Mailman 3 June 2010 - Edu-sig

xturtle online via processing.js !?
by Jurgis Pralgauskis 28 Sep '12

28 Sep '12

Hi, I am struggling around with interactive online py tutorials with https://launchpad.net/projects/intro-to-code (ith might become securely sandboxed soon, as pypy made it possible http://blog.sandbox.lt/en/WSGI%20and%20PyPy%20sandbox :) but one more thing is I'd like to let access xturtle functionality online - one possible way could be triggering tkinter to save its canvas to ps, and then convert them with imagemagic and show via web (animated gif or static) - but if pyjamas can render GUI for js (http://www.google.lt/search?&q=pyjamas+python ), mayby there is a way to **translate turtle commands to processing.js analogues** http://ejohn.org/blog/processingjs/ would it be difficult -- how do you think? -- Jurgis Pralgauskis tel: 8-616 77613; jabber: jurgis(a)akl.lt; skype: dz0rdzas; Don't worry, be happy and make things better ;) http://sagemath.visiems.lt

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Eclipse as Python3 IDE
by kirby urner 12 Mar '11

12 Mar '11

Just wanted to share experiences using PyDev plugin within Eclipse, with Python 3... I've not been unable to get pickle to work properly, with the error confirmed by others. Sometimes (in at least one case) an error marker will indicate a module name cannot be resolved, and yet it imports and works anyway. Getting proper syntax-coloring around triple-quotes seems problematic, especially when the first line is empty e.g. """ comments go here """ However, I'm able to get the coloring situation to resolve by moving text around later... On the whole, Eclipse is pretty capable in supplying an interactive shell, lots of different windows. There's even a terminal window option if you want to do ssh into a server right from within Eclipse. As the above difficulties get ironed out, I think Eclipse will continue to serve as a development platform for Pythonistas. It's not the only option, given Visual Studio, Wing IDE etc., but it's one of the better free ones (eMacs, vim -- these do everything too, in the hands of experienced users, Notepad not so much). [ I remember how Jason Cunliffe used to post a lot about Leo to this archive. There's a school of thought that's more into "literary programming" as I'd call it, where comments might be relatively copious, with more hypertext relationships. You get these fancy markups... ] Some of you may be familiar with the O'Reilly School of Technology (OST) and its use of Eclipse as a front end to accredited courses in the many languages, databases and so on. Rather than use the free-standing Eclipse, which is an option, you get a customized student version called Ellipse that runs of their servers in a remote desktop session. This seems a creative approach and gets a next generation of developer prepared with one of the state of the art environments, using some of the best industry standard tools (e.g. Python and MySQL). Kirby PS: in other news, I've continued to focus on the plight of the lone FoxPro coder (which was me for many years, but not just me) and possible migration paths for legacy applications. FoxPro is a dialect of xBase nutured by Microsoft over the decades. It competes with their other products and too many people use it for free (not the original business model, unlike Java's) so the plan is to discontinue support for it by 2015 I think it is. This decision is having lots of boat rocking-ripple effects, It's not automatic that the .NET platform is where to go next, certainly not with VB necessarily. New developers don't want to waste time learning a proprietary dead language that might be hard to come by down the road, so there's increasing pressure to migrate those legacy FoxPro apps that still do valuable work. I haven't been tracking closely and don't know if MSFT is taking IronPython that seriously, in terms of marketing and outreach. Server side apps still seem to be gaining over thick clients in many institutional settings, but again, I'm not posing as having a lot of overview here. Gotta read all those IT mags I guess, but who has the time? Pointers to true story use cases welcome.

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Updating some more...
by kirby urner 01 Jul '10

01 Jul '10

Yeah, Python 3.x is not ready for prime time in several respects, all talk of Eclipse aside, but that's to be expected as it's still pretty new. I've seen some buzz regarding the #python channel on Freenode, where I gather some bots have been automatically steering people away from the 3.x series. edu-sig doesn't have any real time channel for assisting educators or their students I don't think. Too over-specialized maybe. Asynchronous is good enuff, no need to compete with #python eh? Belated congrats to Vern Ceder for stepping up to lead poster session at usa.pycon 2011 in Atlanta per PSF blog. http://pyfound.blogspot.com/2010/06/leadership-for-pycon-us-2011.html I think py-dev is aware of the situation with Python 3.x and those planning to use that product for production roll outs will continue encouraging its swift evolution. As I was mentioning, the O'Reilly School of Technology has already made the switch, as have the authors of Mathematics for the Digital Age.[1] Where I'm focused a lot goes back to spatial geometry and VPython which I think gives just the right amount of "right brain" gratification to let the "left brain" keep exercising those lexical skills (programming, like algebra, like bash/posix/gnu, is highly lexical). Geometry + Geography is how the simulation games tend to work, with a geography being potentially fantastic, a fantasy, like Alice (in Wonderland) or Uru.[2] Or a game might be closer to real, as when running macro and micro economics simulations (e.g. electrical grid management vs. home appliances management).[3] You'll find me on mathfuture (Google group) and math-teach @ Drexel among other places. A lot of times I don't think the material is Pythonic enough to merit any notes to this list. Sometimes I meet up with other posters to this list. Using the Decimal class to explore limits some more is in my queue. For example, the number e, as in "e ** (1j * math.pi) = -1" may be expressed as lim (1 + 1/n) ** n. >>> import math >>> math.e ** (1j * math.pi) (-1+1.2246467991473532e-16j) >>> n = 10000. >>> (1 + 1/n) ** n 2.7181459268249255 >>> math.e 2.7182818284590451 >>> My first exercise with the Hubble folks was to look at phi to some 100 places and do a string match against a text file with phi to some 100K places. http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/holdenweb/decimaldemo.py http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/holdenweb/PhiTo100000Places.txt I did something similar with a Ramanujan series converging to pi, however I felt my coding style was too ugly.[4] This is a kind of real world convergence investigation that computational math might include (as an exercise in coding skills), whereas in the calculator era we stayed happy with much larger epsilons. Kirby [1] http://www.skylit.com/mathandpython.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_McGee's_Alice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uru:_Ages_Beyond_Myst [3] http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7111960&tstart=0 [4] http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2008/02/reflective-fragment.html (has a link back to this archive)

