Yesterday, Team Ballistics met with our faculty mentor, Susan Vanderplas and updated her on the final tasks we had been given since our last meeting on Monday. The tasks were making it so that the percentage of missing values were calculated in each partition (9 in total), and simplified the linear regression task (which I’m not going to go into details) so the program did not have to go through the entire matrix to get data for something simple.

I thought after this point we were pretty much done with the program. The next steps were to format the display of the results and send the project to our mentors, so that after they install it on their computers, they could run it on the bullet scans so we could start gathering data for our research paper and symposium paper (which is due in less than 2 weeks).

— However, things weren’t as simple as they seemed. After we had pushed the latest version of the project the day before yesterday, Susan spent all of yesterday morning, from 7:00 – 11:30 AM, trying to get it working on her computer. There were a lot of dependencies and files that were not compiling on her computer because it was a Mac and using a different operating system called Linux, and our project had been implemented for Windows. It was until after we met in the afternoon that after spending 2 more hours with us, she finally got it working. There was a lot of tricky stuff there had to be done using CMake, which in basic terms is a software development tool that lets you organize the structure and order of the files in a project, such as deciding the how folders into one another and explaining how they relate to one another. Apparently the setup for this is different for Mac and Linux and now our next goal (among a couple of other tasks involving the code) is make it so our project is cross-platform and works for other operating systems. It is after that that we can start gathering data.

We’ve got less than two weeks to complete everything. Time to get my head back in the game and shift gears because we’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us.