A Learner's Journal

Aardvark the Social Search Service

2009-08-13T19:25:00.007+07:00

Aardvark is a real time social search service that to take your question and attempt to find people who are able to answer. You often receive your results in a few minutes. It also acts as a middle man that forwards messages between people so they can have conversations with each other without the need to add them into their friendlist. This is useful if you want a weak short-term relationship just to find out some information.

I played with it for a while and asked questions related to various fields. The responses were prompt and useful. So far this service has not spammed me. I have not received any questions, yet whenever I posted a question, I got a prompt reply. This suggests the bot is quite careful in choosing the right one to ask.

This looks like a new idea, kind of Yahoo Answers in real time for the impatient. With this service, people can connect with each other in a more productive way.

SAGE - The Open Source Math Tool

2009-03-24T16:00:00.017+07:00

Lately I came accross this project while seeking an open source alternative for Mathematica and Maple. Here's the official site. The project started in 2005 and has been actively developed until now. The newest release is 3.4, which came out just more than a week ago.

SAGE is essentially a collection of different softwares. It combines many math packages like PARI, Maxima, etc. and make them work together seamlessly.

I found this program powerful and very easy to use. It's written mainly in Python, and you interact with it using Python's syntax. This is a huge advantage over using many packages separately, since one would have to learn each separate program's syntax then.

The software comes in two flavors: a standalone desktop application, whose source code is around 200MB (I had to compile it from source because there were no pre-built package for my Linux distro), or you can sign up to use the web application flavor. So far I have not seen any difference in functionalities between the two, but I believe they mention that somewhere in their documentation.

One can get used to the program quickly by following the tutorial. Last month I wrote a calculus library using Haskell. This software makes my work looks like crap, what a shame :)

Introduction

2009-03-13T09:56:00.001+07:00

Welcome guys.

This is the place I share my knowledge and point of view on various issues, mostly related to Computers and Mathematics. Please be aware that I'm still very much a novice, so I expect to hear a lot of feedbacks and corrections from everybody.

Cheers :)