Re: [Axiom-developer] reqeust

[root]

> Tim, please don't let the apparent "bad temper" of my recent emails
> prevent you from asking about this work. (The same applies of course
> to everyone else on this list.)                                 

mood? hadn't noticed. i greatly respect your opinion and it carries a
lot of weight. it won't necessarily change my mind but that's partly
my irish showing up and partly because i disagree with you.

your input is always valued and you have managed to change my opinion
in the past.


>                                 I think Kai's work on AxiomUI is
> very important to the future of Axiom, unfortunately since the close
> of the Google Summer of Code project, Kai has apparently not had much
> chance to continue work on this new user interface. We have quite a
> lot of information and ideas captured in terms of our exchange of
> emails - both on and off the axiom-developer list and I would like
> to spend some time distilling it and organizing it on the wiki. If
> you have questions about Kai's work, what was actually accomplished
> and about the discussion and plans that lead up to it, then that
> would help motivate me to do this. And also it might help to
> encourage Kai to continue work, when he has time, of course.

unfortunately Kai's work occurred while i was "mentally offline"
switching jobs and living arrangements. it hasn't gotten the 
attention from me it deserves and i really do need to look at it.

i want to get a "best case" example of doyen running soon. the 
ISSAC conference CD work goes white hot (gotta get done immediately)
in the late april/early may timeframe. this year i'm trying to get
ahead of the curve so i can prototype a conference CD based on 
doyen before the actual proceedings work occurs.

i'd hoped to do this last year but the strain of trying to bring
two students "up to speed" followed by switching jobs just put the
project way behind schedule. i did manage to set up the doyencd
project on sourceforge.

i spoke to RedHat about doyen and actually have permission from 
their legal dept to state that they endorse the project. if we
can put on a convincing demo of a computational science platform
we may be able to convince them to show up at physics, chem, bio,
math, and other science conferences and give away the doyen CDs.
that, combined with some wizzy demos, could convince a few scientists
of the worth of the effort.

a "standard" computational science platform that contained a wide
range of computational science software would give scientists a
target for distributing their algorithms. and literate programming
has the chance to capture the expertise and keep it with the code.

it really could have a big impact. but it needs work to make it happen.

if you collate Kai's stuff it would make it easier for everyone to view
including me. you were much more involved with it than i was. i've
asked Luanne Burns (copied above) to get up to speed on AJAX so we
can push ahead on this. Perhaps she and Kai can make the magic happen.

t