plaes.org

Previous semester finally ended about week ago (eventually it was quite successful, but also pretty busy), so now it's time to make some new year^Hsemester plans. Firstly, I have picked up reading again and for this purpose I converted my N800 to simple ebook reader utilizing it's builtin PDF reader. Of course, there's also a downside to this because I can mostly use "pirated" material, but hey - I would have used the library or borrowed the book from my friends anyway. So is it really stealing when I haven't had a plan to buy it all along?

As this semester is supposedly my last one in bachelors studies, there are only few subjects left - quantum mechanics, thermodynamics including statistical physics, spectroscopy and astrophysics. That's all. The end is near, but I'm not that happy because I haven't really found a thesis topic I would feel really passionate about. Although I'm currently supposed to work on a problem related to quantum effects between lithium and nafion interaction it really feels more like a nuisance than something I would spend my evenings working on.. :S

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 :)

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.

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 :)