It’s unfortunate that this blog is turning into rants about scientific computing. Perhaps I am simply ethnically predisposed to doing science and kvetching.
Today’s rant is brought about by my collaborators’ request to make my paper figures “presentable”. The reason is simple — current figure drafts are straight up Mathematica output, relying mostly on [...]
My Mathematica adventures continue. I am slowly hammering out a good way to manage namespaces and scoping. I was hoping to write a set of concise utility functions for that purpose, but ran into severe roadblocks. Certain things related to switching contexts in the front end turn out to be impossible programmatically from the kernel [...]
I come back from California sporting a tie-dyed t-shirt with a peace sign, good Chinese food, bubble tea and Yogurtland soft-serve still having the last of their nutrients being extracted by my system, and many conversations lingering in my mind.
I can still see the faces of my interlocutors and hear fragments of their remarks. Yet [...]
Reading a paper on “Electromagnetic Interactions of Molecules with Metal Surfaces”. It explains Weyl’s method for computing fields of a dipole over half-space (apparently much simpler than Sommerfeld’s solution).
“Consider an oscillating point dipole….” Hmm, what’s a dipole?.. (Browse through Jackson chapter 4.)
Oh right, spherical harmonics… dipole moment (in general, lowest non-vanishing multipole moment) is [...]
After spending a substantial amount of time tweaking my system, it now works as well as I want it to, and I am hereby making a public promise not to touch my config files for a month. I want to be able to post a screenshot a month from now with a “last modified” timestamp [...]
That was the final piece of the puzzle, the only major feature that was not working. Now my Emacs environment is complete! Hooray!
As usual, all the information needed to get this running was out there, but poorly organized. Basically, it comes down to the following two points:
1. NTEmacs can only use cygwin ssh-agent if launched [...]
I started playing around with running Mathematica inside Emacs. Once I develop the set of Mathematica <-> Matlab interoperability scripts, this functionality will be invaluable. An unexpected (pleasant) surprise was that Mathematica graphics is available at the console through Java — you just have to load <<JavaGraphics`. The graphics performance is slow as molasses on [...]
…that even after on a public forum I tell the company co-founder and director of user interface research that the product of his life’s work, basically, blows, the good folks at Wolfram actually went and optimized my code, making it run an order of magnitude faster (although still an order of magnitude slower than Matlab [...]
Mathematica’s Manipulate[] functionality got me hooked on interactivity, so once I had the beam propagation code running smoothly, I decided to implement a primitive GUI for it — how hard could it be?.. Wasn’t hard, really, but somewhat time consuming and required lots of code. I mean, order of 100 lines of code to do [...]
Tweak of the day:
Problem: Cygwin doesn’t support UTF-8, which leads to issues with unicode filenames (e.g. when running backups).
Solution: for Cygwin, download the patch from http://www.okisoft.co.jp/esc/utf8-cygwin/
in .bashrc:
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
alias ls=’ls –show-control-chars’
Terminal: mrxvt doesn’t support unicode, but urxvt does. If urxvt is not using unicode fonts by default (or the font is ugly), figure out which [...]