Time Flies

I don't know where the day went.  I went to OSCON today to help out at the PSAS display, I was somewhat nervous since there was mostly a display of hardware of whose language I'm not fluent in. It was a good learning experience and I'm pretty sure I convinced several people to come to next week's Introductory PSAS meeting.  I chatted with Ian a bit, I think it would nice at some point for me to learn about hardware.  My extent of doing hardware was at the first little startup I worked for in Silicon Valley which went public a little over a year and a half ago and now supplies map info to mapquest. I learned how to solder and desolder from a colleague (even though I was doing software), and managed enough to fix my old beat up VCR (swapped the switches).  I do like  figuring out what part of devices don't work, taking them apart  (carefully, theres always a trick), ordering replacement parts and successfully fixing them (been able to do that with  a number of things, quite proud of myself actually that I can repair stuff on my own).  Its quite cute too that my youngest daughter likes to do the same; she's quick to jump at fixing things when they break and seems to have a natural ability and desire to "figure it out".

After OSCON, I went down to PSU and worked on my thesis work. I've got Place Lab on my box but I hit a snag with the APViewer in that it sees the AP points but does not give lat and long for the location estimate.  I posted for help from my group and the Place Lab users list but it appears that these email lists are not very active so I may have to resort to contacting some of the research folks directly.  Better yet, it would be nice if there was a chat channel of some sort.  I would think there should be one that exists for an open source project of this size and visibility but there wasn't anything on their site. Ahhh, but perhaps I can suggest it.  Oh well, a learning curve like everything else.   

Spend some time starting tonight going through to make changes for a specific state space model file for psas within the rebel tool kit.  Once I set this properly along with a matlab file to take in the data from the last flight and utilize this model file then we should be set to see how these filters do.  I need to find out about the simulator code, so I can write code to do some equivalent filtering on its output.