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posts to math forum mentioning Python
by kirby urner 17 Jun '10

17 Jun '10

Sharing these links cuz they yak about MFTDA (textbook), oft mentioned on edu-sig (still here Gary?): http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7099591&tstart=0 http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7099594&tstart=0 This one (below) doesn't mention Python, but is the kind of thing I've used Python to communicate about: http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2084375&tstart=0 (why I was asking about 3D/4D Logo, which I've been looking at) E.g. http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/pymath.html (Fig 1 = Mite, compare w/ Fig 10 depiction in PDF by Senechal http://tetrahedraverse.com/tverse/packings/temp2/tetraspace.pdf ) Kirby Urner 4Dsolutions.net -- "Computer science is the new mathematics." -- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou (thx to mp)

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Announcement: Gato & CATBox
by Alexander Schliep 14 Jun '10

14 Jun '10

Hello everyone, Winfried Hochstaettler, from the FernUniversität Hagen in Germany, and myself have been working for quite some time on Gato, the Graph Animation Toolbox, and CATBox, the Combinatorial Algorithm Toolbox, which is an interactive course in combinatorial optimization published by Springer Verlag. Gato and the algorithms itself are all written in Python and the algorithm animation is provided through animated data structures. There is more information, screencasts and dowloadlinks at http://schliep.org/CATBox. Gato itself is LGPL licensed; the book and the algorithm implementations used are copyright Springer. Gato and CATBox has been used in university classrooms for several years by colleagues on several continents at the later undergraduate/early graduate level. We would be particularly interested in collaborating with high school/lower level undergrad faculty. Screencast: http://biomaps.rutgers.edu/~schliep//CATBox/Dijkstra.swf Best, Alexander A longer blurb about CATBox: Graph algorithms are easy to visualize and indeed there already exists a variety of packages and programs to animate the dynamics when solving problems from graph theory. Still, and somewhat surprisingly, it can be difficult to understand the ideas behind the algorithm from the dynamic display alone. CATBox consists of a software system for animating graph algorithms and a course book which we developed simultaneously. The software system presents both the algorithm and the graph and puts the user always in control of the actual code that is executed. He or she can set breakpoints, proceed in single steps and trace into subroutines. The graph, and additional auxiliary graphs like residual networks, are displayed and provide visual feedback. The course book, intended for readers at advanced undergraduate or graduate level, introduces the ideas and discusses the mathematical background necessary for understanding and verifying the correctness of the algorithms and their complexity. Computer exercises and examples replace the usual static pictures of algorithm dynamics. For this volume we have chosen solely algorithms for classical problems from combinatorial optimization, such as minimum spanning trees, shortest paths, maximum flows, minimum cost flows as well as weighted and unweighted matchings both for bipartite and non-bipartite graphs. We consider non-bipartite weighted matching, in particular in the geometrical case, a highlight of combinatorial optimization. In order to enable the reader to fully enjoy the beauty of the primal-dual solution algorithm for weighted matching, we present all mathematical material not only from the point of view of graph theory, but also with an emphasis on linear programming and its duality. This yields insightful and aesthetically pleasing pictures for matchings, but also for minimum spanning trees.

