| --- Log opened Wed Mar 30 00:00:48 2011 |
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| 06:02 | | ServerMode/#code [+oo Namegduf Kazriko] by *.Nightstar.Net |
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| 15:02 | < gnolam> | Aww, an actual explanation of the data format. |
| 15:02 | < gnolam> | Now all the mystery is gone. :P |
| 15:04 | < Tamber> | Aw, that's taking all the fun out of it. |
| 15:05 | < gnolam> | Now I just have to understand it. |
| 15:10 | < gnolam> | Also: the program you're "supposed" to browse the data with is apparently written in BASIC. |
| 15:10 | < Tamber> | o_O |
| 15:22 | < TheWatcher> | Which BASIC, though? |
| 15:22 | < TheWatcher> | (also, this does not surprise me, as I've had experience with scientists attempting to program~) |
| 15:28 | < gnolam> | PowerBASIC. |
| 15:29 | < TheWatcher> | Ow |
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| 16:25 | < gnolam> | Argh. |
| 16:27 | < gnolam> | Well, /naturally/ it's more important to keep the same column width than to actually have whitespace between all data fields. >_< |
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| 19:00 | < gnolam> | "Turns out 3DS doesn't work if you close one eye. Guess Nintendo really is serious about clamping down on pirates this hardware generation." |
| 19:01 | < celticminstrel> | XD |
| 19:01 | <@froztbyte> | :D |
| 19:01 | < Vornucopia> | Hee. |
| 19:12 | | kwsn [kwsn@Nightstar-9d744862.dyn.centurytel.net] has joined #code |
| 19:38 | < ToxicFrog> | <3 <3 <3 Beamer |
| 19:42 | < gnolam> | ? |
| 19:43 | < ToxicFrog> | The LaTeX documentclass for slides/presentations. |
| 19:46 | | * Vornucopia really should try figuring out LaTeX again sometime. |
| 19:47 | < Vornucopia> | But the last few times have been exercises in rage induction. |
| 19:48 | < ToxicFrog> | If I had been trying to do this in PowerPoint I would have gone insane and killed myself, or possibly everyone else, by now. |
| 19:48 | < Vornucopia> | I found quite the opposite for some things. |
| 19:49 | < Vornucopia> | Seriously: it's three clicks in Word. Why do I have to import four packages and write 30 lines of code and /still/ not have it work all the time in LaTeX? |
| 19:52 | < Vornucopia> | Though being able to actually typeset equations sanely is useful. |
| 19:53 | < TheWatcher> | ... what were you doing? |
| 19:54 | < Vornucopia> | Trying to get a numbered list to indent a particular way: the number has about 1/4" space, then the line starts, and then subsequent lines in that list item start 3/8" in. |
| 19:55 | < Vornucopia> | This is three clicks -- well, okay, two drags and a click -- in Word. |
| 19:57 | < Vornucopia> | But I, and the people in #latex on freenode, fought with it for days and days and couldn't get it to work right. |
| 20:01 | < celticminstrel> | If it weren't for the latex-like syntax, I'd probably make more use of lilypond. :/ |
| 20:01 | | * TheWatcher hrms, fiddles for a moment |
| 20:02 | | * gnolam sets fire to Rome. |
| 20:03 | < Vornucopia> | Even /better/ is if you could get it so deeper levels indent 3/8" further in, and also indent the right side 1/8" |
| 20:03 | < Vornucopia> | (which is another few drags in Word) |
| 20:04 | < gnolam> | Vornucopia: thank Eris you had that # there before. "The people in latex on freenode" is a horrible mental image. |
| 20:04 | < Vornucopia> | Good god you had to say anything |
| 20:06 | < gnolam> | :) |
| 20:07 | < TheWatcher> | You thought it! You can't un-think it! ¬¬ |
| 20:08 | < TheWatcher> | and on that note, woodcarving time... |
| 20:08 | < gnolam> | Woodcarving? |
| 20:11 | < ToxicFrog> | I suspect that the main reason I like LaTeX so much is that, in general, I don't care about the specifics of how my document is typeset as long as it's consistent and looks good. |
