[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On 8/8/07, Ted Kosan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We've discussed stuff like this before on sage-devel, and the decision was made to not put any automatic call home features in SAGE. For example, SAGE won't automatically check for updates, report usage patterns, etc., without the user explicitly doing something to opt in. The Sage server we are setting up at our university will serve all of our university students, all the high schools in our region, and all the high schools that we are serving via distance learning. We are definitely going to want to collect usage statistics on how the service is being used and we would be willing to share this information with the Sage development team. So, what do we need to do in order to opt in? Nobody has actually written any code in SAGE yet in order to record any notebook usage statistics. It would be fairly easy to add hooks into the notebook to record certain things to a log file. It would be very helpful if somebody (e.g., you and maybe other people), could just use the notebook and think about what sorts of things you would like to be able to have logged. Then post a list to this thread. Thanks! -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
William wrote: We've discussed stuff like this before on sage-devel, and the decision was made to not put any automatic call home features in SAGE. For example, SAGE won't automatically check for updates, report usage patterns, etc., without the user explicitly doing something to opt in. The Sage server we are setting up at our university will serve all of our university students, all the high schools in our region, and all the high schools that we are serving via distance learning. We are definitely going to want to collect usage statistics on how the service is being used and we would be willing to share this information with the Sage development team. So, what do we need to do in order to opt in? Ted --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
I am not a SAGE developer, and I'll probably say things that most of you know already, but I thought about this so I might as well email the list. Here is how to go about and possibly improve rankings on Google (*): Step 1: Everyone on this list could make sure to add a link to sagemath.org on their homepage, preferably with free, open-source, math and software spelled out close to the link Step 2: The sagemath.org website definitely needs meta data to be added. The same keywords and more, maybe a dozen total. Google uses those. One could say this wouldn't help for a search on the single term sage, but I am not sure: the very last step that Google performs in every search is to make sure that it has diversity in the output (make sure it talks about herbs, fly-fishing rods and software). So I would suspect the sagemath.org website suffers on a search for the single word sage mostly because there are already quite a lot of programs out there called sage, and Google will only display so many in the top ten. Helping Google (through the meta) distinguish how one is different from the other might help. Step 3: Definitely buy Google ads. Who would find SAGE through Google that has never heard about it? I could imagine that someone searching for free mathematica would be very interested to learn about SAGE. Also you would get data out of it, since you can see which keywords seem to work with people. Finally, with Google Ads you only spend as much as you are willing to spend (I can't remember if there is a lower limit/month or what it is). That data must be worth some cash. Step 4: Go around and post on forums. For instance, if you search for mathematica free (without the quotes), this shows up high up, at least for me: http://www.karakas-online.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=189 . A website, highly ranked by Google, where people seem to be interested in something exactly like SAGE. Doesn't matter how old the conversation really is (in that case it was initiated 4 years ago, but the latest post is 6 months old), it would be good for all (the forum users, Google, SAGE users and developers) if someone took the time to post a paragraph about SAGE and a link to sagemath.org on many similar posts. It would help drain some PageRank to sagemath.org. Suggestion: Writing this up, I have a question. What is the correct case? sage, Sage or SAGE? Is it standardized? For example, in the Firefox search bar that was just posted yesterday, it seems to be written Sage. On the website, it's always (?) written SAGE, except in the logo where it looks like sage. Google picks up on those differences, sometimes, and it could be helpful. Paul (*) This is backed up: for a while I was the first hit when searching for chocolate mousse (without quotes) ! Unfortunately I have come down to 10th since moving to Oxford. :) On Aug 8, 9:14 am, Chris Chiasson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is kinda off the wall: Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab don't have a lot of competition for their keywords on Google, Yahoo, or MSN. By offering a **very low bid** on each of the names, you could probably put a message about the SAGE open source project on each of their names. In addition, you could do the same for SAGE's name. Together with the nice solid application based tutorials suggestion mentioned in this thread, you might easily siphon off their new users (and some old hands too). On Aug 7, 5:22 pm, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Sage-Devel, The SAGE downloads during the last week are as follows: Linux Binary 42 OS X Binary 42 Source 91 VMware (= Windows) 57 Total .. 232 The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I'm laying a lot of groundwork (e.g., writing books, articles, etc.) and I think other people are (esp David Joyner), but there is probably much more that could be done. Please share your thoughts! -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
