Posts

In The Method and Scope of Genetics, published in 1908, William Bateson offers this advice:

If I may throw out a word of counsel to beginners, it is: Treasure your exceptions! […] Keep them always uncovered and in sight. Exceptions are like the rough brickwork of a growing building which tells that there is more to come and shows where the next construction is to be.

Motivated by a recent question from one of my department’s academic counselors, I’ve decided to start a small blog series with tips, tricks, or general advice for undergraduate students in computer science. While some of these may be useful elsewhere, I can’t promise that these will be good ideas when applied in other fields.

So you’ve written a cool thing. Maybe it’s a game that you like and want to let other people play. Maybe it’s a library that you think other people could use. Maybe you want to show off your code to potential employers.

Sometimes, you want to redirect the output of your program to a file–maybe to record it for another program, or because you want to search through it with grep. If you have to do this at the C level, there are a few ways you can accomplish this.

I’m currently working on a project that requires the use of Molecular Dynamics simulations to generate raw data. It’s not really the focus of the project, but I do need some decently long simulations (in the neighborhood of 400ns) to get meaningful data.