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Part-time Online Python, C ++ Teacher Needed
by Anna Roys 14 Jun '10

14 Jun '10

From another list - an opportunity ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 9:34 AM Subject: Part-time Online Teacher To: teched(a)list.nsta.org Gifted LearningLinks, the online provider of Center for Talent Development is looking for interested teachers to teach part-time technology courses beginning September 15, 2010. Courses in need of an instructor are Computer Gaming Academy, Introduction to Computer Programming in Python and Honors Programming in C++. For additional information about our program, please visit http://ctd.northwestern.edu/gll If interested in applying, send your resume and a cover letter to gll(a)northwestern.edu =================

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Re: [Edu-sig] news & views
by Daniel Ajoy 11 Jun '10

11 Jun '10

> Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 23:56:58 -0700 > From: kirby urner <kirby.urner(a)gmail.com> > > Regarding Logo, there's an esoteric genre of Logo > where the turtle swims in a 3D tank, has roll, > pitch and yaw type parameters, more like a small > airplane. I'm pretty sure we had open source free > versions. Lemme go check: > > ... found some links. Anyone recommend a > 3D Logo page? http://neoparaiso.com/logo/galeria-mswlogo.html FMSLogo is free and does have 3D, and not just wireframes but polygons, lighting, perspective. https://sourceforge.net/projects/fmslogo/files/ Daniel

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news & views
by kirby urner 10 Jun '10

10 Jun '10

Regarding Logo, there's an esoteric genre of Logo where the turtle swims in a 3D tank, has roll, pitch and yaw type parameters, more like a small airplane. I'm pretty sure we had open source free versions. Lemme go check: ... found some links. Anyone recommend a 3D Logo page? My approach was to write turtle like commands that would parse into static instructions in ray tracing language, so you didn't see any output by the turtle in real time. Very low budget (zero). The L-systems paper I wrote captures some of the flavor: http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/lsystems.html (lotsa broken links) http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/numeracy3.html (scroll down for fractal tree) These days I'm interested in 3D/4D Logo because of the Mite, Syte and Kite discussion.** These are space-filling shapes, with the Mite being a center- piece of some of my Saturday Academy classes in so-called Martian Math (wherein Python gets used): http://wikieducator.org/Martian_Math http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/sets/72157622961425831/ Also, I'm anchoring for Holden Web while Steve sojourns at Pycon / Singapore, which is starting today. http://pycon.sit.rp.sg/ Holden Web is part of an OST group developing curriculum for intermediate Python students (beginner already on-line). The interface is Ellipse, a student version of Eclipse. Steve is the curriculum writer, packs a lot in. Here's a screen shot from earlier today: http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/4686547486/sizes/l/in/photostream/ Python1 module comes with a 2.x version of Python in a Nutshell (Martelli). I need to go find a 3.x version, suggest OST use that instead, given course content. This is state of the art, meaning Python 3.1, with all the related challenges of finding drivers and adapters. I'm glad for that PEP moratorium, giving library maintainers more of a chance to keep up. On another front, I've been helping my friend in Indonesia with his wxPython + Visual connection. The wx GUI is to set parameters only, with VPython hosting its own window (embedding the latter in the former is a trick I've not seen done yet -- they say use PyOpenGL). Some kind of physics problem (he's in a technical college). On yet another front (or more on the polyhedra front), MIT's ConceptNet is ready for business with Python bindings. You'll find a huge database of words associated with other words -- not the same as a thesaurus, more like "free association" semantic webs of olden days. They kind of goof on "tetrahedron" though, suggesting it's a polygon and/or "sides" must all be the same (both assertions false): http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/4680326861/in/photostream/ http://csc.media.mit.edu/docs/conceptnet/overview.html Saw some action on Diversity, with mention of edu-sig. Maybe someone wants to report (some overlap in foci & concerns). Kirby ** (explaining my cryptic nomenclature more): Mite (minimum space-filler) = AAB (plane nets on-line) http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/4676742214/ http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s09/figs/f5400b.html Sytes = Mite + Mite http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/4679491702/in/photostream/ Kites = Syte + Syte http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/4678858801/in/photostream/ OST = O'Reilly School of Technology

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fmslogo turtle question
by Daniel Ajoy 09 Jun '10

09 Jun '10

> Can anybody give me some help? > > I am trying to set the heading towards a point that is relative to the current position. > > This isn't working: > setheading towards [xcor+30 ycor+20] > It says, > towards doesn't like [xcor+30 ycor+20] as input > > > > I tried defining two values to use > > > > make "x xcor+30 > > make "y ycor+20 > > towards [:x :y] > > and even though it know what :x and :y are it gives the same sort of error as before. > > > > It only seems to like a liter pair of numbers within the brackets. > > > > Does anyone know how to get towards to take less literal coordinates? show [some text] [some text] show [:some :text] [:some :text] show [fd 10] [fd 10] show [xcor+30 ycor+20] [xcor+30 ycor+20] show list xcor+30 ycor+20 [30 20] Daniel

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fmslogo turtle question
by C or L Smith 09 Jun '10

09 Jun '10

Can anybody give me some help? I am trying to set the heading towards a point that is relative to the current position. This isn't working: setheading towards [xcor+30 ycor+20] It says, towards doesn't like [xcor+30 ycor+20] as input I tried defining two values to use make "x xcor+30 make "y ycor+20 towards [:x :y] and even though it know what :x and :y are it gives the same sort of error as before. It only seems to like a liter pair of numbers within the brackets. Does anyone know how to get towards to take less literal coordinates? /c

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