I agree with most of what Paul said, except that the thread on karakas has a page rank of 2, so I am not sure what the ROI would be on that one. For comparison, SAGE's homepage has a page rank of 6. My homepage, which can easily be located, has a page rank of 5. Slashdot's homepage has a page rank of 9, etc... The [mathematica free] search keyword is clever. I think I've personally searched for that many times. Also, it helps to have a domain name where the individual words are separated. Search engines will boost site rankings for search terms that appear in the domain name: sage-math.org or sage.math.org or sage.math.net or sage.net If you make an email signature (that you use on reputable mailing lists) which contains the aforementioned type of domain name in a URL, you can obtain a double bonus. The reason for this is that mailing list (and newsgroup) messages are (usually) automatically converted to HTML archives where URLs are hyperlinked. When this happens, you gain a link from a reputable source that has your key words in the anchor text. Anchor text has a lot of weight; it's what people used to Google bomb the keywords [miserable failure]. On Aug 9, 5:54 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am not a SAGE developer, and I'll probably say things that most of you know already, but I thought about this so I might as well email the list. Here is how to go about and possibly improve rankings on Google (*): Step 1: Everyone on this list could make sure to add a link to sagemath.org on their homepage, preferably with free, open-source, math and software spelled out close to the link Step 2: The sagemath.org website definitely needs meta data to be added. The same keywords and more, maybe a dozen total. Google uses those. One could say this wouldn't help for a search on the single term sage, but I am not sure: the very last step that Google performs in every search is to make sure that it has diversity in the output (make sure it talks about herbs, fly-fishing rods and software). So I would suspect the sagemath.org website suffers on a search for the single word sage mostly because there are already quite a lot of programs out there called sage, and Google will only display so many in the top ten. Helping Google (through the meta) distinguish how one is different from the other might help. Step 3: Definitely buy Google ads. Who would find SAGE through Google that has never heard about it? I could imagine that someone searching for free mathematica would be very interested to learn about SAGE. Also you would get data out of it, since you can see which keywords seem to work with people. Finally, with Google Ads you only spend as much as you are willing to spend (I can't remember if there is a lower limit/month or what it is). That data must be worth some cash. Step 4: Go around and post on forums. For instance, if you search for mathematica free (without the quotes), this shows up high up, at least for me:http://www.karakas-online.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=189. A website, highly ranked by Google, where people seem to be interested in something exactly like SAGE. Doesn't matter how old the conversation really is (in that case it was initiated 4 years ago, but the latest post is 6 months old), it would be good for all (the forum users, Google, SAGE users and developers) if someone took the time to post a paragraph about SAGE and a link to sagemath.org on many similar posts. It would help drain some PageRank to sagemath.org. Suggestion: Writing this up, I have a question. What is the correct case? sage, Sage or SAGE? Is it standardized? For example, in the Firefox search bar that was just posted yesterday, it seems to be written Sage. On the website, it's always (?) written SAGE, except in the logo where it looks like sage. Google picks up on those differences, sometimes, and it could be helpful. Paul (*) This is backed up: for a while I was the first hit when searching for chocolate mousse (without quotes) ! Unfortunately I have come down to 10th since moving to Oxford. :) On Aug 8, 9:14 am, Chris Chiasson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is kinda off the wall: Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab don't have a lot of competition for their keywords on Google, Yahoo, or MSN. By offering a **very low bid** on each of the names, you could probably put a message about the SAGE open source project on each of their names. In addition, you could do the same for SAGE's name. Together with the nice solid application based tutorials suggestion mentioned in this thread, you might easily siphon off their new users (and some old hands too). On Aug 7, 5:22 pm, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Sage-Devel, The SAGE downloads during the last week are as follows: Linux Binary 42 OS X Binary 42 Source 91 VMware (= Windows) 57 Total .. 232 The number of new
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
