Some neat sage command line options

I haven't looked at sage -h for a while and was surprised to see many useful convenience features that have been added. I will highlight some ones that I've been using constantly that makes Sage development more convenient.

sage  -b [branch]   -- switch to and build SAGE branch in devel/sage-branch
sage  -br [branch]  -- switch to, build, and run SAGE branch in devel/sage-branch
sage  -clone [new branch] -- clone and run a new branch of the SAGE library from current branch
sage  -python       -- run the python interpreter
sage  -sh           -- run $SHELL (/opt/local/bin/zsh) with SAGE environment variables set
sage  -t [-optional] [-verbose] [-long] -- test examples in .py, .pyx, .sage or .tex files
                          -optional -- include examples with 'optional' and 'package'
                          -long     -- include lines with the phrase 'long time'
                          -verbose  -- print debuging output during the test

In particular, sage -sh is really useful for setting all the shell variables.

You can get a list of all the command line options by doing

sage -advanced

Using Sage with Fluid

Above is Sage running in Fluid.app, which is a "SSB" (Site Specific Browser). I am starting to like using the Sage notebook this way because it doesn't interfere with my regular browsing and it's nice having a dock icon to show your friends ;-)

Here's how you can get it up and running in no time:

1) Install Fluid.app (http://fluidapp.com)

2) Create a new SSB by pointing it to http://localhost:8000

3) You can use this Sage logo for a dock icon (the icon is from artwork done by Sirio who originally posted it to the sage-devel mailing list) 

Obviously this will not work if you don't run sage from elsewhere. I thought about including some script-fu to make it launch Sage automatically, but since I do sage -br so often it's rather pointless. 

remove /home directory on leopard

If you're like me and are curious about everything on your system, you might like this tip:

http://www.tipstrs.com/tip/1821/Fix--home-directory-after-installing-Leopard

It shows you how to remove the /home directory in your root on a Leopard machine.

Awesome geomap of Sage developers

Check out how "global" Sage development is here:

http://lite.sagemath.org/devmap.html

This was developed by Harald Schilly. If you're a Sage developer and want to show up on the map, contact Harald Schilly.

Updated version of Colloquy which fixes Python plugins on Leopard

You can find an updated binary distribution of Colloquy here:

http://yiqiang.org/Colloquy.zip

The only modification is that it is linked using -weak_library so that it uses Python 2.5 if it exists on your machine and falls back to Python 2.3 if you're using 10.4. This is needed because Python plugins for Colloquy need the pyobjc bridge, which is in Python 2.5 (as shipped with Leopard), but not Python 2.3.

You can find a sample plugin here:

http://yiqiang.org/sage-devel-trac.py

To install it, drop it into

~/Library/Application Support/Colloquy/PlugIns/

and either restart Colloquy or type /reload plugins.

Sage development funded by Google

Today the Sage team received some very exciting and encouraging news.

Chris DiBona, who is the Open Source Programs Manager at Google, was able to secure funding for several students to work on Sage this summer. The students and the projects are:

Gary Furnish (Rewrite and Vastly Optimize Symbolic Computation)
Mike Hansen (Combinatorial Species)
Robert Miller (Backtracking Algorithms and Permutation Groups)
Yi Qiang (Distributed Computing with DSage)

More details are in the original proposal:

http://yiqiang.org/google_proposal.pdf

Thanks again to Google and everyone who worked on making this happen!

Steal This Film Part 2

Part 2 of the wonderful documentary series "Steal this Film" is out. You can
download it via bittorrent here:
http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part2/

Fixing home and end key for Terminal.app in Leopard

I've finally found a good solution for making the home/end keys work as expected in Terminal.app on Leopard.

1. Go to http://www.starryhope.com/tech/apple/2006/keyfixer/, download and install it.
2. Open up Terminal.app and go to Preferences (Cmd+,)
3. Find the Keyboard tab for your settings
   
4. Find the entry for home, click on edit, change "Action" to "send string to shell" and type in ctrl+a (it should expand it to \001)
5. Repeat this for the 'end' key, and type in ctrl+e

Restart Terminal.app and voila!