I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement[...]

Allen Gingsberg, Howl (extract)

Fuselage (source: eurocopter.com)

Well, one of our tasks is to design and test some optimization methods. Because the complexity of the real elements to analize these are a collection of numerical methods working together. In fact the process implies using some computer programs: design, meshing, structural calculus, postprocessing tools, and, at the center of the system, the optimization tool.

The optimization tool generates via different engines  series of designs that must be tested by the other tools. Each engine implements a method or family methods. And this is my project: I must develop an engine to be integrated in a Dakota-style framework. I would use the old Fortran to do it. But I needed to program a text file parser, so I decided to make some experiments with the Python programming language.

I hadn’t programmed in Python before. I avoided it in part because I thought Python would have a lot of hype as some years ago it happened with Perl. Some proofs of concept after, I was really happy with the results. It’s true the basic Python was a bit limited to develop the numerical part of the engine. But then I discovered NumPy (now part of ScyPy libraries).

NumPy allowed me quickly replace some code developed in Matlab language by my fellows and write my own, more clear and simpler code. And, after the experience of implementing some numerical methods, I seriously think it can be a good idea for me to leave Fortran (with the exception of educational purposes) and code Python+NumPy.

• easy integration with PULO (it is written in Fortran)
• respect toward standards
• economy
• cross-platform
• easy learning
• mature develop platform
• community of users
• maintainable

So I wrote about Java, .net, Qt, GTK+, wxWidgets, GNUstep,Fox Toolkit, and FLTK. And, you guess, Qt was the winner for me.
My next step was learning C++. I previously has written code in C, but never C++. In two weeks I learned C++ and Qt enough to make a simple proof-of-concept. I programmed a very (dirty) simple editor.

I learned a lot with two books: The C++ programming language by Bjarne Stroustrup and C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 by Jasmin Blanchette and  Mark Summerfield.

Then I began the real work. Of course, the final code can be cleaned and optimized, but after six months the main target was reached: to have an interface that easily can be used to introduce an initial design of properties and constructive process of the bridge, and read results from the engine and analyze them.

Splash

I used QtCreator to develop the GUI and Emacs to modify the engine. Both with best control version system ever, git, made my work really, shaming easy.

Initial design input

To develop the postprocess I thought on gnuplot, but finally I used the Qwt library because its good integration with Qt.

Postprocess

And what about C++? Well, Linus has strong reasons to run C++ down, but Linus develop operating systems. I think doing all this work in pure C would be a pain. It’s true if you want to program more confortable, you’ll produce a less optimum code. But it’s true too programming with C++ is far to attract monkey coders that only had in mind the fastest solution.

Ode to a Nightingale
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, –
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?

John Keats, 1819

In the end of March I left CartoLab. After near two years it was a hard  decision, but I thought there was no choice. Too much conditions aimed to it. At least I still have good friends in the current CartoLab’s crew.

In April, some days after attending III DudesConf (first as Spanish official DebConf) my Grandmother passed away. She’s one of most important person in my life. It was a very hard blow, and we still are recovering from it. Moreover, I always think in her legacy as a woman ahead of her time. Her relationship with my Grandfather is an example of perfect marriage full of love and respect, too.

I lost all my energy. I temporarily left my studies and my activities as social volunteer at Portiño.

My personal rolling down stopped in June when Tania and me began a love story I hope it will be written about someday. It is epic, it is magic, it is romantic, it is the wonderful love you dream on when you are a child. She made me strong again, and we are living too many sweet experiences to remember.

So I began to rebuild my life. I’m running again the end of my Civil Engineering master. And I found a job in the Structural Mechanics Group in my School. I changed my profile from sysadmin to programmer, and I think I’m adapting to my new position well. Even when I never made object-oriented programming before. Now C++ and Qt are my swords.

2011 begins with new hopes and challenges. And, one of my targets is to get again discipline as (blog, technical, poetry) author. I’ll try to keep informed my friends about my life, and to write about interesting things to the strangers, again. Like the bridges I’m currently working on, let’s launch it!

Ámote eiquí

Ámote eiquí a carón do meu peito
brandamente namorado da tua boca
e sínto o berro quente do teu riso
e síntote, amor,
nos meus días cheos de fame.

Ámote eiquí sen presa nin parolas
porque o amor non sabe
de presa nin parolas para ser meirande

Ámote aquí, mainamente,
baixo a sombra calada dos teus ollos
como un paxaro que move as túas follas
e escapa ao teu adentro fuxidío.

Nada sei doutros día
nin outras voces
que non señan isas mans
e istes sonos
que me rouban cara a tí niste parque.

Nada sei xa.

Ti e máis eu pra sempre
niste banco cheo de tarde!

Salvador García Bodaño, Ao pé de cada hora (1967)

Always let the hardware be free…

Nadie comprendía el perfume
de la oscura magnolia de tu vientre.
Nadie sabía que martirizabas
un colibrí de amor entre los dientes.

Mil caballitos persas se dormían
en la plaza con luna de tu frente,
mientras que yo enlazaba cuatro noches
tu cintura, enemiga de la nieve.

Entre yeso y jazmines, tu mirada
era un pálido ramo de simientes.
Yo busqué, para darte, por mi pecho
las letras de marfil que dicen siempre.

Siempre, siempre: Jardín de mi agonía,
tu cuerpo fugitivo par siempre,
la sangre de tus venas en mi boca,
tu boca ya sin luz para mi muerte.

Federico García Lorca, “Diván del Tamarit” (1936)

Pedro Salinas. Razón de Amor, 1936