure isn't necessarily the simplest, nor is it the fastest way to look at lots of graphs. So, from time to time we make a pdf of all the graphs we think are important. To make the pdf, we first load some graphs onto a canvas, then we save the canvas. For pdfs, we save the canvas as a postscript file. When we're done, all of the postscript files get combined, and the resultant postscript file gets converted to a pdf. If I instead wanted a pretty graphic for a presentation, I would save the canvas as a jpg or png, and insert that into the presentation.

Only a couple of hours later

This screen capture shows some of the code I'm working on. It's oh so exciting, and I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about. However, what I can brag about is two lines below the cursor in this pic. That line saves the result of a function to an array. The array is of a custom variable type I defined, and the function is a function I wrote. The reason this code was open was to check what data it had been running over.
A lot of the work we do over the summer is programmatic. We write code, we run code, we see what comes out. If we understand it, we show it to others. If we don't understand, we study it and discuss it until we do understand it. And it's pretty fun.

You'll notice most of my work is done on computers. While we are doing physics over the summer, most of our interaction with it is staring at computers, making science through our computers on other computers. Very rarely is my code being run locally, most of the time it's being run on the servers out at Brookhaven. I'll post more pics as I have time.