Friday, June 26, 2009

two new mirrors

Sage only had one foot in Europe for the last months. It was the very busy French mirror. Statistics showed that it was the most often accessed mirror of all and numbers were even increasing release by release. The upside is, there is growing interest in Sage in Europe - the downside a possible bottleneck in distributing Sage. I asked around and well, long story short: finally we have two new high quality mirrors in Europe:
Big thanks!

May the sageification of Europe continue - world domination soon to follow ;)

If you are also able to help distributing Sage, contact the webmaster.

H

Saturday, May 30, 2009

sage + google wave

google wave is a new type of web 2.0 hosted communication, presented at google's i/o conference a view days ago. http://wave.google.com . it is very early to tell what it really is, but it could be big. it is very open and also consists of an open protocol for communication, that can be used (basically) for everything - and that's where i started to think about sage. but first, i explain what i think it does and how sage could play a role in there!

a server (not necessarily google - it's more like jabber/xmpp where everybody could host a server and servers talk to each other if users use different servers) hosts the "communication", called "wave". that's a tree-like structure of data, replies, extensions, meta-info, etc. if someone modifies something or adds a reply, every other participant sees the modification in real-time.

there are also artificial participants, called robots. they can also do things just like a regular user. example: spellchecking! a spellchecker analyzes all text and if something is odd, it annotates/modifies the text.
okay, how works synchronization? basically, all operations happen on the server. i think it is an abelian group so that there are no "destructive" operations - only invertible - that cannot destroy the state-flow and the sum of all state changes is the current state. therefore, there is only one thread of communication for all participants. if something happens (lost connection), everything is re-synced fast.

the interesting point is, there are also gadgets: interactive elements for all participants (an example is a chess game) and that's where i think sage could be used. basically, my idea is to implement a button to create a cell from the notebook. then, you enter the url of a sage server + your credentials. now, input is sent to the server (also, autocomplete ....) and you get the answer back and a new cell is created. if i understand it correctly, the server is actually talking to sage, so it is possible that several users edit at the same time and the actual cell-data is saved inside this "wave".
what's missing is formatting the formulas - but there is also mathml which could do it.

i applied for an early developer sandbox access, once i know more about this i'll tell you more.

Monday, May 25, 2009

booom

yet another blogstart!