Mailman 3 January 2011 - Edu-sig

xturtle online via processing.js !?
by Jurgis Pralgauskis 27 Sep '12

27 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 11 Mar '11

11 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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Poster proposals open until Tuesday
by Vern Ceder 23 Jan '11

23 Jan '11

Hey, I just wanted to make sure that everyone was aware that poster session proposals are still being accepted for PyCon. The deadline has been extended until Tuesday, January 25, to match the new early bird registration deadline. We do have a couple of great education themed posters, but I would love to see more. Just stop by http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/posters/cfp/ to find out how to submit a poster. Cheers, Vern -- Vern Ceder vceder(a)gmail.com, vceder(a)dogsinmotion.com The Quick Python Book, 2nd Ed - http://bit.ly/bRsWDW

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PyCon Poster proposals
by Vern Ceder 17 Jan '11

17 Jan '11

Hi everyone, The deadline for poster proposals for PyCon 2011 is fast approaching. While we actually do have some education themed posters this year, I wanted to make sure that everyone here on edu-sig got one final reminder. Below is the announcement that will be making the rounds shortly, but seeing where my loyalties lie, you all get it first! ;) If you want to get the word out about a project or share some of your Pythonic research and innovation in a poster, let me invite you to put in your proposal now - spots are limited and posters are being approved on a rolling basis as submitted. If you want to submit a poster, please check out the CFP at http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/posters/cfp/. If you have any questions don't hesitate to email me directly at vceder <AT> gmail.com. You may want to keep in mind the following: 1. a poster is a very different medium than a talk. You have 4x4 feet of space to present your topic with text and graphics. Since viewers will usually be at least 6-10 feet away from your poster, a bunch of slides or dense text will make a poor poster. 2. successful posters generate more personal conversations between the presenter and the attendees viewing the poster. Poster proposals are being evaluated and accepted on a rolling basis until January 19 or the 35 available slots are taken, so it's very much a "first come first served, supplies are limited" situation. All the best, Vern Ceder, PyCon Poster Session Chair -- Vern Ceder vceder(a)gmail.com, vceder(a)dogsinmotion.com The Quick Python Book, 2nd Ed - http://bit.ly/bRsWDW

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COMETS 2011 - 2nd International Track on Collaborative Modeling and Simulation - Call for Papers
by Daniele Gianni 17 Jan '11

