My brain hurts

I just finished an intense meeting involving my project lead guy, a computer girl like me, and her project lead guy. The last guy single-handedly makes any makes any meeting intense. At least he always arrives about ten or twenty minutes late so you have time to brace yourself.

Basically, we have our research project which eventually will have capabilities similar to a program that they are using. We'd like to be able to compare the programs' performance, so that means we need to convert the data between formats. They're using a database with a whole lot of tables; we're using XML for our input and output. Their program is designed to simulate a very specific system; we're trying to make a general-purpose tool. They're doing a discrete event model; we're using agents. Just translating between our mental models is strenuous. I fear the data conversion is going to be just plain ugly.

Intense dude always gives the impression that he is very disappointed that our research software cannot do everything that their version 4 or 5 software can. Argh! Research! General-purpose! He also was shocked that I write code in emacs and that my "coding standards" don't involve something like Hungarian notation in my variable names. Ick! In what decade did he last program, I wonder?

I think I'm going to bypass him and go talk with the other computer girl about this stuff.