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

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.

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.

Nice experience, today, we made the first day of the online tutorial. This means… fully remote introduction into authoring ActiveMath content.

Challenges… oh thousands… and some really turned out well.

In the preparation of the online tutorial, we keep fighting with network limitations!

Today I have changed the ActiveMath-SVN distribution to become a binary distribution. That is, the compilation result is part of the svn repository.

This will mean that people do an update will get conflicts and means that other recipients will not need a JDK anymore. The installation using ActiveMath-SVN is now documented.

I remember having studied a book using what I remember as the british category school. This notation stipulates that function application is written left to right, ie that:

f∘g(x) should be written xfg

As far as I can tell, all the tools I have seen around that handle mathematical notations, both at input and output, do save brackets around binary operators by the use of the precedence of an operator: it basically says that an operator has a given precedence x and, if a term must be presented as an operand, a bracket is output if the child-binary operator has a lower precedence. (think a*(b+c))

I have just found that the precedence of convolution should not be a (linearly ordered) number…

Hello Activemathers. I wanted to invite persons using recent CVS snapshots of ActiveMath to try the content-storage I have been working on thus far. It is called Slumb, and is expected to be better than LuceneMBase.

Re-use As Perspective Addition

Had a chance to read the article of Busetti and friends (see it at SpringerLink) about a platform and experience they made with pre-service teachers in Italy trying to manipulate learning objects in critiquing them and re-using them.

I know this site is for ActiveMathers but I'll still give it a try as a throw of a personal view with a pretty general scope...

I was recently in two major world heritage sites:

• the Altamira prehistoric paintings' caves (in Cantanbria)
• the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao

In both of these... no photographs... and guards to keep it strongly!

Why ? Some used to say that it is to protect the poor paintings from the horrible effect of the flashes... well... maybe... but honestly... this was not the case of both of these exhibits (note for Altamira caves: we're only allowd to visit fake caves)

Just to notify that after some time taken I dare say eds.activemath.org starts to be a nice tool.

The many plugins available now start to be comfortable. Please all reader, take time to use features there... here's a few:

• the mail notification
• the chat room
• the forums
• having a blog ? trackback is enabled
• a WYSIWYG editor (some like)
• a wiki-like syntax (and an overall wiki-policy)

Soon some better graphical appearance will come. Until then, I'll now start to write a small documentation.

we're starting pretty cool with drupal for an attempt at an authoring community where most of the exchanges are publically visible.
Have a look at http://eds.activemath.org/.