17 Jan '11

Please accept our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this CfP) ################################################################# IEEE WETICE 2011 2nd International Track on Collaborative Modeling and Simulation CALL FOR PAPERS ################################################################# June 27 - June 29, 2011, Paris (France) http://www.sel.uniroma2.it/CoMetS11 ################################################################# # Papers Due: *** March 5, 2011 *** # Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings # by the IEEE Computer Society Press and indexed by EI. ################################################################# Modeling and Simulation (M&S) is increasingly becoming a central activity in the design of new systems and in the analysis of existing systems because it enables designers and researchers to investigate systems behavior through virtual representations. For this reason, M&S is gaining a primary role in many industrial and research fields, such as space, critical infrastructures, manufacturing, emergency management, biomedical systems and sustainable future. However, as the complexity of the investigated systems increases and the types of investigations widens, the cost of M&S activities increases for the more complex models and for the communications among a wider number and variety of M&S stakeholders (e.g., sub-domain experts, simulator users, simulator engineers, and final system users). To address the increasing costs of M&S activities, collaborative technologies must be introduced to support these activities by fostering the sharing and reuse of models, by facilitating the communications among M&S stakeholders, and more generally by integrating processes, tools and platforms. Aside from seeking applications of collaborative technologies to M&S activities, the track seeks innovative contributions that deal with the application of M&S practices to the design of collaborative environments. These environments are continuously becoming more complex and therefore their design requires systematic approaches to meet the required quality of collaboration. This is important for two reasons: to reduce rework activities on the actual collaborative environment, and to maximize the productivity and the quality of the process the collaborative environment supports. M&S offers the methodologies and tools for such investigations and therefore it can be used to improve the quality of collaborative environments. A non–exhaustive list of topics of interest includes: * collaborative environments for M&S * collaborative Systems of Systems M&S * workflow modelling for collaborative environments and processes * agent-based M&S * collaborative distributed simulation * collaborative component-based M&S * net-centric M&S * web-based M&S * model sharing and reuse * model building and evaluation * modeling and simulation of business processes * modeling for collaboration * simulation-based performance evaluation of collaborative networks * model-driven simulation engineering * domain specific languages for the simulation of collaborative environments * domain specific languages for collaborative M&S * databases and repositories for M&S * distributed virtual environments * virtual research environment for M&S To stimulate creativity, however, the track maintains a wider scope and invites interested researchers to present contributions that offer original perspectives on collaboration and M&S. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ On-Line Submissions and Publication +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ CoMetS'11 intends to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss key issues, approaches, open problems, innovative applications and trends in the track research area. Papers should contain original contributions not published or submitted elsewhere. Papers up to six pages (including figures, tables and references) can be submitted. Papers should follow the IEEE format, which is single spaced, two columns, 10 pt Times/Roman font. All submissions should be electronic (in PDF) and will be peer-reviewed by at least three program committee members. Accepted full papers will be included in the proceedings and published by the IEEE Computer Society Press (IEEE approval pending). Please note that at least one author for each accepted paper should register to attend WETICE 2011 to have the paper published in the proceedings. Authors may contact the organizers for expression of interests and content appropriateness at any time. Papers can be submitted in PDF format at the submission site (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=comets2011), which is supported by the EasyChair conference management system. Please contact the track chairs (comets2011(a)easychair.org) if you experience problems with the EasyChair Web site. +++++++++++++++ Important Dates +++++++++++++++ * Submission Deadline: March 5, 2011 * Decision to paper authors: April 4, 2011 * Final version of accepted papers due to IEEE: April 29, 2011 * Conference dates: June 27 - June 29, 2011 ++++++++++++++++++++ Organizing Committee ++++++++++++++++++++ * Andrea D'Ambrogio, University of Roma TorVergata, Italy * Daniele Gianni, European Space Agency, The Netherlands * Joachim Fuchs, European Space Agency, The Netherlands * Giuseppe Iazeolla, University of Roma TorVergata, Italy +++++++++++++++++ Program Committee +++++++++++++++++ * Santiago Balestrini, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA * Torsten Bieler, European Space Agency, The Netherlands * Olivier Dalle, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, CNRS & INRIA, France * Joseph Giampapa, SEI, Carnegie Mellon University, USA * Ralph Huntsinger, Beijng University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China and California State University, USA * Axel Lehmann, Universitaet der Bundeswehr Muenchen, Germany * Cristiano Leorato, Rhea, The Netherlands * Brian Lewis, Vanguard Software Corporation, USA * Steve McKeever, University of Oxford, UK * David Nickerson, Auckland Bioengineering Institute, NZ * Alfred Park, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA * Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT and RWTH Aachen, Germany * José L. Risco-Martin, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain * Maarten Sierhuis, NASA and Palo Alto Research Center, USA * Hans Vangheluwe, University of Antwerp, Belgium, and McGill University, Canada * Gabriel Wainer, Carleton University, Canada * Quirien Wijnands, European Space Agency, The Netherlands * Heming Zhang, Tsinghua University, China *** Contact Information *** Daniele Gianni (track co-chair) Email: daniele.gianni(a)esa.int

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the importance of divmod
by michel paul 13 Jan '11

13 Jan '11

I've been wondering if the Python divmod operator might point to a central issue in math education. Understanding ratio and difference is fundamental to understanding algebra. With all the symbol manipulation we teach in our curriculum, I'm not sure that most students really understand what ratios and differences are. Or, maybe they do, but we don't do a good job showing how to connect them. And we should, because understanding ratios of differences becomes calculus. I was discussing with my class writing a function reverse(n) for some natural number n that would reverse its digits (assuming base 10, but not excluding others). There are all kinds of ways to think about it. One kid accidentally discovered that s[::-1] reverses a string s. He was trying to do a slice and accidentally put in an extra colon. He called me over and showed me that it reversed the string of digits he had created from n. That made me have to look some stuff up. Wow, what a cool idea! You can step through a slice, just like with range(). But then, what if we want to think about it in purely mathematical terms? If we agree that, for whatever reason, we cannot convert to strings, how might we think about reversing digits using purely functional reasoning, just % and recursion? That's how I initially presented it, and then a kid suggested using divmod, and I was delighted. It totally simplified the expression. I think it would be great to come up with a list of divmod math problems. Anybody have some? I think developing fluency in divmod sorts of reasoning would do a whole lot of good for understanding ratio. Our current state of high school mathematical literacy that equates a rational number with some bizarre decimal is horrible. - Michel -- "Computer science is the new mathematics." -- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou

