Programming notes

This page is for working programmers. Notes on how I've configured my development machine, tutorials, book reviews, programming utilities, conference reports, code snippets are the kinds of things I'll be adding over time.

Recent content

MathML Mathematical Markup

I've finally started using MathML. I'll be using it going forward, but at the moment I don't see any need to modify old posts to use it. Here are some tips that I haven't seen elsewhere that I think are helpful. And some examples to cut and paste and modify as needed.

Ancient content

The content in this section is hopelessly obsolete. I'm keeping it around to remind me of how much things have changed since I wrote this, over fifteen years ago. Docker and vscode and mac OS X have made life much better. I haven't developed in a windows environment for well over a decade (and I certainly haven't used VMS on a VAX machine either, which was the gateway to windows NT for me). Or written any 3d graphics code.

And golang is now my non-scripting language when I have a choice. And when I don't, it's java or scala. And rust is the attractive new shiny object I'd like to explore more. I haven't written any C++ in years. Or C for that matter, which was my first and only language for over three years. But I'm still using python almost daily. It's been quite the success, way beyond what I would have expected. And perl seems to have disappeared, despite its initial substantial lead over python. For a few years I used it instead of awk and sed, but now if I want awk or sed functionality (and it happens at least once a week), I use them directly.

Everything below this line is pretty much unchanged from long ago. Enjoy a blast from the past!

The two programming languages I use the most are C++ and Python, and the platform I develop on the most is Windows NT: version 4, version 5 (aka Windows 2000), version 5.1 (aka Windows XP). Most of what I write will involve them in one way or another.

Attending SIGGRAPH 2005

I've attended several ACM SIGGRAPH conferences, including Los Angeles 2005. For that one, I got to use a media pass. As a "media representative" I got to attend everything the fully paid attendees did, and I got access to even more. Part of the deal for getting the pass was that I write an essay about the conference. This is what I ended up writing.

Personal Bug Tracking with Mantis on Windows

I recently started using Mantis for personal bug tracking. Here's what I did to get it working on windows.

Using Visual Studio .NET

This essay is more of a collection of tips that I've found useful. Experienced users have told me that they've found something useful and new amongst the topics I've covered. This is the essay I wanted to be able to read the day after I installed Visual Studio .NET.

Scipy '02 conference review

Last year I attended a two day scientific Python conference at Caltech, had a great time, and learned a lot. The topics of the conference were Scipy and Numeric. These are Python based projects that are providing an open source alternative to MATLAB. Reg Charney, the editor of Accent, the newsletter of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the ACCU, suggested that I write a review for Accent. I did, and it was published in the October 2002 issue.

Javascript Laboratory

I threw this together so that I could quickly experiment with javascript.