On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 10:25 PM, ahmet alper parker <aapar...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Also, why not give them some real life example for why to use a > free/opensource program instead of a commercial one. I think this is > far more important then money. In example, one of a professor at my > university has written a program on a language which has no support > now. And everything he has written for hydraulics engineering has to > be converted to some means of other programming tools, etc. I still > remember the vb6.0 and .net problem (http://classicvb.org/). > Predictable life cycle is a crucial topic. >
This is how I ended up at Sage. The model I am reimplementing was written in a dialect of BASIC, QuickBASIC I think, in the late 80s and carefully backed up onto 5 1/4" floppies. There are parts of the code published in a book (missing a subroutine) and the floppies are unreadable (without going to a lot of expense/time with recovery services and tools). The ODEs are all in a paper naturally so all is not lost. After playing around with reimplementing the program in Scilab, I reviewed my methodology and realised I wanted to have something that is more reproducable in the future with regards test runs and results. NetCDF, while probably overkill, gives me the means of recording metadata with the input and output files. NetCDF support is available with Python. Rather than building my own Python development environment I remembered Sage and here I am. As I need to write as well as read NetCDF files, I am building NetCDF and pycdf packages. having 'fun' with libtool with the NetCDF spkg build, but that is for another email. > On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:35 PM, ahmet alper parker <aapar...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> Why not ask the users to give their opinions about the web page they >> use like "did you find what you are looking for?", "could you please >> rate this page?", or marketing research questionnaires like which >> mathematics software you use?, what would you like to see at web >> page?" etc...? >> >> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 10:00 PM, Keith Clawson <rattletyb...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >>> >>> I like the site the way it is. I've been translating many of the pages >>> into Russian, and the great thing about the design is the simplicity. >>> The source html reads more or less like LaTeX to me in that all the >>> commands are meaningful and transparent. As far as the content, I >>> think it is important to consider how easy it is for a non-native >>> English speaker to understand. Definitely anybody who uses Sage must >>> know some English, but keeping the navigation clear and simple might >>> help visitors who perhaps think in another language, and it also makes >>> producing translations easier. >>> >>> As for the colors and logo, to my eye the Sage site appears similar to >>> this Google page I'm typing on, so there is a counter-example to the >>> trend of using many colors on professionally designed sites. I >>> personally believe mathematicians would tend to prefer that the site >>> communicates the main ideas concisely, whereas commercial sites want >>> to provoke an impulsive decision to buy and buy again. Thus I believe >>> that the different intentions behind producing the sites naturally >>> leads to very different looking sites. I'd much rather see the content >>> change and help with that than change the navigation and appearance. >>> >>> -Keith >>> >>> >> >>> >> > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
