My remake of Zatacka (Achtun, die Kurve!) for Xbox 360 is in the peer review stage (again…thanks very much Guitar Hero controllers) on Xbox Live Indie Games. It should be released within weeks at a price of 80 Microsoft Points. Anyone who is interested in a PC version should contact me directly, though the analogue controls on the Xbox 360 make quite a difference to the gameplay. And look out for the great soundtrack!
Using ROOT’s Virtual Monte-Carlo (VMC) interface allows a high energy physics simulation to be built (almost) independently of the transport package used. One can write a single simulation and alter which Monte-Carlo transport package (Geant3, Geant4, FLUKA) is utilized in the simulation by altering a single line of code. This allows one to test a simulation’s results against other transport packages in a hassle-free and dependable manner. I first adopted this approach while at CERN, working on a simulation intended to verify Geant3’s treatment of delta-rays and found anomalous behaviour. A quick change to the Geant4 transport package resulted in correct behaviour, leaving me to wonder just how this might affect ALICE’s inner tracking system (More on that later). After getting ROOT, geant3, FLUKA, geant4 and the relevant VMC packages to compile and run nicely on Scientific Linux and Ubuntu, I decided to have another go at setting up the VMC environment in MacOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on my home machine. Snow Leopard is a genuine 64-bit operating system (uname -m reports x86_64, system type is macosx64) so one might expect some troubles in the compilation process. Fortunately the process was relatively simple in the end. One must install the developer tools (or XCode) that come with the Snow Leopard install DVD, as well as gfortran. Read more…