| 20:11 | < ToxicFrog> | And LaTeX excels at that, whereas Word is good at letting you control the specifics of typesetting but "consistent" is a constant fight and "looks good" requires some sense of design. |
| 20:12 | < celticminstrel> | Interestingly, that's very similar to what is said in this comparison of Finale and Lilypond that I was reading just now. |
| 20:13 | < Vornucopia> | On the other hand getting it to do my "everything is two columns, but section titles cross the whole page" was relatively easy. |
| 20:16 | < Vornucopia> | I get the impression that, once I manage to get the formatting to look the way I want it, the actual typesetting will mostly be easy. |
| 20:17 | < ToxicFrog> | That's the other thing. Once everything is set up, I can pretty much Just Write and everything slots into place neatly. |
| 20:17 | < Vornucopia> | But right now I don't even know what my setup will look like for me to write in, which makes my life hard. |
| 20:18 | < ToxicFrog> | For my current project, figuring out what I needed for a good-looking definition box at the bottom of the page took about fifteen minutes. But now that I know, I have it macroized and I just write \defbox{...list of definitions...} and it works. |
| 20:18 | < ToxicFrog> | No need to copy it from elsewhere in the document or exactly reproduce the steps that created it, no worry that changes in formatting or font size or the like will cause it to break. |
| 20:19 | < Vornucopia> | Indeed. |
| 20:20 | < Vornucopia> | I kind of miss FrameMaker. It was pretty impressive. |
| 20:21 | < ToxicFrog> | My prof uses FrameMaker, and from what he's shown me of it, I honestly don't see how it's any better than Word |
| 20:22 | < Vornucopia> | It seems to understand wide-ranging formatting better, ime. |
| 20:23 | < ToxicFrog> | "wide-ranging formatting"? |
| 20:23 | < Vornucopia> | Like that definition box thing. |
| 20:23 | < ToxicFrog> | Aah. |
| 20:23 | < ToxicFrog> | So it makes consistency easier (or at least, less hard) relative to Word. |
| 20:24 | < Vornucopia> | For /my/ purposes, what I really want is Word's equation editor to suck less. |
| 20:24 | < Vornucopia> | Because my god it sucks. |
| 20:24 | < ToxicFrog> | You could always do the equations in LaTeX and then include the resulting image in Word |
| 20:24 | < ToxicFrog> | (can Word inline PDFs?) |
| 20:24 | < Vornucopia> | (...not that I'm aware of.) |
| 20:25 | < ToxicFrog> | (if not, there's stuff that'll take a LaTeX math sequence and spit out an SVG or PNG of it) |
| 20:25 | < Vornucopia> | And it's not that I can't write the equations -- it's that the equations have a long turnaround, and farming it and it alone off to LaTeX is not worth my time. |
| 20:26 | < Vornucopia> | What I'd /really/ like is a portable wiki with math stuff in it. |
| 20:27 | < Vornucopia> | Something like how mediawiki does it. Only, you know. Not relying on having httpd, mysql, and php. |
| 20:28 | < Vornucopia> | Not sure if that made sense. |
| 20:37 | < Vornucopia> | So in short: the reason I didn't use LaTeX is because while technically I can live without the special formatting for now, I /still/ have to decide how the hell the top-level design looks in text, and since I've never managed to get the things I want to do to happen in /any/ form, my top-level design is still up in the air. |
| 20:39 | < Vornucopia> | On the other hand, something like a wiki, where it renders to HTML, I know how that's done. I can find the css file and edit that when I need something changed. |
| 20:47 | | Derakon [chriswei@Nightstar-cfae48c3.ca.comcast.net] has joined #code |
| 20:47 | < Derakon> | What is it about some people that makes them name everything in code? |
| 20:48 | <@jerith> | Derakon(self, msg): Dunno. |
