plaes.org

For the most of the past week, I have been working on variable separation of PDE's and yesterday I sent my merge request. Currently two mostly-used strategies - additive and multiplicative separation are implemented and tested on simpler equations like Laplace's.

So, what's next? :)

I am currently prototyping a pdesolve() which can handle first-order equations (and also any hyperbolic PDEs) using characteristic methods. Once this is finished, I can start adding the variable separation into pdesolve() and after this has been done, I can move on to implment support for boundary and initial conditions.

School finally ended last week (no exam results yet, though) and I took a long-long trip back home.. Week started slowly due to the deadly combination of the forgotten laptop power cord, Midsummer day, Victory Day and best weather ever. This resulted in lots of grilling, beer and also a small side-effect: my GSoC mentor is probably quite angry now for missing my weekly update again...

Back to Sympy now.

So far all my various doc-related fixes have been committed to upstream, and I have decided to bite the bullet and start implementing the variable separation for PDEs. So far some very simple testcases based on first-order equations work, but I have some trouble with equations containing higher order derivatives. You can pull from gihtub/pde-separate and please break it :)

As I have still exam session in progress, I haven't had much motivation to write about my almost non-existent progress with GSoC.

So, school first: I have still one exam left - Optics, which is on 19th and will be hard as some of the stuff we are required to know does not even exist (tunnel effect) in the Hecht's "Optics". (Although I might be wrong, as I only have 2nd edition and later editions might have updates). Fortunately I have almost 100% of the lecture notes available. After the exam, either on Friday or Saturday, I will be moving back home (which is ~1 day of travelling) and then I can really start with GSoC.

Now, GSoC..

As some people have had trouble connecting to my personal server (Who said that free countries do not have internet censorship?), I created a mirror of my private Sympy repo on github. There you can find the following two branches I consider upstream quality:

• py3k - some preliminary Python3K porting, which gets rid of all the dict.has_key() that were reported during test phase. (So some still remain).

• doc-fixes - I ran into few problems while tried to build Sympy's documentation - most of them were Sphinx warnings, although ran into some errors too. So please review and comment.

There's also my pde-wip branch, but currently I'm not very happy with that approach...

Thanks Ondrej for pushing me to keep posting :)

This sometimes happens in real life :)

18:32 < plaes> hmm..
18:32 < plaes> [ 2546.243316] emerge[4717]: segfault at 7fff860ddac8 ip 00007fff867c4ebe sp 00007fff860ddad0 error 6 in libpython2.6.so.1.0[7fff866d3000+159000]
18:32 < plaes> any ideas?
18:33 <@DrEeevil> what did you do?
18:33 < plaes> emerge --sync :)
18:34 <@DrEeevil> please go away ;)
18:34 < plaes> well, `sudo emerge --sync`
18:34 <@DrEeevil> sudo go away! ;)

Yesterday was so far the hottest day of the year topping near 28 degrees Celsius. It was also the first day of the exam session and I already got my feet wet with "Structure of Matter I". Unfortunately this isn't the only one - I still have exams in Theoretical Physics I, Mathematical Physics III and the hardest of them all - Optics.

So, what about Summer of Code and my project Partial Differential Equation support for Sympy?

I certainly haven't jumped the ship and continue working on it as soon as possible. The first task for me is to define an acceptable syntax for defining and solving PDE problems (with all the hints, assumptions, initial values and boundary conditions).

(After staring this text for 15 minutes and trying to figure out what shall I write here about my plans, I finally have to conclude that it has been a long hot day...)

As a sidenote, I did set up an application for reviewing patches. Hopefully it eases the management of the patch queue and improves overall code quality. (I really find google groups' lack of inline diff support quite unhelpful :( )

PS. You might need root certificate from Cacert, otherwise you may run into issues accessing the site.

From Adobe's RTMP specification website - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/rtmp/:

Adobe is expected to post the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) specification on the Adobe Developer Connection at this URL (www.adobe.com/devnet/rtmp/) in the first half of 2009. Please check back for updates. You can learn more about plans to publish the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) specification in our press release.

So now Adobe has issued a DMCA takedown notice for a project called rtmpdump which implements the very same protocol...

But there is still some hope - http://lkcl.net/rtmp/ :)

...or download locally hosted rtmpdump-v1.6.tar.gz

Stumbled upon an article titled 4-hour work day which talks about workdays that start at 9 and end at noon.

This is 3 hours, not 4 :)

I have managed to fulfill the requirements for "Models of Industrial Mathematics" and "Practical Course in Electronics", which means that almost 25% of subjects has been successfully completed. :)

Of course things that are left, aren't the easiest courses in the curriculum - Optics + labs, Theoretical Physics I, Mathematical Physics III, Structure of Matter, "Security and Defence Technologies". For all these I have ~3 weeks until GSoC starts...

And something bit different: I managed to cause a new release of libopenraw :)

Instead of studying for last optics test I got distracted a bit decided to write some code for Zine - post preview support.

Although this is still half-baked and shouldn't be enabled on live blogs, it works. I just posted it to get some preliminary review.

Edit: I have uploaded a new version of the patch which adding some more error handling plus few usability enchancements (like flash notifications).

As some of you might already know I am also working within a small group of students developing a small cubesat satellite. Last weekend we finally published a press release which basically concludes that our mission is actually feasible.

Now the University of Tartu together with Finnish Meteorological Institute and other European partners particularly from Estonia and Finland are joining forces to develop the first‐ever orbital test of the electric sail physical principle and technology. The ESTCube‐1 is a 1 kg nanosatellite and Estonia's first satellite, with planned launch in 2012.

And good news come in pairs - my project proposal Improve Sympy to handle Partial Differential Equations was accepted into Google Summer of Code. This means that I can basically spend my summer at Saaremaa and not worry about finding a summer job... :D

But more about the GSoC tomorrow...