Purchasing

The remaining POs for higher dollar items were turned into Patsy and I gave her my reimbursement requests for the lower $ purchases.

Two more annoyances and wastes of time on purchasing:

• CSU has not mechanism to purchase from Newegg.com who doesn't do purchase orders. Why isn't there a college or department credit card for this stuff?
• I'm trying to order the computers but because our grant budget has no special category for computers, then we can't orderd them until the account is rebudgeted. This takes a form and signature from Ton and he is out of town till the 13th. The computers take 2-4 weeks to get in from IT & S so we will likely not have the computers for 2.5-3 months after we decided to get them.

I'm quickly getting frustrated with purchasing stuff and the amount of wasted time dealing with it. I thought UC Davis was bad, but man CSU is worse off. The ideal situation would be to have a credit card for purchases under a certain amount that would be linked to a grant account, then I can go to vendors and purchase as needed. But this removes the approval step which I doubt the University would give up. UCD CoE had a decent online purchasing system put in a few years back that alleviates much of the wasted time. I'm trying to track down what that is.

Structural Model Identification

From Ron:

I need the identified gains for Task 2, no K estimation. This is one of the runs that you did while you were still in Davis. I seem to have misplaced these results that you emailed me.

What I have recorded for the identified gains are: K1 = 14.4, K2 = .284, K3 = 1.02 and K4 = 121.8. The K4 value looks suspicious. I may have transcribed it incorrectly. Do you have them available?

These are likely results from Matlab 2010a, which I used for all the previous analysis. But I don't have access to that version anymore and 2013a gives different results (WTF!):

Plant #2,  Run #1, K estimated: no
Best ARX [na=3, nb=1, nk=24]
The order of the closed loop system is 8.
The gain guesses: k1=14.500000, k2=0.375000, k3=1.000000, k4=20.000000
The identified gains: k1=41.742796+\-1.496914, k2=1.241115+\-0.005499,
k3=1.466902+\-0.000640, k4=10.349165+\-0.149289

I'm not sure what to do about this. Maybe Ron can run the code on his previous versions of Matlab.

Here is the results I got from Matlab 2010a on June 18, 2013 with the same code:

Plant #2,  K estimated: no
Best ARX [na=1, nb=3, nk=3]
The order of the closed loop system is 8.
The gain guesses: k1=14.500000, k2=0.375000, k3=1.000000, k4=20.000000
The identified gains: k1=34.679381+\-0.532964, k2=1.100302+\-0.002407,
k3=1.255370+\-0.000265, k4=9.427437+\-0.071185

I need to check and make sure I'm actually using the original data Ron sent me, because he has an even different set of numbers.

Plone

I made it through chapter 7. A few more chapters and I'll be ready to setup a site that has a version control configuration based on my dev environment. Tomorrow is theming so we can work on implementing Sandy's design once I go through that chapter.

Source for the practice stuff is here: https://github.com/moorepants/optilux, including notes on installing on Ubuntu 13.04.