WPI

Welp, I’ve been accepted to start my M.S. and eventually start my Ph.D. at Worcester Polytechnic Institute this fall! I will be studying fire protection engineering, a continuation of my bachelor’s degree. The school is populated with just under 4,000 students and it is a private engineering school. Not only does this school house one of the top fire protection engineering programs in the US, but the faculty and their work align closely with my values and passions in life.

The big move will look something like this in 8 weeks:

Some cool info about the school includes the fact that Robert Goddard went there and graduated in 1908 - he was the gradnfather of modern rocketry with the first liquid fueled rocket. Also, the fire protection engineering department has about 150 masters of science students and 4 (!) doctoral students. This is quite the opportunity I smell.

What I did during the summer of 2008

So far this summer I’m being funded by UHD as a last request to make a catalog of fire models for various textbooks. The work is very refreshing and I love to work when I learn much more than I expected. Another cool side effect of this work is that I can include the FDS models and example writeups on my website, free for anyone else in the world to see and learn from. The technical writeup is located here and it gets updated automatically anytime I change a single word in there. Eventually it will have links to FDS files for FDS users and students around the world to download and use on their own - I love technology.

FDS MESH Size Calculator tool

Finally, to finish off a nice post about fire protection engineering and FDS: I updated my FDS Mesh Size calculator on my other website to include some awesome and never-before-done functionality! It now takes in x, y, and z dimensions and an expected heat release rate and gives the user three MESH lines (coarse, moderate, and fine) to guide them on making an FDS file that has an adequately resolved MESH.

The tool can be found here on my FDS/sciency website and the nice folks at NIST gave me a link on their third-party tools page of the FDS website: http://fire.nist.gov/fds/thirdparty.html

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I know I post out-there stuff like this on my blog here sometimes, but this is what is on my mind and taking up my mental cycles and daily days. Jump in and read the linked pages or play with the tools of my creation!

Ok, I think I just found a new role model in the teeming world of science. I realize that every day I learn feel closer and closer to the mind of this man that I have just discovered. Watch this 18 minutes of video, and I think you will enjoy it very much. He is an eccentric man, yes, but listen. His words and final thoughts are aligned with the subtitle of my blog, “Communicating the greatest possible growth”.

Stuff like this gives me a warm feeling of why I am so attracted to the fields of science that I am. Something tells me that this man doesn’t fret too much about the trivial stuff that we sometimes get trapped up in day to day. Click on the picture to watch. Enjoy.

  
http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/04/09/must-watch-18-minutes-with-an-agile-mind/

By the way, watch out for loose gravel! - I wiped out on my motorcycle gracefully right at this spot near UHD. Everything is okay with me minus a brake pedal that needs to be bent back into shape and a slightly bent handlebar that with bother my OCD.

 
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I am taking a numerical methods course and using the textbook Numerical Analysis 8th edition by Burden and Faires:

The book is good and has nice pseudocode examples throughout. It also has a companion website with all of the algorithms programmed in C, FORTRAN, Pascal, Maple, MATLAB, and Mathematica. For our assignments, we can use any program that we want, and I have been using MATLAB, FORTRAN, and Python as those make the most sense to me thus far in my computing experiences and are the most useful for my work.

However, the FORTRAN 77 programs on the website are programmed in such a way that they only work when using a FORTRAN compiler in Windows. At this time, my primary machine is an Apple Macbook Pro laptop, and I am using the Intel Fortran Compiler version 10.1 on OS X Leopard. When I try to compile the programs from the textbook website, I get errors. So, I went ahead and fixed the files so that they would work on with the Intel compiler on the Mac, and hopefully Linux as well.

The two problems were that:

a) The programs were trying to read and write to ‘CON’, which is a Windows specific way of writing to the command window console.

b) The programs had an extra line at the end and would crash the Intel compiler.

So, I fixed these errors in all of the programs and you can download the corrected files in .zip format from me and follow the instructions below to compile.

The original files are freely available from the author’s website here

Step 1: Download the above linked zip file of the corrected FORTRAN 77 programs

Step 2: Unzip the FORTRAN files. You will find several files with the .FOR extension.

Step 3: Run the Intel FORTRAN compiler using the command: ifort -f77rtl -o <outputname> inputfilename.
For example, to compile example 12.1: ifort -f77rtl -o alg121 ALG121.FOR.

Step 4: Make the output file executable with: chmod +x alg121

Step 5: Run the file with ./alg121

Step 6: Be sure to answer the first Y/N question with the y or n character in quotes, such as “y” or “n”

Step 7: Have fun learning numerical methods and dissecting the FORTRAN programs!