@Zviovich @P.Fonseca Twitter is such a bad platform and that guy sounds like a real jerk. How a literate scientist can call someone's opinion BS in public is beyond my understanding. An I'm sure I have to throw up if I hear "I feel offended" one more time. And this coming from a researcher who should have learned that disagreeing is what we do most of the time. I disagree with many papers I cite in each publication and others disagree when they cite me.
@halirutan Twitter should be banned for the kind of discussion it promotes :) I hope for a platform where you need to add sources of your claims before publishing :P
> [...] I hope javascript front end would give better competition to mathematica. [...]
Well, I hope the opposite.
But yes, it is easier to start with Manipulate and deploy for friends with MMA/Player. And if this is a use case it is fine, but more control on gui or deployment options etc and you wonder if it wasn't a bad idea to start with MMA.
@kuba I think why CDF did not become popular, is nothing to do with deployment or functionality. Because it is closed source, no one can create a CDF file without using Mathematica. There was a great article on why PDF became the standard format for storing documents everywhere in the world. Adobe (a private company) created PDF, but it was smart to make the format public and standard, so any one can create a PDF document. This is not the case with CDF
@Nasser in academia that may be the case. From my experience deployment related limitations kick in for business applications. They usually don't mind the price as long as it can be easily integrated etc.
@Kuba yes. But it is not really about price. I am thinking about making CDF popular and having CDF be standard for interactive documents, just like PDF became standard for static documents. Just because few companies do not mind paying for Mathematica and using CDF, this will not make it popular as universal standard used everywhere.
The window for CDF might have already closed. WRI should made something with it when it was released in 2011? or so before an open/standard alternative come in.
@Kuba @Szabolcs and anyone else who makes paclets, I'm trying to see if GitHub will work as a paclet distribution server. I set up an org here github.com/MathematicaPacletServer if any of you is willing to beta-test the pull-request to submit changes process.
@halirutan I don't actually know if this set up makes much sense with GitHub given how potentially large this thing could get if someone just dumped a GB large paclet.
@b3m2a1 Since you are interested in this area, have you looked at how Maple handle its package repository system? They added new one where any one can upload a package there, and then it shows up everywhere. I can download a package from Maple by clicking on a button which opens the Maple cloud. Here is the link maple.cloud/#group=packages&sort=likes&dir=desc I've used it little to download few packages.
If I remember correctly Bob Sandheinrich was giving the talk and may have stated an expected arrival date in the fall of 2018. But it's not slated to be out until after the API repository and the Function repository. Maybe in beta though like the NeuralNet one...
@b3m2a1 About this page: Would it be possible to have a button or link for each package in the list which will show confused users the exact command to install/update that particular package?
@gwr It works in bash (on a Mac), but I do not know what is the correct way to quote/escape things in PowerShell/Windows. Maybe the shell is stripping the quotes?
The documentation seems to suggest that the syntax you used was correct, so I'm not sure ...
@Szabolcs Thanks, I will look around some more, but as you just wrote, I had suspected the documentation to comply with Windows 10 at least or point out obvious traps...
Recently I have been having some trouble using GnuWin32 from PowerShell whenever double quotes are involved.
Upon further investigation, it appears PowerShell is stripping double quotes from command line arguments, even when properly escaped.
PS C:\Documents and Settings\Nick> echo '"hello"'
"h...
@Szabolcs Yeah definitely. I’ll try to remember to implement that tomorrow in JS. I might even be able to make it open a notebook with the install command in desktop Mathematica, depending on how well the deep links work.
@Kuba Same here. The issue in academia for me personally are: I need to load files and usually, I need functionality that is not available in FreeCDF. None of my medical colleagues has Mathematica or will buy it, so FreeCDF is useless. There is no academic licence to create enterprise CDF. So if I wanted to do that, I need to buy the same expensive licence as companies do.
@b3m2a1 The SEUploader would be a nice-to-have on the paclet server.
@Szabolcs Yes, I know in principle what to do and have done it several times. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do anything meaningful in the next time. Work-load is just overwhelming.
Is there a way to discourage Mathematica from inserting page breaks after certain cells? Ideally, text cells wouldn't often be separated from the following In/Out cell pair. This applies to printing or creating a PDF out of notebooks.
How do people deal with the problem of inconvenient page breaks, in general?
@Kuba I guess I could use PageBreakAbove->True for all input cells, and simple make sure that every input cell has some text written above it. There isn't a way to make this conditional on cell type, right? I mean, avoid breaking above if the cell above is of a certain type.
@b3m2a1 Thanks for merging the pull request! Can you let me know when you've updated the site to include the new paclets?
@Szabolcs, what do you mean by "cell type"? Certainly, you could modify the Input and Output styles. You could also modify the StandardForm style, which would catch several sorts of things (including, e.g., Message and Print cells).
Re the Romer post, I think the open source/commercial debate is a fine debate. I do both, and I certainly see upsides each way. But I have to put some personal pronouns in Romer's post because he discusses a bug in my area. I find the notion of being called a "Vandal" and contributing to "objective truth [perishing] from the Earth" to be amusingly hyperbolic. The notion that I "hide behind corporate evasion"...well, I leave that to the judgment of this community.
But being accused of introducing a bug "so bad that someone must have worked at making it bad" as an accomplice to "an intentional, hidden part of Wolfram’s strategy"? That hits home a bit. In my life, I've been wrong, I've been stupid (there seems to be no end of that!), but I try very hard to be honest.
5
I thought about echoing my thoughts on Twitter, but as has been mentioned, Twitter is just a terrible place for civil or useful discussion. Obviously, I have a much higher opinion of this chat room. There...off my chest, and now back to work. :) Feel free to call me out on any place where you think I'm out of line, here or elsewhere.
@JohnFultz I am looking to improve the appearance of this terribly long document by keeping the code examples (In/Out cell pair) together with the preceding description. (Of course that requires a lot of editing and tidying up too.) There are many cases where there is a small piece of text followed by an In/Out pair. I would like to keep the text together with the Input cell, but I am hoping not to have to give the text a special style.
@JohnFultz I was wondering if it is possible to prevent (or discourage) a page break before an Input cell if that Input cell is preceded by a Text cell. I do not want to prevent the page break if the Input cell is preceded by an Output cell.
All this is not very important because this PDF file is for preview only. People should use the notebook anyway.
@JohnFultz I do not think anyone here believes that PDF export was crippled on purpose. The PDF I linked above is a good example that it works well.
@Kuba Yes, that was the plan, but I was hoping for a solution with less trouble. I already run a post-processing script for this notebook anyway, so it's doable.
The one thing I'd really like to see improved in PDF export is to get rid of the blurriness in MatrixPlot/ArrayPlot outputs:
The problem appears only when viewing these with Preview.app on OS X. But Preview.app (and Mac computers) are extremely common in academia. Thus I always feel that I should not include such plots in publications (what I do is replace the Raster with individual Rectangles)
I do understand that the "blurriness" is probably just interpolation, and sometimes it is actually preferable (what if that Raster represents an image?)
@Kuba Thanks! That definitely helps. I'm not so experienced with notebook manipulation and it would have taken me longer to come up with this.
Something weird: The Text and Item styles have black text. Surprisingly, the ItemParagraph style has dark grey text that is barely distinguishable from black, but still distinct (GrayLevel[0.2] instead of GrayLevel[0])