Part 6: Reaching the Summit#
If I describe my journey through Google Summer of Code as an arduous mountain climbing adventure then finally I have reached a point from where the summitis within reach.
But as they say — > # “The last stretch is the most difficult!!”
The past few weeks have been such a delight — they involved everything from episodes of frustration to moments of great joy!! I really have to thank my mentors — Nabil and Jack, for the level of confidence they have shown in me.
If you have been following my previous posts then you are very well aware of the one thing about which I have been talking, i.e. the Fourier Local Correlation Tracking.This has been the longest part of my project and it took me almost a month to conclude it (though it is still not merged). So, the last time when I left you we were searching for a bug in the wrapper code. But to our amazement, we could not find anyone in the wrapper code rather it was lurking in the most unexpected of places.
The C code had some IDL I/O routines involved with it to read and write binary “dat” files. We were aware that the IDL and C codes will read the arrays differently owing to the order in which they store arrays. IDL is column-major and C and Python are row-major. We thought that it can be taken care of by transposing the arrays but it was found that this was not the solution because both the codes were reading different values from the binary files and this was really baffling!!
Later, we realized that this was actually due to the order of operations. IDL was reading the binary file in column-major, unlike C which produced different results. So to fix this I wrote a few more Python functions wrapping the C read codes and also providing an option by which arrays read by IDL can also be used. This finally completed our code for FLCT and only the documentation and examples were left, which were later added.
On a separate note, I passed the second evaluation but after reading the above, I presume you already got to know about it ;-)
The most exciting part of this journey still awaits and I hope with the team with which I have been working with we will surely reach the summit. I hope you enjoyed this and would surely join us next time to see the conclusion of this saga. Until then, ciao!!!