| 20:48 | < Derakon> | imposn, irdsec, read_prm_new, xprm, irdhdr, itrhdr, ialmod, ialres, iwrhdrc... |
| 20:48 | | * Derakon eyes Jerith. |
| 20:51 | < Vornucopia> | Der: you mean, like, the names are hard to understand like that? |
| 20:51 | < Derakon> | Just a bit, yeah. |
| 20:52 | < Derakon> | I also have test files supplied by our biologists named things like 20100429-0809__t00_p10_7daysZ3ERNEG. |
| 20:52 | < Derakon> | Up through p10 it makes sense, but I know that's only there because I wrote the program to put it there. |
| 20:52 | < Derakon> | And I have no idea what Z3ERNEG means. |
| 20:53 | < Vornucopia> | Maybe they're remembering back when your filenames were restricted to 8+3 |
| 20:53 | < Derakon> | I think it's more they just assume that nobody else will ever have to deal with their files/functions/etc. so why bother with the extra typing? |
| 20:54 | < Vornucopia> | Man. I can't remember what things are I wrote 6 months ago. |
| 20:54 | < Derakon> | Not being trained programmers, they don't recognize that problem. |
| 21:00 | < Vornucopia> | I'm talking about filenames, even in normal situations like "okay that savegame is, um... where is that savegame anyway." |
| 21:00 | < Vornucopia> | (<3 games that store an image with the save) |
| 21:04 | < Vornucopia> | gah, suckage! |
| 21:05 | < Vornucopia> | I have get variables coming in and I need to possibly replace parts of a string with them, but I don't need to, um. How do I put this. |
| 21:06 | | * Derakon hands Vorn a regex and an extra problem to go with it. |
| 21:06 | < Vornucopia> | Well, no, the regex is not the hard part in any sense. |
| 21:06 | < Vornucopia> | (hell, that's written) |
| 21:07 | < Vornucopia> | Problem is: I have getvars, and they replace the values of several global variables (that have defaults) |
| 21:08 | < Vornucopia> | now I have to take those global variables and replace parts of a string using them... only problem is, many of them are set in the specific drill module, and the instructions writer doesn't know about them. |
| 21:08 | < Derakon> | So your string has placeholder values, and you insert the global variable into the string in place of the placeholder? |
| 21:08 | < Vornucopia> | Whereas I also have a getvars variable that, while it has the getvars, it does not have any of the defaults. |
| 21:09 | < Vornucopia> | Right. |
| 21:09 | < Derakon> | Can you modify the getvars variable before this point, inserting the globals for any variables that weren't specified? |
| 21:11 | < Vornucopia> | ...a sensible idea. I can store, instead of a large namespace of things, the defaults into an OPTIONS object which gets used for the actual options and thus for writing out the strings. |
| 21:12 | < Derakon> | It's often helpful, I find, to introduce abstractions so that various pieces of my program don't assume their inputs come from a specific place. |
| 21:12 | < Vornucopia> | Well. I do need the values in non-string form too, which is kind of a pain. |
| 21:13 | < Derakon> | Oh, hey, maybe the reason these are so badly named is that this is Fortran code. |
| 21:13 | < Derakon> | I wouldn't be surprised if there were some limit on the length of variable/function names. |
| 21:13 | < Derakon> | At least in something suitably ancient like Fortran77. |
| 21:16 | < Derakon> | Argh I really need to learn how Fourier transforms and correlation coefficients and so on are useful. |
| 21:16 | < Derakon> | The problem being that all the resources I've found for this stuff assume you already know what it is, and all of my coworkers (who know how to use it) are crap teachers. |
| 21:16 | < Vornucopia> | I can't teach fourier transforms yet. |
| 21:17 | < Vornucopia> | (because I don't particularly understand them that well myself) |
