Simulab Update - It Compiles!

By the beginning of last week I was successful in actually compiling the primary components to my project for Simulab. The most important of these was the LGPL-licensed GHMM library.

GHMM is a C library for creating and using hidden Markov models. Simulab is using hidden Markov models to determine the proficiency of a surgeon-in-training. This library sits at the heart of the application I'm developing for them. However, I encountered an issue concerning the library's random number generation routine. In short, the algorithm used the initstate function found in the C standard library. However, this function doesn't exist in the Windows version that comes with Visual Studio 2005. (Not being familiar with Windows, this too me a long while to debug!) I found some equivalent code for this function at Google Code and now it builds just fine.

In my next post I'll give a tutorial on how to actually use GHMM to solve problems. I'll do this because I'm excited to finally learn the library and because the GHMM website has poor documentation despite the utility and good design of the code itself.