Re: swarm-1.2 and Drone

[Sven N. Thommesen]

At 09:58 AM 8/29/1998 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:

>Dear Marcus
>   3 questions.
>   1. If you were me, how would you go about managing the repetition of a
>simulation?  Alex L says recode Swarm as in simpleExperBug. Benedikt says
use a
>perl script. Rick says use Drone.  The Gecko people say something else.  I
wish
>you would just tell me what to do!

And I say use Drone! (In case you were taking a poll ;-) 

Actually, what tool you use depends on how your app takes its arguments.
FWIW, Drone lets you specify what parameters to sweep over, and how many
runs (with different random seed) to do per combination of parameters.
Drone tells your app what parameter values to use in the form of command
line arguments, however, so to use Drone your app needs to be able to
decode those parameters. Other solutions may do it differently (e.g. write
the parameters to a disk file you can read.)

I've hacked MySwarmAppArguments to accept a *list* of arguments from Drone
and split them into a 'name' part and a 'value' part, ready to use by a
little probe-setting code. If you decide to use Drone, I'll be happy to
shoot you a copy.

Of course, if you need something more complex than simple parameter sweeps,
you need to talk to Ginger!

>   3. I had a bad experience editing text lately and wonder if I solve it by
>using TeX.  I wrote a paper in Applixware and used some symbols, like
theta and
>delta.  Applixware has a html editor and it is supposed to work, but
whenever it
>found a theta or delta, it just put nothing because apparently html
doesn't have
>math symbols???  What do scientists do if they have to prepare a document for
>distribution in different formats, one of which is HTML?

Are you sure your problem with Applixware was with the app? Could it have
been that you used a font that didn't have the right symbols in it?

FYI, if you decide to go latex there's a semi-WYSIWYG editor for latex
called 'lyx' out there; it's either in the Redhat 5.1 dist or it's in the
5.1 Powertools (on their web site).

Cheers,
--Sven



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