Freesteel Blog

The weekend had been set months in advance, and turned out to be the only weekend with perfect weather all summer so far.

Left Liverpool at 10pm and drove late into the night towards Aberystwyth looking for a place to camp on the way. We were expected to meet at Ty Canol campsite at 9am on Saturday morning near Newport. It’s very difficult to find anywhere in the dark, and the lanes off the main road are narrow, lack any waste ground between high walls, and all lead to farms. There are campsites and caravan parks on the map, but none of them ever reliably explain what they would like you to do if it’s two in the morning. This spot was not bad, although the 7am start was a drag.

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First on some small “fun-boats” in the docks, and then an attempt on a boring-can’t-do-anything-except-paddle-it-for-miles sea kayak.

About 3 weeks ago I got sent a big part to have a look at which took about 5 hours to process. This wasn’t too disruptive as I was at Europython and could keep popping back to the hotel room to read the output, change the print statements and set it running again.

The problem traced down to this image where a 6-way cell was connecting up wrongly.

The black lines are going up a wall, and the contours are in this vertical wall. We are getting a sharp internal corner of offset from a contour that runs to the left and then to the right around that tip. And the tip is almost coincident with another corner at the bottom of the wall in XY. The rectangle with the 6-way cell is actually a square in XY space of about 0.02mm on each side and has reached its limit of subdivision.

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Just spent a long time getting to and spending time in a hotel in Florence at Europython 2012.

It was touristy, hot, sunny, very Italian, good conference food. This is from the fantastic painting of the dome interior of the Duomo

We also contributed a poster:

No more time for blogging. Gotta get work done and get to bed.