Together in electric dreams

[austin_dern]

Ooh, so, the faculty is determining how many of which software licenses they need. The list of possible programs -- most with OS X versions installable on my own personal computer -- include some that are obviously useful, for me, like Matlab, Mathematica, and Maple.

Matlab is a nifty numerical computations program, including great tools for generating pretty pictures. Mathematica and Maple are symbolic mathematics programs capable of doing high school and undergraduate mathematics problems. Mathematica is the brainchild of slightly mad scientist Stephen Wolfram, who thinks he's overthrown all science for some John Conway Life-style computer games. Tch. If you accept his user-interface concepts it fits together elegantly. Maple was designed by chance, so its syntax has no end of anomalies, but it copes better with odd demands from the user, which (going against type) I make often.

They also offer programs harder to justify requesting -- Photoshop, notably. The times I need to use it for work-related purposes are rare, but do exist ... so is it fair to ask for it?

By the way, have the Atlanta Braves choked yet? Baseball's not much covered here.

Trivia: The Saint Paul Winter Carnival began in 1886 as response to an Easterner's description of the city as ``another Siberia''. Source: ``A Tale Of Twin Cities: Minneapolis and Saint Paul,'' Thomas Abercombie, National Geographic November 1980.

Currently Reading: The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, Giles Milton.

Comments

[gafennec.livejournal.com]

Oh Yeah...12-3 in Game 5 of the Division Series. Astros play the Cards in the NLCS.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Aw, I'm sorry. (I didn't mean to sound as glib as I think I did, either.)

I guess the followup question is, are the Red Sox still leading their fans on or have they broken their hearts yet? (I remember having to explain so patiently to Skyler last year why no, there was not going to be a Red Sox-Cubs World Series.)

[gafennec.livejournal.com]

It's s'right; Braves fans are used to heartache and disappointment. Boston plays in the ALCS against the Yankees starting tonight.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Championship series versus the Yankees? Oh, man, the more sensitive Bostonians are already screaming in agony.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The first game of that series was interesting, to say the least: Schilling (Boston's ace pitcher now) out after three innings, the Yankees pulling to an 8-0 lead.. and then Boston making it 8-7 in the eigth inning. 10-7 final, though, Yankee win.

The highest and second highest payrolls in baseball are the Yankees and the Red Sox, now; There's going to be plenty of matchups of the two in the near future in playoffs with the wild card system. And I recommend espn.com as a solid sports score source.

And if you use Photoshop, ask for Photoshop. The times you need it are there, so, you require it.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow, now that's a taunting of the Red Sox fans. I'd have expected them to build up a big lead and then wreck it instead. Well, there's six more games to go.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Way back when, I recall Potatoshop checked on the LAN for identical licenses; if you only use it seldomly, you could always just share a license, letting the software ensure that it's only running on one system at any given instant. Or, of course, there's Elements, a modestly "lightened" version, for much less, or, depending on what you actually use it for, GraphicConverter's also quite a capable little program.

At least in commerce, I've found it quite a sensible rule to not strive to minimise one's expenses. Which is not to say one shouldn't be frugal, of course, but cutting corners on hotel costs, or paying for one's own meals during business travel, doesn't engender any brownie points, so far as I've been able to gather, even in small companies, where such attention to lack of spending might be noticed.

Oh, I finally saw Sky Captain last night - jolly good fun, what?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know it won't make an appreciable difference in the school's resources whether I ask for stuff I wouldn't need for work or not, but I do want to be reasonably honest about what I need. I'm not, no matter what, going to request the Macromedia Flash programmer, for example.

Sky Captain hasn't opened in Singapore yet, though I'm up for it whenever it does. I saw postcards for it in McDonald's recently, so it must be soon.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

They still have Maple? I had a copy of that like 8-10 years ago, I think...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yup, they do. It was the symbolic math package of choice at RPI. Maple's undergone some big revisions since then -- notably making it possible to have multiple windows open simultaneously and adding flexibility in drawing pictures; and tossing in some minor user-interface revisions (the big one being changing the ``repeat last result'' character). They always sprung the huge new revisions on us TAs early the first week of class, so we couldn't be less baffled than the freshmen in Calc I were.

Still, there's things I like about it more than I like Mathematica, particularly when I'm trying to work on chains of coordinate changes.

[oliver-otter.livejournal.com]

I loved Maple. I was in one of the first classes at RPI to use it for Math I.

And I'd ask for Photoshop. It's been years since I've published a paper that didn't include at least one figure that needed Photoshop mods.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It probably won't surprise you to know Maple instruction to the TA's was always a pretty ragged thing. Mine was the first group of incoming TAs to get any instruction in how to teach, and that wasn't enough to figure out how to explain a program filled with as many odd crevices as Maple.

My favorite moment, though, was the student who wanted to know, since to get a floating-point expression for f(x) by typing evalf(%), why didn't you get the floating-point expression for g(x) by typing evalg(%) ...