William E. Hart's Blog

The role of the FAST software repository has evolved over the past few years, and it is time to rethink what the goal of FAST is. See Rethinking the goal of FAST for some perspective about FAST. The upshot is that FAST has been reorganized to support an ensemble of independent software packages related to agile software development. One important change in this reorganization has been the decomposition of the FAST Python software into independent components. Some elements of FAST are deprecated, and the rest have been spread out into various packages. See the FAST Blog for further details.

Coopr is a collection of Python optimization-related packages that supports a diverse set of optimization capabilities for formulating and analyzing optimization models. The following are key Coopr capabilities that are driving Coopr development: Pyomo: Formulate algebraic models within Python's modern programming language PySP: Generic solvers for stochastic programming problems COLIN: Scripts that simplify IO between optimizers and black-box applications SUCASA: Customize MIP solvers to expose model structure to the MIP solver engine See https://software.sandia.gov/trac/coopr/wiki/GettingStarted for instructions for getting started with Coopr. An installation script, coopr_install, is provided to simplify the installation of Coopr packages along with the third-party Python packages that they depend on. This installer can also automatically install extension packages from Coin Bazaar. See http://groups.google.com/group/coopr-forum/topics for online discussions of Coopr. Two ...

I just discovered that the talks at PyCon 2009 were video taped! Excellent! I had fun browsing them last night, looking for clues to the challenges that I face managing several complex Python packages. I am not sure how the PyCon organizers justified the cost for doing this, but I think that this was an excellent idea. I would love to see other conferences adopt this idea (or at least support online publishing of electronic slides). I suspect that this would discourage some people from attending a conference. However, people like me are already traveling too much. Thus, the PyCon organizers did not lose anything with me; I was already unable to attend. Further, having access to the presentations makes me more likely to adopt the techniques/approaches that they are presenting! This sounds like a win-win to me!!