Olga.Caprotti's blog

MathML displayed natively in Safari, on iphone

2008-10-29T14:51:06+02:00

I post here a photograph of a page from the NAG documentation in which one can see MathML being rendered natively by Safari using css on a iphone. Because it is MathML, the fonts scale well and zooming makes the formula very readable. The MathML profile for CSS is doing the trick, with the stylesheet by David using the css by George for Opera. What makes this interesting is the fact that we were not sure if the version of Safari running on the iphone has a xslt processor able to handle the stylesheet. Some recent experiments on IE8 of the same trick seem not to work as well.

If you want to test your iphone on some rendering, go to the NAG library documentation, in the pic for instance is http://www.nag.com/numeric/FL/manual/xhtml/A02/a02aaf.xml, and post your picture to show off your mathml.

Cleaning up the web

2008-10-22T10:14:19+03:00

My notes from TPAC.

Tim Berners Lee is arguing we need to clean up the web from the mess, meaning the legacy markup which is out there and is nevertheless displayed by browsers without any error message being displayed. If the amount of non-valid content grows, it makes it hard to build on top of the current layer. What we learned is that each layer needs to build on top, as extension, of lower layers. Making sure that the new content that is produced is "clean" ensures better extensibility, in 15 years (they go real fast). The current browsers implement a step function which either does not display anything or displays the document, despite the errors. This behavior does not reward users for the extra work needed to make the source validate.

Assistive technology gets Sun Honors Community Awards

2008-09-30T18:22:32+03:00

Dominique has just announced that the odt2tbook plugin for OpenOffice.org has won an award. He does not mention he has been interviewed in a podcast about the OpenOffice.org community. Congratulations are in order!

JEM Workshop 4: mission accomplished.

2008-09-16T19:10:58+03:00

One of the goals of the JEM network is to connect the various communities involved in mathematics education, from the technology developers to the users to the researchers in education. The last JEM workshop was organized as a satellite event to the fourth in a series of European workshops on MathML, which has shifted the emphasis from being purely technically oriented to addressing also the various communities. The participants were indeed a mixture of expertise: from long-time users of ICT in mathematics educations, to developers of leading technologies, to researchers of mathematics educations. This mix lead to some interesting remarks and conversations over the three days and hopefully increased awareness. As you can read from her blog, Christine, for instance, has come to realize that the interaction with her user community can be frustrating (when you expect to be understood) and exciting (when you are given direct user feedback). Do not miss out on her remarks on the various talks she attended. What about you, did you bring home anything from the workshop?

Math Lookup in Firefox: WikiLook plugin

2008-08-01T12:03:23+03:00

Mika often says how convenient he finds the Dictionary lookup integrated in Safari. I do not know how well that performs on mathematical terms so I tested it and compared it briefly with the wikilook plugin. To make a story short: Dictionary lookup finds terms that wikilook fails to parse. They both resort to checking Wikipedia but one finds combined terms such as ''rational functions'' while the other does not, not yet at least. None of them is able to handle numerical expressions such as the geometric series ''1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ...'', which is on Wikipedia and Google can find.

MKM 2008 blogging

2008-07-30T17:05:26+03:00

I could not attend this year the full week of workshops and conferences, including MKM 2008, and going on now in Birmingham but I found out that the Jacobs JEM partners are there and are blogging about it. I found this because I was going through the posts archived under Planet JEM.

In response to MiKo's quest for a search engine competition: yes. Let us first come up with a survey to catalogue engines in order to define divisions and list the math search engines that are out there. For instance, I have very recently installed the MathWeb search plugin in my browser toolbar. Did not even know I could do that.

MathML support in Word 2007

2008-07-30T16:29:46+03:00

After reading http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/archive/2008/07/28/improved-mathml-support-in-word-2007.aspx">Murray's blog and getting the invitation ID, I managed to download the stylesheets that should convert OOML to MathML2.0. Now I just need to figure out how to get these working on the parallels installation of Word.

Zemanta plugin and blogging

2008-07-22T17:34:45+03:00

I have been using the Zemanta firefox plugin for a while now and now the Drupal module is installed on the JEM portal. Zemanta uses the semantic web to scout for images and links that might be useful when you are writing a blog entry. I think the idea is a good one and worth of explorations from the point of view of mathematics, say by integrating search engines and smart scientific text analyzers to suggest possible connections. This brings to mind that MKM2008 is about to start as part of Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics. It will be a full week the next one in Birmingham. Hopefully some participant will blog.

BTW, for some reason Zemanta did not load while blogging this.

Geo-Traffic today on JEM

2008-06-25T12:05:54+03:00

Did you notice the live feed monitor, on the left column, under the "Online Now" header? We just added it yesterday to show you how traffic comes to our JEM pages, what pages are hit mostly, by which search phrases (some puzzling ones too). You can also see the map of the traffic, generated live.

