(What was) Croquet is maybe still alive

It seems there is still some hope to see Croquet (or, OpenCobalt which took off from where Croquet stopped) alive and based on latest Squeak and more importantly using Cog VM.
Matthew Fulmer reports it here.

The potentials are magical as explained by Howard Stearns.

Investigating Pier

I have been playing around with Pier.
It is fun, especially when you can extend it to show LaTeX formulae (this is still work in progress given I am using the js from MathJax [even if forbidden], but hey I wanted a proof of concept!)

I will try to complete it: whatch out 'Beautiful Math for Pier' on squeaksource.

LaTeX on Blogger

An inline snippet of LaTeX $e^{\pi i}+1=0\$ in blogger (from http://watchmath.com/vlog/?p=438 but it now, Oct 2010, shows crap!).


You can as well have it in display style:
\[e^{\pi i}+1=0\\]

Geomapping: what a wonderful world!

Suppose you have a set of lat/lon points, where do you find out their elevation?
Simple, let say you have the following coordinates (a cross in concrete on the top of the hill in front of my parents' place):
45.469678, 10.970527 (I got these from 'Get Directions from here' in google maps)
Then call a USGS' web service from the URL below.
It says
getElevation
for Latitude 45.46 --> Y_Value=45.469678
for Longitude 10.97 --> X_Value=10.970527
return result in meters --> Elevation_Units=METERS
use the best survey available --> Source_Layer=-1
not other additional info --> Elevation_Only=true

http://gisdata.usgs.gov/xmlwebservices2/elevation_service.asmx/getElevation?Y_Value=45.469678&X_Value=10.970527&Elevation_Units=METERS&Source_Layer=-1&Elevation_Only=true

Why would you want elevations?

To plot an elevation chart of a bike or hiking tour.

Amazing what you can find around...

(This was inspired by http://econym.org.uk/gmap/altitude.htm)

PyCalCal is out!

I finally set to put PyCalCal out in the open.
I will need to finalize and perfect it but that is a good starting point.
I also added a demo web app using it.

My idea is for PyCalCal to be used as a Python library and as such use it to provide calendrica calculations as web services.
Stay tuned if you are interested.

Giants' Shoulders in music

A nice song about a great Giant, Galileo, by the Chromatics.
Read text and listen to music, here

Scons and noweb

I was curious to see how I could integrate noweb and Scons.

You can download my little Sconstruct for this, Sconstruct.example. It defines two builders. NoWeave is used to produce TeX or LaTeX documents, while NoTangle extracts the non-document artefacts, i.e. programs, config files, scripts ... It also includes productions for generating a sample program about Ackermann function:


ackdoc = env.NoWeave('ack.tex', 'ack.nw')
ackcode = env.NoTangle('ack.py', 'ack.nw')
acktest = env.NoTangle('ackTest.py', 'ack.nw')


The noweb source is ack.nw and the companion BibTeX file is ack.bib

It contains the doc chunks describing the function, the source code chunck for the relevant Python code and the code chunk for the unit test

You can try it out executing

$ scons -f Sconstruct.example

You will get the following artefacts, ack.py, ack.tex, ackTest.py and ack.pdf

Remember to run BibTeX first...