Been a busy, busy bee. And (SHOCK HORROR!) I've actually been busy doing work stuff. Following on from that other annoying incident at work I've been re-visiting my Ansys data.

Engineering Interlude: In validating the analysis I looked at the raw output files so I could check for stress discontinuity at the nodes (the same corner node will exist in more than one element and thus there will be more than one stress value at that node). This was a Royal Pain in the Butt since there are about 3000000 lines of text to search through. Before I clued myself up I was using Notepad on Windows which meant I could only be arsed to check one node point on the path of interest

Before I charged down the route of telling my colleagues to "Naff off! I've spent ages explaining why this analysis is invalid and now you want me to just give the results anyway?!!" I thought I would do a bit more checking of stress discontinuity, etc. I decided to develop a clue and starting learning regular expression searching for a quicker way of finding the single line I was interested in from 3000000. So it's been great. What better way of doing regular expression searches than on BBEdit on my mac? So I've had a fun couple of weeks using my mac at work legitimately for a change. I've also been able to relearn Octave (so lovely) and use that to help process the Ansys Raw Output stuff. Now I've finished on my mac I can transfer the techniques across to Windows at work using Cygwin (for the other unfortunate souls). I've been very at home doing this kind of thing, if only there was more of it in my job.