William E. Hart's Blog

By necessity, I have become quite adept at digging through webspace with search engines like google to figure out "how to do X". But occasionally, it is difficult to get a sense of whether something is easy from written instructions. For example, I recently tried to install PyQT, a Python interface to the popular QT application interface library, and here's the error that I got when trying to use nmake to build the SIP library (which PyQT uses): C:\Python25\sip-4.7.6\sip-4.7.6\siplib>nmake Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility Version 8.00.50727.762 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. cl -c -nologo -Zm200 -O2 -MD -W0 -DUNICODE -DWIN32 -DQT_LARGEFILE_SUPPORT -I. -IC:\Python25\include -Fo @C:\DOCUME~1\wehart\LOCALS~1\Temp\nm271.tmp NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin\cl.EXE"' : return code '0xc0000135' Stop. I had more than a little difficulty figuring out what the ret...

In the past year, I have increasingly been using Python to develop a variety of OR-related scientific software. In particular, the Coopr library has been a major focus of this software development. Recently, I have written a paper that will appear in the proceedings of the INFORMS Computing Society Conference 2009 : W. Hart, Python Optimization Modeling Objects (Pyomo) , Proc. INFORMS Computing Society Conference, 2009, (to appear). In this paper, I describe Pyomo, an open-source tool for modeling optimization applications in Python. A key goal of Pyomo is to provide an open-source math programming modeling capability. Although open-source optimization solvers are widely available in packages like COIN-OR , surprisingly few open-source tools have been developed to model optimization applications. Pyomo has been developed in Python because it is a well-used modern programming language that provides a robust foundation for developing and applying scientific software. In this paper, I...

If you are interested in the intersection of operations research and computing, then the INFORMS ICS Meeting will be of interest to you! I am organizing a session on open-source software for operations research. Contact me if you are interested in giving a presentation!

Much of my work involves the development of open-source software. Recently, I have been challenged to justify this in several different projects. I recently stumbled across Dave Wheeler's paper , which provides a nice quantitative analysis of the advantages of open-source software.

I'm going to try using ScribeFire to generate these posts. This seems highly recommended. Also, I can work with it offline, which is a definite plus for me!