Hi, I just want to post to say thanks for all the excellent feedback on the question I asked earlier. I think it is all very valuable, even if some options aren't possible at present. Regarding a native Windows port, such a thing would be wonderful to have, but unfortunately it is *totally impossible* given the resources currently available to the SAGE project, as I think Michael explained very well. Programs like Maple, Mathematica, Magma, and Matlab currently have between 1 and 100 million in operating budget per year, whereas SAGE has maybe $70K, so the options for what we can do are severely constrained I am still very glad expensive options were discussed in this thread. One comment is that I think it's wrong to think Windows users would prefer a native half-way broken partial version of SAGE to a VMware or Virtual-PC based complete 100% working version of SAGE. In fact, I'm fairly certain most Windows users would vastly prefer a 100% working virtualization version of SAGE to something that is half-way broken but native. In fact, most Windows users have no clue at all that they're using Linux when they start SAGE via the vmware machine, and that's fine. I should add that very very little time has been put into the SAGE vmware machine at this point -- certainly far far less than went into the Cygwin version of SAGE. I'm the only one who has put work into the SAGE vmware machine, and I really didn't do much besides install SAGE into ubuntu and write a couple of little scripts. There was going to be a coding sprint project on this at SD4, but that didn't materialize. Thoughts for improving the development model for the sage-vmware (and/or sage-parallels and/or sage-msvirtualpc) machines would be greatly appreciated. Probably the only possible way there will ever be a native (!= Cygwin or Mingw) Windows version of SAGE were if some people formed a dot-com open source mathematics software company, got venture capital, sold service, etc., and were able to hire a team of highly skilled windows programmers for a (few?) years. If anybody who actually understands how SAGE works thinks differently I'd love to hear about it. The suggestion to make a serious major push for good 3d graphics, is clearly difficult but totally doable. I think this would be the best investment of time at present for the greatest return. The lack of good integrated interactive 3d graphics in SAGE is now the main remaining missing functionality. I still think the best solution is a java applet in the notebook and vtk/mayavi for people using the command line. Tim's idea for example nontrivial applications of SAGE is great, and it's supremely practical because the workload is easily distributed: * In SAGE_ROOT/devel/doc/overviews you can find some documents that Josh Kantor and I started, which go in this direction. * This page is also useful for seeing how SAGE is applied: http://sagemath.org/pub.html Aaron's suggestion to make it really easy to run the SAGE notebook publicly through apachessl sort of scares me because running the SAGE notebook publicly in anything but a chroot jail is inviting disaster, and that will never change. This is definitely not ready for anybody to trivially do, and probably it should never be. Notice that there are -- as far as I can tell -- no web pages (besides the SAGE notebook) that let a person enter arbitrary Python code, and Python is vastly more popular than SAGE. (Also, running the notebook through apache is already reasonably easy via using mod proxy.) Regarding Internet Explorer, the fact is it would be 1-2 day's of work to make the SAGE notebook reasonably usable from IE 7. Shift-enter would be replaced by a submit button and some of the CSS would have to be reworked, but otherwise most things would work. It hasn't happened yet, mainly because none of the people who know how the SAGE notebook work actually use IE. Supporting IE7 is definitely worth doing. Regarding: Pick an organization or department that uses Mathematica or Maple or MATLAB. Find out what they use it for. Put the same capabilities into SAGE. Give SAGE to them, possibly with a turnkey demonstration. Rinse and repeat?? This might be a reasonable strategy if SAGE had a nontrivial budget or were a company, but it isn't (though it's too random for my taste -- which department? which use case?). Every step of SAGE development has to: (1) directly benefit and be *very* important to at least one SAGE developer, and (2) move SAGE forward to be a better system. Guiding SAGE development is all about finding ways to simultaneously satisfy these constraints. Many of the comments in this thread are very helpful for this. Overall, I think the ideas in this thread that best satisfy the above two constraints are (1) Josh's idea to greatly improve the 2 and 3d graphics capabilities in SAGE (and how they are showcased on the website), and (2) Tim's idea to
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
Regarding Internet Explorer, the fact is it would be 1-2 day's of work to make the SAGE notebook reasonably usable from IE 7. Shift-enter would be replaced by a submit button and some of the CSS would have to be reworked, but otherwise most things would work. It hasn't happened yet, mainly because none of the people who know how the SAGE notebook work actually use IE. Supporting IE7 is definitely worth doing. Depending on funding, this might happen some time this month. It used to be a 2-3 day job, but most features have had their IE-aware code stripped out, since it was often causing more trouble than it was worth. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On 8/7/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Regarding Internet Explorer, the fact is it would be 1-2 day's of work to make the SAGE notebook reasonably usable from IE 7. Shift-enter would be replaced by a submit button and some of the CSS would have to be reworked, but otherwise most things would work. It hasn't happened yet, mainly because none of the people who know how the SAGE notebook work actually use IE. Supporting IE7 is definitely worth doing. Depending on funding, this might happen some time this month. It used to be a 2-3 day job, but most features have had their IE-aware code stripped out, since it was often causing more trouble than it was worth. Hopefully many of those features disappeared from SAGE in the new version of the notebook. I optimistically think it is 2 days to get something that is fully usable. (This means that the CSS produces pages that are actually readable, and it is possible to evaluate cells, insert cells, etc.) What does depending on funding mean above, by the way? Does it mean, if I pay you some money out of startup? Another option is that I could finally get the tax-free donation (via credit card, etc.) setup through UW math, and we could see