My new approach to coding

I have a large function to write over the weekend. When it's finished and a co-worker gives the all-clear after his tests are complete, I'll unleash it on the documentation notebooks for the upcoming version of Mathematica and let it do its thing. My function will store blobs of information in each notebook, and my co-worker's function will use those blobs to build other parts of the notebooks.

This time around, though, I'm doing something a bit different that's working remarkably well so far. I started with an empty function template and simply wrote the function's story in sentences and paragraphs and bulleted lists, from start to finish, as if I were describing it in detail to a technically-minded co-worker. In a second pass I broke apart the prose into smaller sections and then just translated each idea into Mathematica code. I've left the prose in there as free-form commented areas to act as documentation for my future self, who will have forgotten all about this code in a couple of years.

My latest obsession

I'm writing a program to calculate days on the 1962 liturgical calendar, the one used for the traditional Latin Mass/Extraordinary Form/Tridentine Mass/whatever you call it. This time I'm documenting everything as it happens - breathtaking LIVE coverage of a fat guy typing at a computer!

I've been down this road before back in 2002 or so when I wrote a similar program in emacs lisp for the current liturgical calendar. This time I'm writing in Mathematica, and I'm an older and slightly wilier programmer.

Mathematica and insurance research

Seth Chandler of the University of Houston Law Center talks about modeling post-hurricane insurance in Mathematica. Here's the application he demonstrated in the video, and here are the 107 other ones he's written.

Practically giving it away

Mathematica Home Edition is now available for only $295.00, and it's not some crippled toy version - it's the whole shebang. See http://reference.wolfram.com for the complete language documentation and see http://blog.wolfram.com for neat things you can do with it.

-15 and falling

So I'm up all night tonight babysitting our crazy homebrewed in-floor heating system in the garage. There's an electric water heater filled with water and antifreeze, an electric pump, lots of plastic tubing in the garage's concrete floor, and, naturally, just a few exposed water pipes under the laundry room, which overhangs a corner of the garage. So the challenge is to maintain 32°F plus a few degrees of insurance, which means tonight maintaining a 32° + 15° + insurance° = 55° difference between outside and inside, without running the system nonstop all night.

The dryer vents out into that corner of the garage, so I'm continually washing and drying the same two loads of laundry all night to pump warm air into the garage. Sometime after I wake up tomorrow I'll buy an electric heater to use out there.

Update: oh-bloody-hell o'clock: here's what Mathematica says about the temperature since yesterday at midnight; time in UTC, temp in °F:

DateListPlot[
  WeatherData[
    "KCMI",
    "Temperature",
    {{2009, 1, 15}, {2009, 1, 16}},
    "DateNonMetricValue"
  ],
  Joined -> True,
  DateTicksFormat -> {"Hour12Short", "AMPMLowerCase"}
]

Update: at five million o'clock we're 17 degrees colder than Barrow, Alaska, where they're enjoying the warmth of the tundra on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

Update: half-past gah: trains make odd sounds when the temp is this low. Going around the curve west of town they emit strange echoing screeches and along the straightaway a block south there's a deep thumping beat as they speed through.