Lessons learned and musing about software tools, software testing, computational experiments, optimization, operations research, and other interesting stuff that I run across...
Constraint Programming
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Nick Berger pointed me to the Global Constraint Catalog, a collection of constraints that are can be used for constraint programming formulations. This looks like a nice reference!
Technical writing is an integral part of my research in computer science and operations research. I have a long history using LaTeX, which is very well suited for writing technical articles that contain mathematical equations as well as code snippets. Although LaTeX can readily generate postscript and PDF output files, I have been unimpressed with tools that generate HTML from LaTeX source. Thus, I was intrigued by AsciiDoc , which promises to generate PDF, HTML and eBook formats. AsciiDoc is used to provide online documentation for software projects, and authors can publish book through O'Rielly using this tool. Thus, this is a well-developed document generation tool. I have successfully prototyped a draft book, Getting Started with Coopr , and you can browse the subversion repository for this document here . Note that the Makefile file specifies build targets for PDF, HTML and eBook files. The advantage of AsciiDoc is that you can use a simple markup language to generate...
One of my favorite authors is Vernor Vinge, who explores how the evolution of technology impacts future societies. Vernor is a former professor of computer science, so it is perhaps no surprise that his tech focus appeals to me. The novel The Peace War imagines a post-apocalyptic society that is recovering from a world war that was prompted, in part, by a new force field generating device (called the Bobbler). There are all kinds of futuristic technologies described in this book, which is typical for Vinge's literature. In one scene, the protagonist is about to be ambushed by a group of bad guys. He hands a gun to his teenage companion, who takes out the bad guys without hardly aiming the gun. The trick is that the gun has computer-guided bullets, which the protagonist directed using his laptop. This sounded like standard sci-fi tech fantasy until I heard about the self-guided bullet that has been developed by Sandia National Laboratories . Mashable ha...
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