Firefox and Quicktime

2008-05-15T11:25:13+03:00

I was very frustrated by the podcast page of Mika since the movies never played on my preferred Firefox browser under Linux. I complained to him and he added the disclaimer These podcasts require QuickTime. They will not run on a generic player. to his Calculus podcasts page.

What happened was that a missing-plugin warning blocked the player and redirected to a page where no Quicktime plugin was to be found for Linux. I spent some time today checking the iWeb template used to create the page thinking that maybe one could modify the scripting and do not require explicitely the quicktime plugin, however it turned out that the code itself does not mandate the usage of the quicktime player rather it checks the mime type. Therefore I searched for generic quicktime plugins and found plugger, a streaming multimedia plugin for Unix Mozilla. Beware and behold, it solved the problem just with one quick install line sudo yum install mozplugger. Now, when I check the plugins (about:plugins), it lists MozPlugger 1.7.3 handles QuickTime Windows Media Player Plugin with the mime type video/quicktime.

EVLM Portal

2008-04-29T18:43:36+03:00

During the last NORMA08, I was made aware of a Leonardo project called EVLM, European Virtual Laboratory of Mathematics. The basic idea of this project is to establish the virtual lab of mathematics and to promote better understanding and utilisation of mathematical knowledge in a range of other disciplines that are underpinned by mathematics. To do that, the partner institutions offer a virtual database of mathematical resources and e-learning materials but also consultancy services to those wishing to learn about the latest results in mathematics and mathematics teaching. It sounds good. I wonder if any of the partners are registered at JEM. If you are, please comment back!

The project has delivered a portal which offers:

FACTS: Frequently Asked Consultation Topics - like a small encyclopedia (not as extensive as mathworld)
ROLs: Reusable Learning Objects, for complex information about mathematical concepts consisting of a longer explanatory text accompanied by examples, illustrations and applications, or links to webMathematica examples.
PROBLEMs: training by solved problems and examples from basic mathematical topics in which a explanatory text is accompanied by step-by-step solution and calculation.
MODULEs: complex educational materials where explanatory text is accompanied by examples, illustrations, solved problems and applications.
eBOOKS: a teacher's and a student's guide, which sound very similar to the JEM wiki.

I would like to offer them the option to develop the eBOOKS online at JEM, and also to test our repository which offers a number of extra functionalities, like tagging, reviewing, RSS feeds, all missing from the EVLM portal until today.

Document Freedom Day was yesterday

2008-03-27T13:31:57+02:00

We missed it, the world's first Document Freedom Day advocating free open standards for documents. This includes MathML and OpenMath and OMDOC and MathDox! Anyway, if you want to read about ODF and MathML, check out e. g. A 'mooh' Point. To amend, we ought to customize the artwork and generate some JEM wallpapers and banners that advocate freedom for the mathematics in documents. Do not forget to post and advertise your work here!

Tags: ODF, MathML

IPhone SDK and Flash

2008-03-19T14:02:49+02:00

Few days after the longed release of the http://developer.apple.com/iphone/sdk1/">SDK for the I-devices, comes the http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120588767706747197.html">announcement of the intention to develop a Flash Player by Adobe. Good news for the users interested in educational media.

Pi Day » The official web site for Pi Day, March 14th

2008-03-14T14:22:38+02:00

Pi Day » The official web site for Pi Day, March 14th

Go celebrate.

ICTCM 2008 aftermath

2008-03-11T13:53:30+02:00

ICTCM 2008, International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics, took place last week in San Antonio, TX. The attendance this year has been the largest since 9/11 and the program was split over 9 parallel sessions in 2 days, which made it real hard to choose a presentation to attend. Tablet PCs seemed to be a great hit but in the talks I attended nobody mentioned the problem of handwritten recognition of mathematical formulas. Since this issue came up twice in the last two weeks, (in the accessible science workshop also), I decided to look into the progress after the Pen-Based Interfaces for Mathematical Documents session at CMDE in 2006. What is new? Bruce Char and Stephen Watt have a recent paper on "Representing and Characterizing Handwritten Mathematical Symbols Through Succinct Functional Approximation". Unfortunately, neither PenMath, nor Mathbrush seem to distribute their software. Hss Infty given up on handwritten math recognition? The commercial XThink offers a free trial version of their calculator. By googleing, I also found Loren Heiny's math applications on his blog where he mentions the issue of math search, among a lot of other things like Flash support in iPhones. This last topic was also mentioned during Lila Roberts talk "Beyond Podcasts: iTouch the Math", she is a firm believer in the appeal of the touch interface of the apple gadgets. Talking gadgets, Maria Andersen showed the smartpen video. She also blogged from ICTCM, so did others, according to technorati.