if somebody would donate a total of say $200 to support you spending a few days on this. What do you think? It would be interesting to have a comment in the code listing who paid for certain functionality... -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, William Stein wrote: On 8/7/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Regarding Internet Explorer, the fact is it would be 1-2 day's of work to make the SAGE notebook reasonably usable from IE 7. Shift-enter would be replaced by a submit button and some of the CSS would have to be reworked, but otherwise most things would work. It hasn't happened yet, mainly because none of the people who know how the SAGE notebook work actually use IE. Supporting IE7 is definitely worth doing. Depending on funding, this might happen some time this month. It used to be a 2-3 day job, but most features have had their IE-aware code stripped out, since it was often causing more trouble than it was worth. Hopefully many of those features disappeared from SAGE in the new version of the notebook. I optimistically think it is 2 days to get something that is fully usable. (This means that the CSS produces pages that are actually readable, and it is possible to evaluate cells, insert cells, etc.) I agree that it would probably take around 2 days for it to work, and suck a little. I think it'd take a week (plus) for it to work nicely. I recall that cross-browser introspection was a hard problem, but doable. What does depending on funding mean above, by the way? Does it mean, if I pay you some money out of startup? Another option is that I could finally get the tax-free donation (via credit card, etc.) setup through UW math, and we could see if somebody would donate a total of say $200 to support you spending a few days on this. What do you think? It would be interesting to have a comment in the code listing who paid for certain functionality... It means, I'm kinda broke, so I'll do work on the notebook for pay. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
I'm here just to say that for non-US users, the name of the program is not the simplest to found on the web. SAGE is a name with many different meanings and I'd suggest a more peculiar name that could let the program to be found instantly on the web. And I agree that a web site with many examples open to free contribution and a .deb package would increase greatly the number of users. Just think about how many Debian users try to find a mathematica package in apt repository. Regards On Aug 8, 12:22 am, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Sage-Devel, The SAGE downloads during the last week are as follows: Linux Binary 42 OS X Binary 42 Source 91 VMware (= Windows) 57 Total .. 232 The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I'm laying a lot of groundwork (e.g., writing books, articles, etc.) and I think other people are (esp David Joyner), but there is probably much more that could be done. Please share your thoughts! -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
kaimmello wrote: I'm here just to say that for non-US users, the name of the program is not the simplest to found on the web. SAGE is a name with many different meanings and I'd suggest a more peculiar name that could let the program to be found instantly on the web. I very much agree with this. When someone does a web search on just sage, all kinds of other sites are returned. When telling people about Sage, one often only gets the chance to say a quick look up sage on the Internet. I was in a meeting with the head of Ohio's Learning Network organization a couple weeks ago and I was able to make a few comments about Sage. I noticed that everyone in the room picked up their pencils and wrote down notes on what I said, but I bet that most of them will have a hard time finding Sage on the Internet if they wrote the URL down wrong. Now that the SAGE acronym has been dropped, I would recommend changing the name to sagemath. This name matches the sagemath.org website, it helps explain what sage is, and search engines will not return unrelated sites if this name is used. Ted --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
Now that the SAGE acronym has been dropped, I would recommend changing the name to sagemath. This name matches the sagemath.org website, it helps explain what sage is, and search engines will not return unrelated sites if this name is used. We bring this up every few months, and I maintain that it's a good idea. Alternately, sage.math or mathsage (that would make us an m, which has it's pluses and minuses.) --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
This is kinda off the wall: Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab don't have a lot of competition for their keywords on Google, Yahoo, or MSN. By offering a **very low bid** on each of the names, you could probably put a message about the SAGE open source project on each of their names. In addition, you could do the same for SAGE's name. Together with the nice solid application based tutorials suggestion mentioned in this thread, you might easily siphon off their new users (and some old hands too). On Aug 7, 5:22 pm, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Sage-Devel, The SAGE downloads during the last week are as follows: Linux Binary 42 OS X Binary 42 Source 91 VMware (= Windows) 57 Total .. 232 The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I'm laying a lot of groundwork (e.g., writing books, articles, etc.) and I think other people are (esp David Joyner), but there is probably much more that could be done. Please share your thoughts! -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
