It was finally time today to pull the 56Kbps modem from this server. As awesome as 56Kbps dialup was back in 2000, and as cool as it was that this computer served as a phone answering machine when I was an undergrad, it’s only use in the high-tech modern age we live in is to take up a PCI slot and reduce heat dissipation from the other PCI cards. I am now thinking about making a section on this website devoted to the server it’s hosted on. The server has been alive since 2000, had several hardware replacements and upgrades, served various functions, and lived in several different locations!

My GPS skiing project is now officially underway, and I’ve set up a database to keep track of chairlift positions at ski resorts. I will use the database later for computing mountain stats and for analyzing tracklogs generated by skiing with the GPS receiver in my pocket. Google maps is useful for displaying the lifts I have in my database.

Here’s a TCL script written for use with VMD to automatically generate a bunch of contours from grid files in a specific directory. The script saves the viewing angle and other rendering aspects.

#Set the directory for looking for files here
set dir "/home/cogswell/Downloads/dx/30-blend-95"
set currentDir [pwd]
cd $dir

#set height and width
#set h 500
#set w 500
set h ["%h"]
set w ["%w"]

#Set global defaults and preferences
axes location off
display antialias on
display depthcue on

# save the current display state and representation style
set viewpt [molinfo top get {center_matrix rotate_matrix scale_matrix global_matrix}]
set myrep [molinfo top get {rep}]
mol default style $myrep

foreach f [glob "p*.dx"] {
set file [exec basename $f ".dx"]
mol off top
mol new "$f"
#mol addrep top
molinfo top set {center_matrix rotate_matrix scale_matrix global_matrix} $viewpt
render POV3 "$file.pov" povray +H%h +W%w -I%s -O"$file.png" -D +X +A
mol delete top
}

#return to the original molecule and directory
molinfo top set {center_matrix rotate_matrix scale_matrix global_matrix} $viewpt
mol on top