Websites and Setup Scripts: Random Updates

I haven't posted in a while! This is mostly because I've been busy with a couple things which I'll list here. Don't worry, I'm not going to apologize for not posting more.

What I've been up to:

• Purchasing a domain name: I decided to buy one through Google Apps. You can now find me at
  
  
  http://www.cswiercz.info
  
  (You may have noticed that this blog is now at http://blog.cswiercz.info) Not only do I have the domain name but I put my website on Google's server instead of the Applied Math server. Not sure where I'll be next year so it's good to have, for my situation, a more central location. Finally, like a lot of academics' websites, it's constantly under construction. I just refuse to put little GIFs on construction workers all over the page.
• Concerning Clawpack: believe it or not, I'm still wrestling with the setup.py installation script. Many things broke since we converted to a new program structure involving a Python-Fortran bridge library. However, things are almost working again. Essentially what needs to happen is that the core Fortran library, libclawpack.so, need to be built and installed into a directory under the user's LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. This is because the Python-Fortran bridge library, pyclawpack.so, needs to link to the core library. Since they're both dynamic the setup script needs to perform some environment variable checks or else things break down. Only then can we move on to the Pyclaw standard distutils installation process.
• Converting Examples: Once the Clawpack setup script is squared away I hope to begin converting some of the Clawpack 4.x examples to the Clawpack 5.0 format. This will be a good opportunity to learn how to use the new system as well as implement some of the things I've been learning from Randy's book

One thing I forgot to mention from the SciPy conference: on the morning of the first day of tutorials I saw this on the news:

Starting the Scientific Python conference right, I suppose.

Random Thoughts:

• After getting fed up with the poor compatibility between my Macbook Pro's wireless antenna and Ubuntu's drivers for such things, I decided to wipe the Ubuntu install when I installed Snow Leopard. No worries since 95% of my work and personal stuff is floating on a cloud somewhere...
• ...and speaking of Ubuntu. I think there was an incompatibility with Ubuntu's battery handling algorithms and my lappy battery because Snow Leopard is indicating that it needs to be serviced. I believe it since my battery's lifespan has fallen to 1:30 instead of the usual 4ish hours.
• (Que Mac-haters' rants. :P Though, since I do so much development on Linux platforms I'm considering purchasing a netbook and popping Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it and use the Macbook for mostly personal stuff. It actually doesn't matter too much since I do most of my development remotely. I have a one terminal window up for my local machine, screen running on the Clawpack server in another terminal session, and a third terminal running screen on the Sage server.)
• I introduced some engineering friends to the Scipy - Numpy - Matplotlib combo. They're such heavy Matlab users so I thought I'd share with them an open-source option. The reception was not to bad especially after giving some demonstrations.