Day 6

I'm almost able to take data with the CAEN QDC now. I've modified the dummy application from CAEN a little bit to make it work, and as far as I can tell it's taking data from one of the fifteen or so inpuits on the faceplate, the issue is that the CAEN application crashes whenever I try to select an input, so that would seem to be the last hurdle to tackle.

On another note, I picked up my Aspire One last night. Blue, 80gb HDD, 1GB ram, Windows XP Home. The Windows install is most likely going to be gone soonish though, there are a couple Linux distros for netbooks I want to try out (HP Mi is really pretty), and the Aspire One Linpus distribution gets better battery life than XP apparently, so there's an advantage there. The advantage to having a Windows partition in this case is that I'm going to go install all the CAEN drivers and such on to it to see if I can get it tow work, in the event that I can't figure out the Linux stuff.

Day Three

Today I went through all the 'blue base' photomultiplier tubes in the Lab. Broke one, too. It's not a huge deal because the thing dated from 1975, but still, not off to a good start.

Also, I learnt tht I have an hep.physics.mcgill.ca domain email address now, which is pretty cool.

Paul the tech guy managed to get the CAEN Linux drivers working, but the comany's documentation is so horrible (or nonexistant, even), I think I might need to somehow get my hands on a Windows box so I can actually work with the USB VME interface. Not sure David will like that.

Day One

It all started when I couldn't log into my lab computer. It took the tech 2 hours to figure out the issue, at which point I tackled the issue of tracking down the drivers for my lab equipment. 

Luckilly, the drivers were easy enough to find, but I'm pretty sure someone made a typo in the Makefile; when trying to compile they look for an 'i686' folder containing Makefile information (where the correct folder is i386 corresponding to 32 bit architecture). 

Being unable to fix this error at home, I sent the company in Italy an email outlining all this. Given the time shift, ideally tomorrow morning when I get to my office I'll have a response of sorts.