ChapterZero

School is almost over: I have my only final this Wednesday, on functions of a real variable, and that’s open book. Good thing, or bad thing? Other than that, I have three assignments to grade for the engineering math class I’m proctoring.

My graduations are on the 13th (EE) and 14th (math). After that, I’ll be free of UH! Well, except I’ll continue working with Papadakis’ group for the summer until I leave in mid-August to go to CalTech.

I originally planned to spend my summer focusing on the math I learned or should have learned as an undergrad, but I doubt that’ll get very far. I’ll be satisfied to refresh my calculus and real analysis skills. I doubt I’ll have time to get to Complex Analysis and other topics of interest.

At any rate, I plan on working on some more computer related stuff, since I have the time. I haven’t forgotten my ambition for writing a CAS, so I’m going to continue working on basicCAS. Also, given that working on basicCAS has made me much more knowledgable about parsing, and that the python binding of cairo seems really simple to work with, I’m going to be working on a python postscript interpreter. Why? I’ve always loved postscript, and I’d like to have an interpreter that lets you trace programs, and is easily embeddable into my other python projects. There’s a project in Java that’s come pretty far towards the goal of implementing a postscript interpreter with a rudimentary graphical interface supporting debugging, but the latest version doesn’t come with the code; also, I don’t fancy delving into Java code.

Other than those two major projects, I’m going to be messing around with MetaPost a lot more, and tweaking my website installation. Last night I fixed the problems that were stopping IllustRender, LatexRender, and WPjsMath from working; next, I need to fix whatever bug is causing the Mysql daemon to quit intermittently. I think I’ll end up just reinstalling everything. Finally, I need to release WPjsMath, and I want to work on further WP plugins. Like, why isn’t there one that lets you easily link words in one post to an appropriate post— it would beat having to track down every reference by hand and putting them in yourself.

Anyhow, I’m back!

Possibly relevant posts:

• Spamtastic (4/3/2004)
• Java just keeps getting better! (12/27/2004)
• R6RS ratified (9/16/2007)