| 21:17 | < Derakon> | I barely learned them in my college engineering survey course, and they went right out the window immediately afterwards because I had no need to use them. |
| 21:17 | < Derakon> | And now it's years later... |
| 21:21 | < gnolam> | Derakon: unmodified Fortran77 truncates all variables at 6 characters, IIRC. |
| 21:21 | < Derakon> | So you can have longer names but they'll be ignored, and you need to have each independent variable have a unique six-letter beginning? |
| 21:31 | < Vornucopia> | Fourier transforms can be really useful because they can describe energy quite well. If you apply fourier transforms to an image, you're essentially doing jpeg compression -- and then the ones with the largest values have the most interesting data in them. |
| 21:33 | <@jerith> | Fourier transforms turn time into frequency. |
| 21:34 | < Derakon> | How? |
| 21:35 | < Vornucopia> | And in a certain sense, fourier transforms let you model stuff that comes out of a differential equation... which very often have sines in them. Get the right fourier series for your fit equation and you've also got the right series of numbers for other parts of your system. |
| 21:35 | <@jerith> | Derakon: I don't recall the theory. :-/ |
| 21:35 | < Derakon> | Sadly, that's what I need right now. |
| 21:36 | < Derakon> | Can't really work effectively with a tool unless I understand how it works. |
| 21:42 | < Vornucopia> | Well the basics is you try to fit a series of ever-shorter sine waves to your data. |
| 21:47 | < Vornucopia> | As long as your data is vaguely continuous-shaped, the shorter waves will get really small coefficients. |
| 21:50 | < Derakon> | So you generate, what, a 1D array where the index is the frequency and the value is the coefficient? |
| 21:50 | < Vornucopia> | Yeah. Well, usually there's 2 values for each frequency - either coefficients for both sin and cos, or a magnitude and a phase. |
| 21:51 | < Vornucopia> | (these two things are equivalent but you need to do some transformation to get between them) |
| 21:52 | < Derakon> | I'll think in terms of magnitude and phase for now. |
| 21:53 | < Vornucopia> | It's generally a better idea to feel it out that way. |
| 21:53 | < Vornucopia> | but usually you'll actually be /getting/ sin and cos. |
| 21:53 | < Derakon> | No surprise. |
| 21:53 | < Derakon> | We wouldn't have a less-intuitive method if it didn't have advantages somewhere. |
| 21:54 | < Vornucopia> | In addition to its more common setup, sin and cos have the other advantages of being individually even and odd. |
| 21:54 | < Vornucopia> | (reverse-respectively) |
| 21:55 | < Vornucopia> | Time to go back to work. Byeeeees |
| 21:57 | | Vornucopia [NSwebIRC@C888DE.7F9621.DD23F2.568C83] has quit [[NS] Quit: Page closed] |
| 22:28 | | * Derakon finds a page on Fourier series, wonders why they couldn't have said "asymmetrical" and "symmetrical" instead of "odd" and "even". |
| 22:29 | < Derakon> | Stupid engineers and their tendency to add new confusing meanings to words and letters! |
| 22:29 | < Derakon> | (insert i vs. j joke here) |
| 22:45 | <@jerith> | Hey, Python chose the *proper* imaginary constant. |
| 23:31 | | You're now known as TheWatcher[T-2] |
| 23:33 | | kwsn is now known as kws-not_here |
| 23:34 | | You're now known as TheWatcher[zZzZ] |
| 23:38 | < kws-not_here> | i went through math with i = sqrt(-1)... then i get to applications of electral enginering and i'm like WTF IS j DOING HERE? |
| 23:39 | < kws-not_here> | *engineering |
| 23:39 | < kws-not_here> | but with that |
| 23:39 | < kws-not_here> | i'm off to radio land :D |
| 23:39 | < kws-not_here> | and well |
| 23:39 | < kws-not_here> | getting food |
| 23:39 | < kws-not_here> | and goign to the store |
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| --- Log closed Thu Mar 31 00:00:02 2011 |