@J.M. I shouldn't be in a hurry.. the 10k will be the last big goal for while..

@halirutan hey

How's all? Did I leave in the middle of something yesterday?

@Rojo Hi.

I tried some stuff.. a packet sniffer but, as you assumed, the FE-function does not work without frontend..

Asking the front end for information is something I'd like to be able to do in more than a way

For example, some programatic way of knowing some style's settings would be nice, you know any? Humm

I find myself every once in a while browsing the stylesheets

@Rojo I'm really the last one who knows such stuff.

Noone does

except for the Futz

yeahh. the futz..

That brought a big smile on my face..

I appreciate every post of his, it's always new information

I really wonder how they handle it at wolfram.

All undocumented new information

This last one was x-treme

an undocumented function actually named UndocumentedSomething

I mean Johns answers (on MathGroup too) very often leak some internal information.

Yeah, he also said that same day that V9 will be exporting in ico format and some other

He helped me at least 3 times personally with incredible stuff.

I mean f*** thing is under some NDA crap and then boom, John talks about functions everyone would have died for to know.

Yeah

They say undocumented functions aren't guaranteed to stay

and I guess an undocumented function named UndocumentedSomething is almost guaranteed to not stay?

or at least to never ever become official

Hehe

Who cares? It's not that I'm building long lasting software.

No

but

with v9 hopefully so near

And since V5.2 had to rebuild all my stuff again and again because they indroduced all the image processing which we already had. Everything clashed, etc.

Oh

We had a TotalVariationFilter and an image type long time ago..

The good old days of Graphics[Raster[..]..]

Hehe

Now it's me who should say I'm the last one to know about that

I started in V7, perhaps played around a little in v6, not sure

That's why we are here. There are so many excellent people with so many different interests.

and I used very little image processing so far

I'm interested, but I'm busy, and when I'm busy I become lazy with everything that I have to do. But I also don't do other stuff because I should be doing what I have to

Anyway, I have no practice or big background but get the idea of the image processing ordinary functions, but I have no clue about the "morphological" functions

I wouldn't know where to start, perhaps wiki?

Morphological operations are basically set-theory.

And if you really need image processing some time I would start with Gonzalez & Woods.

Very usable stuff.

What you use MMA for mostly? Image processing?

Thanks, I'll take a look

imageprocessingplace.com

This is their page.

@Rojo Yes. Image processing, Signal processing, data analysis, modelling..

@halirutan Great

You use other similar tools too like MAtlab?

I don't use any other CAS than mathematica.

I used to use Maple long time ago.

But of course I need some other tools.

@halirutan given your fields of interest, what did you think of systemmodeler

I tested it, and lost some interest when I came into a bug in something too basic, and then the trial had ended

@Rojo I haven't tried it because currently I don't really know what to do with it.

But on the other hand I haven't looked very close at it.

Btw, does someone know in which time-zone stackexchange lives?

When does the tomorrow start?

Oh, it never starts. Whenever it's about to, they postpone it another day

hehe

I think it's UTC time

so now it's almost 22

but I'm not 100%

So two more hours until I can get rep..

hmm

I answered too much today.

Hehe

If I come into an answer of yours, I'll hold the upvote

But on the other hand, I havent understood the rep-system anyway.

The 200 seems not to be a hard line!?

I think yes

but that's from upvotes

You can get rep from bounties or accepted answers beyond that

I think

Check my rep for today.

247

how is that possible?

You got 3 accepts I think

How much is that? 25 each? I don't remember

and it seems you got 2 weird points for accepting my the Futz plagiarism answer

an accept is 15

yes, this solves the problem.

Good

Now, I won't upvote your caligraphy answer until next time I come into it

@Rojo :-)

I finally got the elusive populist gold badge =) I must thank cormullion for not accepting my answer

populist is when you have a highly upvoted answer which is not accepted, right?

better that the accepted answer, I mean

Yes, the accepted answer has to be >10 and the highest answer has to be > 2x that

@rm-rf What question?

It's a hard one to earn, because some users like to sit on their questions for months before accepting an answer, thus narrowing/eliminating any advantage there was

Yeah, already upvoted you

heh, I had another one that's two upvotes away from a badge and I thought that would be the one to get it

@halirutan Seems like a nice read the book you suggested, thanks

You might get 2 badges then today, link me to it

@Rojo Yes, it is. As long as you keep in mind that image proc is hard math when it comes down to the facts, then this is maybe the best introduction there is.