Actually, to clarify and back up from the previous statement: I don't know what the level of competition is for those keywords. I thought it was low because Google didn't show a lot of ads, but that could be an artifact of automated programs that only show ads that are clicked on most frequently (or whatever). I suppose I could look, though I don't know if there is a way to check the average selling price. Also, this gets into economic questions: Is it better for the project to have maximum investment in RD or to have some part of investment in advertising, which can have the effect of more quickly growing the community. Perhaps it would make more sense to advertise on terms such as AMS or python or whatever else people who would make good candidate programmers search for. On Aug 8, 3:14 am, Chris Chiasson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is kinda off the wall: Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab don't have a lot of competition for their keywords on Google, Yahoo, or MSN. By offering a **very low bid** on each of the names, you could probably put a message about the SAGE open source project on each of their names. In addition, you could do the same for SAGE's name. Together with the nice solid application based tutorials suggestion mentioned in this thread, you might easily siphon off their new users (and some old hands too). On Aug 7, 5:22 pm, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Sage-Devel, The SAGE downloads during the last week are as follows: Linux Binary 42 OS X Binary 42 Source 91 VMware (= Windows) 57 Total .. 232 The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I'm laying a lot of groundwork (e.g., writing books, articles, etc.) and I think other people are (esp David Joyner), but there is probably much more that could be done. Please share your thoughts! -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On Wednesday 08 August 2007, William Stein wrote: Hi Sage-Devel, The SAGE downloads during the last week are as follows: Linux Binary 42 OS X Binary 42 Source 91 VMware (= Windows) 57 Total .. 232 The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread I'm laying a lot of groundwork (e.g., writing books, articles, etc.) and I think other people are (esp David Joyner), but there is probably much more that could be done. Please share your thoughts! To me SAGE has at least two quite distinct target audiences. 1.) research mathematicians (or similar fields). I don't know how many people work in these areas (and know how to use a computer for research) around the world but having almost 1000 downloads a month seems like a lot to me. My guess is that most SAGE developers somehow fall into this category (correct me if I'm wrong) and that is why we focused and should focus on this area. Here, all that counts is high quality, maybe speed, good documentation and lots and lots of publications. Maybe presenting SAGE at some conferences wouldn't hurt either. So basically, it's all about a good product. 2.) undergrads taking calculus classes or people who use a CAS from time to time only. If SAGE is to reach the 10.000 user mark it is probably this group which makes up the big numbers. Many people on this list seem to assume so too, because they suggested non-mathemtical means to increase the number of users. in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. Okay, you asked for it: - is the SAGE notebook optimized for search engines? Does it get picked up? Same for the SAGE website, the documentation? Search Engine Optimization is a shady business but some tricks certainly help the visibility of a project. - right now, there is a huge hype surrounding AJAX, Web 2.0, user created content and such. SAGE fits in there because of the SAGE notebook which is a good example of AJAX actually being useful. Use the hype, let the AJAX crazy dotcom world know about it: techcrunch.com, mashable.com, uncov.com, slashdot.org, digg.com, reddit.com, lifehacker.com ... the list goes on and on and on. To them its a free webservice which doesn't even have Google Ads or VC. - buy some Google Ads, apply for venture capital ... kidding - when I did my GRE Math test I noticed that many shady websites try to lure you into installing some dialer to get some GRE Math prep material, like solutions with explanation. So, if they think it is a profitable business to rip-off potential grad students, there must be some significant number of people trying to find solutions to the GRE prep material on the web. A well placed SAGE notebook explaining the concepts and allowing a user to interact with the sample GRE test questions in the way SAGE allows this interaction could bring in some attention. - there are some math blogs news sites out there. Drop them a mail. Maybe search for Mathematica 6 review (as it just came out) and drop those reviewing Mathematica a mail about SAGE. So far, Martin -- name: Martin Albrecht _pgp: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0x8EF0DC99 _www: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb _jab: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
- right now, there is a huge hype surrounding AJAX, Web 2.0, user created content and such. SAGE fits in there because of the SAGE notebook which is a good example of AJAX actually being useful. Use the hype, let the AJAX crazy dotcom world know about it: techcrunch.com, mashable.com, uncov.com, slashdot.org, digg.com, reddit.com, lifehacker.com ... the list goes on and on and on. To them its a free webservice which doesn't even have Google Ads or VC. Spot on. Slashdot has high PageRank. After obtaining a few stories there, sagemath.org will have a much higher PageRank. It could be billed in the typical Open Source XX Killer/Competitor way. Ex. Open Source Mathematica Competitor. This really gets the juices of the Slashdot hordes flowing. Of course, it is important to have a killer demo and a really fast server waiting on the other end of a Slashdot link... - buy some Google Ads, apply for venture capital ... kidding I think it is worth looking at since they're so serious about making SAGE successful. - when I did my GRE Math test I noticed that many shady