I'm making a tetris

Making tetris is a standard beginners computer science exercise. Doing the basic layout for the game is pretty straightforward, but getting the game to handle well is another issue entirely. I've been playing a number of online tetris games as research, but many of them have serious control problems, e.g. no fast drop or awkward left/right shfting. This tetris clone looks very nice, (The DEMO screen in particular is reminiscent of old-school arcade games) but actually playing the game is awful! Here is the pen in its current state.

Computin

Last week we set up the other computer that was sitting in the teachers lounge. There was a lot of difficulty getting an install of any OS running (at first it wouldn't recognize bootable flashdrives etc.) but now we have a clean install of Arch Linux! Woo! We (me and ryan) also added RAM to the other computer and tried to add graphics cards/capability, but it caused strange screen issues. We also organized wires so it's not a jumbled mess and set up the new monitor for the "new" computer. That computer has a liquid cooling system which no one knows how it works, that somehow needs  to be refilled, so that might be part of what we're doing next week. It was pretty productive although unrelated to anything else. Hopefully I can get accustomed to Arch soon.

Results

In computer science, some data points can be very expensive to calculate, so compiling a sufficient array of data for analysis can take a very long time. In the past week I have been collecting many different kinds of data for this reason.

Mess up on Stampede

In bash, you can run commands in parallel by terminating them with an "&", rather than a ";". I thought that running commands in parallel on Stampede would help them finish quicker, since I had a job limit of one. However, by doing this I inadvertently submitted the parallel commands to my user nodes, rather than the job nodes, which is against Stampede user policy. So, after having my account terminated for improper conduct, I contacted TACC and they reactivated my account. Since, I've only had the chance to do basic simulations on the new system.

Move to different servers

I moved from Lonestar, an old TACC server cluster kept for posterity, to Stampede, the 7th most powerful computer in the world. The server comprises 6400 nodes, 102400 cpu cores, 205 TB total memory, 14 PB total and 1.6 PB local storage. Since, I've been migrating simulators and getting used to the new system of queueing jobs.

Neat Code

Code written in javascript, css, html, etc. is all very free-form, which means that taking care to organize code neatly is particularly difficult. As I work on a project, I often find that there are many ways to write a certain part of my code, but that I'm not sure which one is the nicest, most readable way to write the code. Given that the different options are nearly identical in performance, I don't have an easy tie-breaker for the different styles. Shorter code is not always easier to read, but longer code is not always sufficiently succinct. If a single css file is becoming thousands of lines long, it seems like I should refactor some of it, but isn't it uglier to have the code split between css files than have it all be in one easily searchable document? My solution to this has typically been to read others' code and model it off theirs. For this reason, I spend a fair amount of time browsing websites like codepen.io and various web design blogs to catch a glimpse of others' programming paradigms. But who is to say that their code is better? For this reason, I've read various books on general code organization, e.g. Code Complete and The Pragmatic Programmer, two books that I plan on looking back upon over the break.

Material Design and color selection

I decided to take a break from my internship and instead read up on web design. Google has a pretty exhaustive article on their own design philosophy, dubbed material design. These guidelines are extremely specific (they even specify to have no space in between en-dashes when specifying a range of times). The entire design philosophy centers around imitating tangible objects (mostly paper) in your websites, to have an intuitive and elegant aesthetic. Beyond that, the design rules are pretty typical- attractive colors, strategic placement of elements, and intuitive animations.