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py tutorials with some educational interaction
by Jurgis Pralgauskis 08 Jan '11

08 Jan '11

Hello, during the hollydays I put up some nice system to quite straitforward build tutorials... the tutorial is written in kind of markdown (this could be changed easily) http://ftp.akl.lt/users/jurgis/python/knygute/_sources/intro.1.txt and then it is converted to rst/sphinx like http://ftp.akl.lt/users/jurgis/python/knygute/intro.1.html Features: * automatically computes outputs/results of examples (I havent' found such feature otherwise) * adds interactions (via sphinx template js injections) at the bottom of each code block there are 3 buttons appearing on hover - 1st I'd call "syntax trainer by repeating" (for beginners it should be very good) - 2nd -- toggle off/on prompts and output -- for copying example to editor which I didn't found around sphinx (3 lines of jquery actually) - 3rd -- integration with http://people.csail.mit.edu/pgbovine/python/ - I also used turtle graphics to introduce function -- and I like this idea http://ftp.akl.lt/users/jurgis/python/knygute/intro.3.functions.html#funkci… any comments? Tutorial is in Lithuanian, but you can understand most by examples... I was writing it with absolute beginners in mind -- somehow I didn't find easy enough english tutorials. thinkscipy is a bit steep in my opinion... maybe you could indicate some, or maybe I'ts worth translating mine into english? Best regards -- Jurgis Pralgauskis Don't worry, be happy and make things better ;) http://kompiuterija.pasimokom.lt

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Re: [Edu-sig] End of 2010... Happy \N
by Laura Creighton 02 Jan '11

02 Jan '11

In a message of Sun, 02 Jan 2011 17:48:52 +0100, Fernando Salamero writes: > >> Will the better Python IDE emerge? Wing? Komodo? > >What about the new open souce Ninja-IDE? > >http://ninja-ide.appspot.com/ Thank you. I hadn't heard of that one before. Do they have any documentation anywhere? I couldn't find it on that site. Laura

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End of 2010... Happy \N
by kirby urner 02 Jan '11

02 Jan '11

Code Blit: The string module has translate and maketrans, through multiple versions. In per 3.x, an optional argument listed "letters to delete". The first argument was a kind of mapping, of 256 symbols to itself, except with some letters changed, what we would call a "permutation" in group theory (not promising a bijectional one-to-one mapping, no way, more likely surjective, do we agree?). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKNX8BUWR0g Here we are in 2.6, where the bytes type is not yet operative. IDLE 2.6.5 >>> b'a' 'a' >>> type(b'a') <type 'str'> Now let's replay that action in 3.1: >>> b'a' b'a' >>> type(b'a') <class 'bytes'> Here's my idea of a punctuation filter in 3.x, where the delete characters clause is now a delete bytes clause in the byte type superobject. import string def filterpunc(thestr): return thestr.encode('utf-8').translate(bytes.maketrans(b'',b''), string.punctuation.encode('utf-8')).decode('utf-8') See: http://diveintopython3.org/strings.html http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/42659/1763 if curious. This'd be used to strip string.punctuation characters out of any string. Other solutions possible, including with regexps. Suggestions for Features (SFFs -- not as prestigious or important as PEPs but sometimes the genetic precursor of a PEP). Save Session in IDLE or other PyShell: This is probably already out there, in IPython or one of those. It's so cool to be able to interactively bind names to working code in memory, but when you resume your session later, all that has gone away. In some other shell environments, you have the option to hibernate and resume, Smalltalk's being the most famous. Would it come with a source code snapshot version that encapsulates all the definitions as runnable code? The latest version of f, all the latest object values? That's another way to "pickle", to just write out a module that recreates what was there, when run. Python in Mathland: A link to a recent summary that mentions Python quite a bit: http://groups.google.com/group/mathfuture/browse_thread/thread/3d642708c2f2… Kirby

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2011 == sum of what consecutive primes?
by kirby urner 01 Jan '11

01 Jan '11

No, the question doesn't specify *how many* consecutive primes. Python scripts to find the answer might be.... Constraining it more, you could specify it's 11 consecutive primes that we're looking for. Kirby Teacher's note: Some students may not write a sieve or other prime-finding algorithm but instead screen scrape from a table off the web (e.g. OEIS). Other's may start with a cut and paste list of consecutive primes gotten from who knows where. If the question is this open ended, then be accepting of a diverse set of solutions.

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