symbolic vs numerical

always been a bit confused about how to exactly distinguish between a numercial and a symbolic maths solving type of computer program. to be fair its a very grey world and not easy black/white. most numercial programms(like matlab) will have some symbolic abilities(matlab uses a stripped down maple kernel) so for the casual user
ive spent the past hour or so browsing the net to get myself up to speed on what programm is a numerical and which one is a symbolic. the result is that i found this. very helpful. ill be trying MuPAD then. as i have before but now i know what it actually does,]]

feeds via POST instead of GET

ive been thinkign about the following: why do we not push news(rss, atom, ...) feeds, i.e. Http POST them to everyone intrested instead of everyone intrested GETing the index.rss document every 5 minutes causing a lot of traffic and load.

it would be very easy to implement. especially these days with xmlrpc and REST interfaces everywhere(soemthing the zope world is very used to)
say instead of everyone knowing that index.rss is the file to get if you want the last 20 posts why not have a script/function to call to register your intrest in a certain feed. everytime something is added to this feed they will do a POST of this xml data to all intrested. this would definately reduce the load for the one publishign the post. yes there would be problems to solve like: how do we find out if the other one is not intrested anymore and they forget telling us and so on. but that would be doable.

i think the main reason why push based content distribution hasnt caught on yet(except for smtp(email) and instant msgs) is that it requieres and extra instance of hardware. afterall how is going to receive all the feed infos that joe average is going to miss while hes not connected to the net. he would have to reregister and request all data since the last time he received stuff. it would be intrestign for sites like bloglines as they would not have to crawl all the feeds and for other web apps which provide rss reader capabilities but not for the normal home user. which means it would be neat but not reduce the load as joe is going to cause much more traffic then bloglines&co.

just an idea. maybe this is true for all push based contenten distribution systems. they are potentially nicer and more elegant and effective at what they do but they require extra set up and thats not going to happen in the first phase. when a technology is unknown it has to attract lots of users(while its unknow the scalability problems do not show) and once its big and well know(and getting into all sorts of problems now with load) it will be so in the heads of ppel that they dont want to change it

ps: united utils. just cut our power for an hour! at seven in the evening....how very smart of them. it gets worse. the guys on the road which probably did the power cutting jsut said "there are to many to notify in advance" and didnt give a very good explenation as to why they do this at seven in the evening instead of during the day. c***s

circuit emulators

call me strange, call mewhat ever you want but i do really enjoy fiddling with circuits, simple ones, yes, still. its like a puzzle. also im quite proud of myself. never had anythign to do with circuits or electronics before in my life(seemed to have skipped it at school) and now im enjoying it andhaving fun and even understanding it.

point is this: i wanted to fillde with circuits at home. went looking around, asked questions. tried spice and got put of. its not what i was looking for, its a commandline thingy, to steep a learnign curve i guess, asked some more questions and got told to try SwitcherCad [install & download here] it is a windows programm, yes, but it runs perfectly fine in wine, sans help menu. built a very basic inverting amplifier. worked. yay!

also played with scilab, have to get my brain around these maths programms...they seem so useful. dont want to do numerical stuff in python(well would like to but probably to slow, any good numeric packets around? any computer algebra systems?) or c/c++. c is probably faster but still ugly as hel
reminds me i have to write a c programm to read integers from a file and calculate mean and std deviation or so for uni. bbrrr

plastic phun

did you know manchester is in a 3rd world country in which no piece of plastic can be wasted?
aparently so. someone felt so in need they stole the cover of my domi. hopefully it keeps someone dry now. poor bike had to stand in the manchester rain for three days till i got round to buying a new one.

after buying a new one i understand why people mite stell one. 50 squid!! well i got a 10% discount and a can of WD40 ontop but still. this one is long enough so i can roll the front wheel onto it and it has funny little slits at the front and back, assume they are ment to have a chain thru them. at least thats what im doing now. when you wnat to take it now you have to rip it and push the bike over. lets hoep noones that desperate. while i was beign nice to the bike i even cleaned it! it started rainign after about 5 minutes. but i got rid of the last bits of dust still on it from the trip to the ardeche this summer.

been reading lots of intresting articles about zope2/3 and plone. did some work in plone for the new kuss website. mainly playing with zope's builtin xmlrpc support. we will use xmlrpc to get data from flash into zope(i.e. editing stuff) and use ZPT to generate xml documents flash can read to get information into flash clips. why not use xmlrpc to get data into flash? well we could but for one we already had the loading data from xml documents code available and using xml ducments has the following advantage: you can cache them and other people can look at them and imediatly understand the available data. xmlrpc makes this a bit more complicated.

back to more worldly events: soph was so brave as to take me home home with her for the weekend. giving me a chance to make a fool out of myself infront of her friends&family. think it went reasonably well and i behaved myself. cant remember anyone running away from me or shouting,]] and yes virgin trains have power plugs everywhere so you can plug in your laptop but chairs are so close together that i didnt really enjoy working. like her home and friends.

thats all for now. hungry.

waking of the dead

it has been quite a while hasn't it? lots has happened. most importantly: my laptop got stolen(from my room, with people in the house)(not really the most important but this is my excuse for not posting anything)

photos, yes, head over to flickr to have a look at the place Sam, Van, Nay, Pat, Gaz and me call our new home. I have told you about it before.(sorry im to lazy for hyperlinks today, will edit&fix it later)

so what else has been happening? back to uni, in manchester, which is not as wet and rainy as everybody believes

Manchester has a damp climate and a reputation as a rather rainy city. The average annual rainfall is 809mm, meaning that this reputation is undeserved. This total is less than Plymouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Edinburgh for example. In international terms, Manchester receives substantially less rain than New York City, which receives 1200mm of rain in an average year and the average annual rainfall total is comparable with that of Rome. -- from Wikipedia

its reading week already, which means i have been back in manchester for a whole 5 weeks already. feels like a few days, maybe 3 weeks but not 5. time flies by at uni.
as a summary of these five weeks: too much has happened to actually write about it now. nothing to exciting, except maybe "tim remind yourself you want to dress up as a xmas tree next year for halloween", talking of reminding me, ever since i forgot about cinema with soph once she is making fun of the pudding thingy in my head i call brain.

speaking of which: am I the only one feeling not PC when refering to girls with the word "babe"?

ill end the post now, fix the hyperlinks, hopefully all before i fall asleep again, yesterday nite was exciting and somehow its catchign up with me. hopefully I know enough about fourier and differential equations for tomorrow mornings mid term test.

talk to you later(yes thats in less then 6 weeks)
ps: oh yeah this time its sophs fault im back to blogging