Lambrtz’ Blog

Thank God I don’t need to wait until November to make a post again.

I implemented a part of an article entitled Simulating Dynamical Features of Escape Panic, whose official webpages can be reached here. I didn’t understand some parts of it, so I decided to ask one of the author, Mr. Illés Farkas, who is now a Senior Research Associate at Eötvös University, Hungary. He replied, and yes I got some explanations to my questions. He also suggested me to download the source code. Unfortunately, they wrote it for Linux, while I only have access to Windows Vista and XP. It would take more times to install Linux in my notebook. I tried to compile the code using Visual C++ Express 2008, which I use to write my code, but was not successful. There were some problems with unistd.h and X11-something. I finally realized that 1) since unistd.h is only available on Unix/Linux/other members in their family, the code would only compile on those OSes, and 2) I needed XWindow.

So I decided to install Cygwin. FYI, it was my first experience installing Cygwin, and FYI2 I’m not really an expert in Linux. That’s why I had no idea about how to compile their code. I typed make and g++, but the command prompt returned error. It turned out that I only installed Cygwin in minimum package, so I spent several hours downloading and installing the full package. make. Successful.

But there comes another problem. The executable file could not simply be run. It needed several DLL files. Since I was too lazy to list the needed DLLs, I just copied the executable file and all files in Cygwin’s bin folder and X11’s bin folder into one directory. Bang. It still could not run. It needed XWindow. I re-read the FAQ in Cygwin website, and found that I had to run a kind of service in order to emulate XWindow on Windows. After several trials of running the batch file, the XWindow simulation layer was finally activated. I ran the executable file from the XWindow’s command prompt, and voila, mission accomplished.

So, great thanks to him, I can sail over two oceans in one row.

Below is a screenshot. There are still some bugs. Hopefully I can finish it before Thursday.

My hiatus is finally over.

For now.

Anyhow, I am not totally finished yet, and the dead line is approaching. I can sense the presence of Grim Reaper somewhere in the darkness out there.

Don’t panic! Why so serious?

BTW, you don’t want to see my room. Very nasty. Very sticky.

BTW2, I wonder, why ideas often come up very early in the morning like this? It is now 4:39 AM GMT+8. And this is not the first time.