But you can always study the detailed math later, after having some fun.

@Rojo Hehe... this is the answer (note that the OP drastically changed scope afterwards, hence the difference between the two answers). Daniel needs 2 and I need 2

@rm-rf Oh,I hadn't seen all the updates

once I saw that what he asked required 39456879345 petabytes I forgoty

@Rojo a petebyte sounds like something odd to have in a machine

but I had already upvoted yours, can't help

@belisarius It's not, it's even. 2^something

read again

I'm pretending to have an innocent mind

you can't

the Futz!

sorry, gotta go for a while

Later neighbour

l8r!

Rojo wants to know "some programatic way of knowing some style's settings". I know. It's even documented! See the 6th bullet point in the CurrentValue documentation.

"The Futz" is in chat!

Welcome :)

Wonder if I should change my user alias.

@JohnFultz Hi.

Surfacing for the weekend before I dive back in deep to fix a bunch more v9 bugs. But it's been good to pop back up for a bit.

@JohnFultz We were discussing the following: Especially you leak from time to time very, very usefull undocumented functions. If this does not conflict with your Wolfram NDA, wouldn't it be possible to give us some hints whether there is a way to, let's call it explore undocumented stuff ourselves?

@halirutan, well working for WRI for 19 years comes with some privileges. :) But there are some real issues with some of the undocumented stuff. My biggest concern is that some of it isn't very well designed. Either we might replace it later with something much better designed, or it might be functionality which is prone to crashing because it doesn't have very good error-handling.

For example, right now, we're looking at shipping some functionality in v9 which will enable background images in notebooks (which would answer one of the unanswered SE questions, I noticed last night). Enough functionality is turned on to use in slide shows, and it'll be really neat. The problem is, it was introduced late enough that the design was not vetted, and I already know the design is not up to usual Wolfram standards. So, what to do?

We could not ship the slideshow functionality. We could lock ourselves into a bad design. We could delay v9 to fix up the design. Or we could go ahead and use it internally now, but knowing that users will really want to do this themselves, we'll plan to fix up the design in the future. From my perspective (yours may differ), the last option looks good.

yes, I see the point. But in the case of the tokenizer for Input-cells I tried every possible thing.. Especially to keep the non-semantic whitespaces and then BOOM, you come and solve everything with one answer.

@JohnFultz that functionality seems nice

Of course, some of the undocumented functionality just never becomes interesting enough for more than just a few users. So it languishes and never gets designed or exposed in the System` context.

but, at the risk of suicide, there's no front end equivalent of Names or something?

Concerning the UndocumentedTestFEParser packet, that was actually added for QA purposes. It makes adding a test harness easier. I guess I wasn't imaginative enough to consider that real-world users would be seriously interested in this. My bad.

@JohnFultz And basically, I'm aware that those things maybe introduce bugs but it's better than having nothing. And as I said to @Rojo, it's not that I want to write long-lasting software I want to sell..

@Rojo, I could give you a list of FE packets. There isn't...wait...maybe there is a way to get the list. Hmm...checking...

:)

@JohnFultz We had to hack the tokenizer for this site from scratch by guessing and there is still no highlighted LaTeX-export of code snips from Mma. UndocumentedTestFEParser really saved my day.

And as you might have seen Leonid started a code formatter project.

@Rojo, this returns some interesting results:

MathLink`CallFrontEnd[FrontEnd`NeedCurrentFrontEndSymbolsPacket[]]

The [[1,1,4]] returns specifically the list of packets.

Thanks a lot, let's see :). Also there's one old question that I believe you might know something very simple that would help a huge lot. It's about programatically getting some current counter value at the place where it is executed. mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/6073/109

If we knew that answer, there's another question with lots of interest that I think we could solve: mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/346/…

But, something you should understand about packets. You can really mess up a front end if you send bad stuff through to the packets. The bar for input validation isn't as high, and in the worst case scenario, it's not too difficult to crash the FE or to mess up the MathLink connection between FE and kernel.

As long as restarting it solves everything, we can handle :)

Hehe

@halirutan, I haven't really looked into the parser that you're using. Does the SE site actually have a copy of Mathematica running someplace?

Thanks a lot for that list

@JohnFultz No, I hacked it in JavaScript.

It's a plugin to google-code prettify.

