Stretching “Physics” And OOo

June 2, 2007 by Mark.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday writing (the beginnings of) a physics engine for work. In fact, there is probably more blood, sweat and tears in those 300 or so lines of code then in anything I have done recently. There are diagrams, math books, and crazy formulae scribbled on napkins all over my room, laid out in an almost symmetrical circle around my chair. Lets just say the engine is far from finished. The lack of any sensible code would probably make physicists around the world weep. Regardless, the engine does what its meant to (thus far) and makes it appear that the programmer that actually wrote it, knew what he was doing. I still have a few bugs to flush out and if Anand finds it in his heart, there might be a neat demo available.

On to the real work.

Dave has been kind enough to supply me what a fairly fast machine for all my OpenOffice hacking needs; and I am the more grateful. The box runs CentOS 4.5, which is perfect for compiling OpenOffice, if you know what your doing. I must admit, I am not as Linux savvy as some of my friends are, so many of the tasks that are ahead of me require many hours of looking up on Google. Contrary to all my problems, the OpenOffice community has been very helpful as well as all my friends on IRC. More so are my coding efforts. Ive been digging around the source tree, looking through code, and I believe that I have found a suitable spot to put my filter. Hopefully in the next few days, once OOo compiles, Ill be able to write some test code. Hello Cruel World!

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