As Thanksgiving passes us by and the end of the Fall 2010 school semester looms, the calculator-programming community typically slows down, its members turning their full attentions to final exams and projects. I'm happy to say that activity continues to be strong if slightly diminished, with the Cemetech Forum reaching an impressive 2^17 posts, or 131,172 posts since March 14th, 2005, five and a half years ago. Indeed, 2010 has been a year for rejuvenation, with Cemetech meeting and surpassing many longstanding posting and activity records. Kerm Martian, site founder and head honcho and yours truly, exceeded 37,000 personal posts today, comprising over 1.3 million words. For comparison, the typical novel is 80K to 100K words, and even such a massive tome as Tolstoy's War and Peace weighs in at less than half this count, roughly 560K words. Cemetech members as a group have posted 5.16 million words in their 2^17 posts, creating just shy of 5,000 topics and garnering 8.6 million topic views. The Cemetech File Archives are nearing the 500-file mark, and have collected over 25,000 downloads since their inception in October 2006.



As always, we hope that you'll continue to stop by, have a chat with us in the Cemetech chatroom, SAX, or hop on #cemetech on the Efnet IRC network and give us a shout. If you're a new user, you should introduce yourself and tell us about your programming skills and your latest projects; new and existing users should be sure to maintain running logs of their projects for us to offer our encouragement and suggestions. Several Cemetech projects are moving along haltingly, their progress slowed by their authors' life, school, and work commitments. Doors CS 7.1 is still under beta-testing and development, including a CALCnet2.2 demo program called flourish. Shaun "Merthsoft" McFall's Tokens IDE program, a sort of offline SourceCoder that also includes image editing features and a DCS GUI editor, continues to progress. Finally, the Have Calc, Will Program (HCWP) seminars continue every Wednesday evening, fomenting discussion of programming and optimization tips, discussions of current and upcoming projects, and community communication.

:O hopefully we can keep this coming! GG all for beating the crunch

Thanks! Oh, and don't be fooled by the slightly buggy graph-drawing script I've written; that trailing tail at far right is not real data, just an artifact of annoyingly-elusive bounds checking.

ah, thats fine, I could tell it was a little off

Congratulations Cemetech!

I wonder when we reach 133337 posts :O

YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY WOOOOOOOT!!!

yay cemetech! best programing site ive ever been too

At this rate, we might reach it before the end of the year, depending how December activity goes. And on behalf of Cemetech, thanks for the congrats.

@Rhombus: Very happy to hear it, sorry about the rockiness a few weeks ago that had you doubting us.

No kidding about crunch time. As far as the next week and a half goes, 8.5 pages down, at least 28 pages to go. Plus coding projects.

Ouch. If we're going to play the "what's killing your will to live," then I shall list, in order of mental capacity and time devoted:

1) Relationship concerns
2) Algorithms final exam on December 22nd. Have to get an A or A-
3) Distributed System final portion of semester-long project (creating a distributed, recoverable, robust, parallel filesystem). I'm at the 99% effort = 1% remaining completion stage.
4) Distributed Systems final exam December 16th.
5) Algorithms homeworks. Probably at least one or two more
6) Did I mentioned the Algorithms final?
7) Christmas preparations and shopping
8) Need to renew my passport if I hope to visit Chrystina
9) Cemetech stuff
10) Doors CS stuff
11) CALCnet stuff

Been there, and I am very glad it is not taking up the disproportionately enormous fraction of my faculties that it has in the past. I hope things turn out okay.


Eeek. My final programming assignment in O/S is also dealing with parallelism and IPC, and my 7 page writing assignment for that class is identifying which of a series of 12 reader/writer precedence algorithms would be nearest-optimal for a game like Starcraft 2. Then I have to finish generalizing my Maple implementation of the Schrödinger equation (and producing graphical examples of) for the infinite-thin barrier solution for quantum tunneling.


Eeek, those too.


Better get on that. Passport renewals can take quite a while.

It's been about 3 weeks since I've even thought about Freebuild stuff at this point, I'm hoping the inter-semester period gives me a chance to be productive with it.

Jesus. To think, the most productive thing I've done in the past week is my 5th play-through of Mass Effect...

Anything I could learn with all my free-time to help pick up the slack?

Depends what you actually want to study, but you should consider MIT OCW, if you're self motivated to learn.

I absolutely love MIT OCW. Pick something you like, and learn all about it

I can't express the degree to which I share that last sentiment.

Parallelism and IPC are always fun to work with; good luck. Personally I'd rather do modeling of something like quantum tunneling in Matlab.

[/quote] Definitely, same for me on my projects.

Not being a large university with an engineering department, our school only has licenses for Maple and Mathematica, so no Matlab for me. And for this assignment we're still working only with abstracted barriers, and one-dimensional propagation of the particle, so Matlab isn't as much of a necessity as if I had to model the properties of a real material, or the particle wasn't traveling normal to the surface of the barrier.

Ah, that's a fair point. Good luck with the assignments, at any rate. For what it's worth, I just submitted my final assignment for Distributed Systems, although I'm planning on continuing to do tiny bits of testing to make sure it's a solid program, since it's not due for another nine days. Frankly, I think probably only one or two other students are actually going to finish by that deadline.

Woah, activity took a huge drop for a while, looking at that graph, although it still seems way above the averages for all previous years. Hopefully it will remain that high or higher for a long while. I think we have to thank Kerm and the loyal members for contributing into making Cemetech an active community.

That makes me wonder, every March/April Cemetech always seems to see its activity double for a while compared to the end of the Summer and Fall. If this trend continues for 2011, Cemetech will easily pull 400 a day next Spring.

I figured out that was mostly my fault for being busy with schoolwork, looking at my personal postcount, so in the end I decided that that wasn't a terribly significant downturn, hence the title of this topic.

I certainly like that idea! I guess we'll see once Spring rolls around. How's Omnimaga doing these days, still super-busy?

It's totally understandable. I don't have school myself but the X-Mas shopping rush is starting at the store where I work, not to mention I myself have to do some preparations for Christmas and already had work partys and such things. Online, I had to deal with some drama with two new members on my forum that kept whining about negative post ratings or low post rating totals and some requests, so I was more tired in general. As a result, in November my monthly post rate dropped by about 500 over October. With school it would be horribly hectic, though. X.x

As for Omnimaga it is still doing well. Activity dropped a lot a few weeks ago but then it returned to the same level it was somewhere in late June, the second part of September and most of October. I think the current level of activity is kinda good as it is, though, because we had a giant spike in Early November and I ended up taking several days to reply to some topics. There were over 700 posts one day and I almost considered disabling SpyBot45 for a while because the IRC channel got too hectic.

For what it's worth, I'm almost at 38,000 personal posts, and we've crossed 1,600 users.