ruminations

If you’re like me and are curious about everything on your system, you might like this tip:

http://www.tipstrs.com/tip/1821/Fix–home-directory-after-installing-Leopard

It shows you how to remove the /home directory in your root on a Leopard machine.

Check out how “global” Sage development is here:

http://lite.sagemath.org/devmap.html

This was developed by Harald Schilly. If you’re a Sage developer and want to show up on the map, contact Harald Schilly.

You can find an updated binary distribution of Colloquy here:

http://yiqiang.org/Colloquy.zip

The only modification is that it is linked using -weak_library so that it uses Python 2.5 if it exists on your machine and falls back to Python 2.3 if you’re using 10.4. This is needed because Python plugins for Colloquy need the pyobjc bridge, which is in Python 2.5 (as shipped with Leopard), but not Python 2.3.

You can find a sample plugin here:

http://yiqiang.org/sage-devel-trac.py

To install it, drop it into

~/Library/Application Support/Colloquy/PlugIns/

and either restart Colloquy or type /reload plugins.

Today the Sage team received some very exciting and encouraging news.

Chris DiBona, who is the Open Source Programs Manager at Google, was able to secure funding for several students to work on Sage this summer. The students and the projects are:

Gary Furnish (Rewrite and Vastly Optimize Symbolic Computation)
Mike Hansen (Combinatorial Species)
Robert Miller (Backtracking Algorithms and Permutation Groups)
Yi Qiang (Distributed Computing with DSage)

More details are in the original proposal:

http://yiqiang.org/google_proposal.pdf

Thanks again to Google and everyone who worked on making this happen!

Part 2 of the wonderful documentary series “Steal this Film” is out. You can
download it via bittorrent here:
http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part2/

I’ve finally found a good solution for making the home/end keys work as expected in Terminal.app on Leopard.

1. Go to http://www.starryhope.com/tech/apple/2006/keyfixer/, download and install it.
2. Open up Terminal.app and go to Preferences (Cmd+,)
3. Find the Keyboard tab for your settings
4. Find the entry for home, click on edit, change “Action” to “send string to shell” and type in ctrl+a (it should expand it to \001)
5. Repeat this for the ‘end’ key, and type in ctrl+e

Restart Terminal.app and voila!

I’ve been working off and on for a while on a nice web front-end for dsage and here are some screenshots to show what I’ve got so far:

Jobs:

Job detail:

Server stats:

For those who swear by Markdown, I’d like to introduce you to a new piece of software called txt2tags. The syntax for txt2tags is very similar to Markdown, but has a ton more features, including tables support. Also, it supports many more output targets, including:

• HTML
• XHTML
• LaTeX (my favorite)
• Man page
• MoinMoin
• etc…

There is a fantastic TextMate bundle for it as well.

You can try out an online demo here.