bierfaristo blogs

Classes end next week and everyone is trying frantically to finish up their projects. My students are building posters for a poster session on Tuesday. On Sunday, I'll take Penny to the BCRC and open it up for my students to finish and print their posters. It should be fun.

The Virus Simulation generated some interesting data. Not a lot of data -- the virus turned out not to be very infective. I managed to infect 10 people -- as many people as the virus would allow -- but I'm not sure anyone else did. Most people who became infected did nothing. That's OK because it's useful data in terms of helping to craft how to try it next time.

I spent most of Thanksgiving (and the day before) writing a PHP program that could read in the data file and generate branching diagrams that showed the transmission of the virus from one person to another, organized by date of infection. If you invoke it without arguments, it provides a usage line that shows how to generate a PDF file that shows an initial code and all of its descendants. I was rather pleased with it!

In class, I demonstrated how to use it. I also showed how to get at the various intermediate components and tried to demystify a bit what it was doing. And how to construct a "dot" file from scratch. It went reasonably well, although it became clear that most students had never run a program at the command line before. That's a deficit that really should be corrected. It's pathetic that we have hundreds of computers running unix and the students don't have the first idea how to take advantage of it. Pathetic.