That was fun without a grammar of the Mathematica language ;-)

BTW, I saw on the chat session yesterday some confusion about stuff in the FrontEnd` context. As some have guessed, the FrontEnd` context is generally (can't remember if it's exclusively) used as an inert context. So, for example, look at EvaluationNotebook:

Note the definition:

EvaluationNotebook[]:=MathLink`CallFrontEnd[FrontEnd`EvaluationNotebook[]]

Yeah, and we were the main participants in the confusion

The FE packet has the same name as the kernel symbol. But we can't have it evaluating out from underneath us, and it's stupid to give it a different name. So the FrontEnd` context is a totally inert version in the kernel.

Makes sense

In fact, the FE doesn't really care whether the packet has Global` or System` or FrontEnd`, but it makes it much better when writing kernel code to use FrontEnd`.

Wow! SimulateMouseClick and those kinds of packets, I'll definately be testing those out! ;D

@JohnFultz This list is stunning.

@halirutan, the crazy thing is that you must be like the 20th person or so to have done this. At one point, I suggested that we release a YACC grammar for CDF (which would be a significant subset of the Mathematica grammar), but the idea wasn't well received by various parties.

Internally, I can think of at least six notebook parsers running around (I wrote three of them!). :) And then the full Mathematica grammar is implemented, separately, in both FE and kernel, as well as various syntax coloring engines (yours is far from the first, but I think it's the only contemporary one besides the one in Workbench).

@JohnFultz I assumed something like that. Is there anything we or I can do (someone to ask beside the support) to maybe make Wolfram release some form of grammar?

Because the tokenizer is of course only one step. What really would be nice is an annotated abstract syntax tree which connects the parsed full form to the input string.

The funny thing is, we already have something like that!

TreeForm gives the structure of the code while the tooltips show exactly on which portion of the input-code you are looking ;-)

@halirutan I think there are two issues here. One is the level of effort required. Constructing and maintaining an AST is non-zero effort on our part. And the grammar as implemented in the FE and kernel are tightly integrated...very difficult to extract. Fortunately, we're at least documenting precedences, so most of it could be reconstructed, but painfully, I'm sure.

Second is the concern about whether we're giving something away that could reduce our competitive advantage. I personally don't think too hard about the second issue, but other people do (and, yeah, it'd be kind of irksome if some open-source competitor adopted code we produced purely for purposes of making their product look better when compared to ours).

But the good news is that, as announced at the WTC, we're now beginning to put stuff on GitHub (first project, HadoopLink). When time permits, I should ping folks again about this sort of activity.

BTW, I saw some talk on here about sniffing traffic between the FE and kernel. Are you folks using LinkSnooper? Or do you even know such a thing exists? We use it all the time internally, but I'm not sure how much it's been discussed externally.

I am

@JohnFultz I used one yesterday.

@Rojo Awesome.

Yes, I got to know it through you and it has been quite helpful several times

@JohnFultz When I would place a question about this the next days, do you think you maybe have time to write an answer at some point?

I mean the worst thing which can happen is, that you gain more reputation ;-)

@halirutan better milk that 19 yrs of privilege before he gets busy with work and leaves chat! ;)

@rm-rf I'm so glad he spends some time here, that I would risk it and say a big "thank you for all the information today" and hope he's coming back.

I hope he's not working officially a sunday night

@halirutan Yes, I'm really happy that folks like John, DL, Yu-Sung, Brett, etc. spend time here, enlightening us with the internal goodies

@Rojo, what I did yesterday was that I started a MathKernel and used this one to evaluate things from the front end. All the traffic was printed. This all is described in the book of Wagner.

@halirutan You mean a question about the packet list or something else? Well, free reputation is always nice. I've left a lot of it lying on the floor, I think. :)

@JohnFultz Yes, about the linksnooping between kernel and FE

@Rojo Sadly I was working. You do want v9 this year, right?

Hehe, of course

@halirutan Ah, yes. Be happy to write that up.

@JohnFultz I guess you are not working on the FE for Linux?

@halirutan I work on all the FEs. But my attention is certainly less on the Linux FE, market realities being what they are. That having been said, we use the Linux FE on the Wolfram|Alpha servers.

Gotta leave now, mother's day here. Bye @rm-rf, @halirutan. Thanks @halirutan and the Futz @JohnFultz

@Rojo bye.

@Rojo Later.