eds.activemath.org

It’s not really new that mathematical notation is made there to be abused so as to be most efficient for the current context. But I just met an extreme case:

In the OpenMath3 and MathML3-content efforts, we are polishing the description of symbols’ so that they can be common. Discussion about using linear syntax appears, of course, and an extreme case about the need for context was just posted by James Davenport:

Skype has always appeared to me as the real end-user application… something you have to accept to reach certain users. It’s nicely designed but it’s too proprietary.

But hold on, Skype actually tried a standard… sed!

I just attended the MUPPLE workshop here at ECTEL in Maastricht. In general, I tend to be finding bad style the mashup approaches such as the “very simple web-page embedding”. In this case, I was impressed of seeing something real useful happen just under my eyes.

Since a few weeks, we are playing with Google Web Toolkit, a very nice tool that compiles java code to JavaScript. Among the features of GWT, transparent remote server invocation is offered. The nice thing is that it right away forces you to consider services asynchronous which yields responsive user-interfaces. The wrong thing is that it seems to be fully version dependent to a point where, basically, one wishes to throw it all away.

Sorry, this time it really is unrelated… but I just wanted to celebrate the joy of OmniWeb again and again.

OmniWeb is a commercial browser, not very expensive, one with customer support and a polish that you never get anywhere else for many aspects! It has secret features for web-developers and this fluidity that pushes you to abuse it…

I recently had a very simple request… soooo simple: our user just wishes to copy the formula from Mathematica (which can copy it in MathML) and paste it on something that does web.

I just went around and tried… SeaMonkey should support that in editor and reader: copy a piece of HTML with MathML and paste it, didn’t even work… my 1/x became a place full of nbsps in three lines!

Tim Bray indicates that almost all the legal impediments before an open-source java are cleared. Now this really means there might be, one day, a clean java, something that does cause headaches to distributions!

I much love the GNU Classpath license… really… as simple as that: do whatever you want to “link to it” but there rest is the GPL-full-land.

There’s a wind for more content construction in the ActiveMath group, with at least two projects at the University focussed on creating content (and a adapt platform and…). And MathML starts to play an important role there.

More and more, I cannot understand why the default subversion toolset exports logs in a format different than RSS.

And actually I have found one from codingmonkeys.de which I slightly polished.

My old Nicephore laptop has died recently. It’s always a shock.

But it came at a point when a MacBook Pro was available, so I insisted and had it. A simple 2.4 GHz, 15” laptop.

To my surprise, the power available suddenly makes it possible to do so many things I had postponed!

Recently, Bob Matthews posted a mathtype trick, something that was not new to me, but something that struck me this time: you can, now, copy-and-paste from Wikipedia, shown in a current browser, into MathType (so into Word or PowerPoint).

A new draft of MathML-3 has just come out. It has a bunch of good maturations. But it also has a very nice new section on clipboard support which could generalize.

Just found this by browsing randomly. Very delicious: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/~cmiller/Linux+Is this is a very good summary of the traumatic experience many folks do while being proud of running a cleanly free software.

There are virtues in cleanly free software, and thanks god there are folks that take time to actually endure the woes up-there and that period is over for me since a few years.

The real virtues lie in the realization of the long-term impact of the licensing policies… which has carried a lot of its fruits, e.g. with the realization of the most dom

Could eds.activemath.org please consider and explore a Mathematical User Interface(MUI) enabled as a service, in order to facilitate a somewhat more seamless integration of being able to input Mathematical content into Drupal, the currently chosen communication medium, or otherwise?

Paul,

Thank you very much for enabling the issue of LaTeX Into Active Math to take place at a LibreSource instantiation you have created.

The enhanced facilities you have made available will very well come in handy in the exploration of the issue.

Well done.

I am currently discovering Libresource, a forge focussed on sharing a set of sources. A first experience has been made with a non-technical user on the tentative komma content collection… very positive!

In intergeo, we recently realized that ranking is not for free in SQL databases… not a new story… just an important fact which might influence the choice of tools!

This video demoes the introduction of a new language into an OQMath file.

This thought would like to report a tiny catastrophe I recently experienced with Drupal which leads to mistrust considerably both Drupal and PHP in its essence and comforts my inclination to avoid PHP for intergeo community platform.

There seem to be quite a few people who create exciting and beautiful Mathematical documents and presentations, using LaTeX.

How can ActiveMath be utilized to transmogrify the documents into self-directed, interactive and adaptive web-based learning opportunities?

Looking for a good licensing model for content which stimulates re-usability? Here’s an attempt…

… is finally working… I’m pretty proud of it… undoubtedly, it’s the way to stimulate discovery of math input.

The question of storage of OMDocs keeps coming… why the hell do you, in ActivMath, use your own storage solution for OMDoc fragments and not one of the classical SQL or XML databases? Below is a short answer, helped by Eliotte Rusty Harold.

Below is an extract of The Wealth of Networks, a book trying to describe the mechanisms of “peer productions” with a very convincing analysis of why big projects such as Wikipedia or Open-Source-Software projects have managed to attract a large human investment. The extract follows the strong claim that an essential quality of high-involvement peer-production spaces is the possibility of small-grained human investments.

As part of the ActiveMath-EU effort, integration into open-source LMS have to be considered. This time I am following a hack that find somewhat elegant to integrate into Moodle an ActiveMath that is “slaved by this Moodle”: both Moodle and ActiveMath share a domain, and Moodle’s Apache config is extended to proxy to ActiveMath all queries in a sub-path. In turn, ActiveMath can use this to read identity of the queries. Have a test on our test moodle

ActiveMath builds on a heap of specificity… you generalize you either break it forever or spend six months debugging.

Now, this is a great day! SLuMB, the OMDoc file storage for ActiveMath supports <imports from="x" type="global"/>. This was a standard feature of OMDoc specification but was never supported. I finally understood that this is the clean-way to support the management of big files and I even successfully split a LeAM_calculus monster-file in two without breaking references.

I would like to put forward a few simple samplers, which exhibit some of the elements, notations, layouts and features I want to have at my disposal for delivering my contents. I would like to see if and how, it can it be realized in ActiveMath, or, if not why not?

Ongoing Explorations of how best to use eds.activemath.org, i.e., among other things, where best to put and find stuff.

You have opened up a new dimension for editors and authors of ActiveMath.