websites try to lure you into installing some dialer to get some GRE Math prep material, like solutions with explanation. So, if they think it is a profitable business to rip-off potential grad students, there must be some significant number of people trying to find solutions to the GRE prep material on the web. A well placed SAGE notebook explaining the concepts and allowing a user to interact with the sample GRE test questions in the way SAGE allows this interaction could bring in some attention. Clever - there are some math blogs news sites out there. Drop them a mail. Maybe search for Mathematica 6 review (as it just came out) and drop those reviewing Mathematica a mail about SAGE. ++ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On Wednesday 08 August 2007, Tim Lahey wrote: On 8/8/07, Martin Albrecht [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2.) undergrads taking calculus classes or people who use a CAS from time to time only. If SAGE is to reach the 10.000 user mark it is probably this group which makes up the big numbers. Many people on this list seem to assume so too, because they suggested non-mathemtical means to increase the number of users. I guess it depends on what you mean from time to time. I use Maple quite a bit (pretty close to daily), and I presented software I wrote to symbolically derive mass and stiffness matrices from first principles for finite element analysis at Maple's user conference in 2005. I've been trying to do nearly all my symbolic mathematics for my PhD research directly in Maple and I've been using MATLAB for my numerics. However, license restrictions have been a pain for MATLAB so I've been looking at moving away from both Maple and MATLAB and into SAGE since I'm somewhat familiar with both Python and SciPy. Unfortunately, learning to use SAGE for symbolic calculations has been quite a bit more difficult than learning Maple. With limited time (since I have to do my research) it appears that I'll be using SAGE for numerical calculations at most (at least for the foreseeable future). Hi Tim, I wasn't trying to say that everybody using Calculus is not a power-user or developer. My point is that if we are after 10.000th of users, then casual users are the ones we are after, simply because I doubt that there are so many power-users/developers out there. Presenting working code to a conference isn't something 10.000 people are going to do (?) Cheers, Martin -- name: Martin Albrecht _pgp: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=getsearch=0x8EF0DC99 _www: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb _jab: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On Aug 8, 3:59 am, Tim Lahey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I presented software I wrote to symbolically derive mass and stiffness matrices from first principles for finite element analysis at Maple's user conference in 2005. That's cool. I wrote similar stuff in Mathematica when I had to take finite element classes. I bet yours is a lot more sophisticated than mine. Is your work on the web? --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
William wrote: Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I'm laying a lot of groundwork (e.g., writing books, articles, etc.) and I think other people are (esp David Joyner), but there is probably much more that could be done. Please share your thoughts! In my opinion, the most promising marketing plan for Sage is based on the idea that Sage is the first general purpose computer algebra system in history that has the potential to radically change the way people learn and perform mathematics. I have come to firmly believe this and the main strategy of this marketing plan is to provide people with the educational support needed for them to see this for themselves. I think Sage's destiny is to create a revolution in the way people learn and perform mathematics and revolutions are most effective when they are targeted at the young. Therefore, I think Sage's future lies with the millions of junior high and high school aged students in the world today that are more than ready to learn how to perform mathematics in a way that is vastly more powerful than a hand calculator and guaranteed to be available as long as civilization lasts. If Sage is successful in gaining a large user base of young people today, this will translate into increasingly wider distribution across all industries and institutions going forward. The key to successfully distributing Sage to the millions of students in the world is to understand that they all need to learn fundamental programming and computer skills before they can use any computer algebra system. Most K-12 educational institutions and learning materials are unable to teach these skills because they are extremely obsolete. The reason for this is that technology's growth is exponential and most K-12 institutions have simply been unable to keep pace with it. These institutions know they need help with their math and science curricula and they are usually very open to solutions to this large and universal problem. Using this as a foundation, here are my thoughts on action items for a Sage marketing plan: 1) All technical students need to learn how a computer actually works and how to program. Create a series of free eBooks that teach these topics from scratch in a way that provides a solid foundation for learning how to use Sage: Status: Done ( http://professorandpat.org ) 2) The Internet heavily depends on UNIX-based open source operating systems and this dependency is increasing over time. A significant number of technical students need to learn how to manually install these type of operating systems so that they have a solid understanding of how they work. This knowledge is needed in order to do more advanced tasks like patching applications and building them. Create a series of free eBooks that show how to manually install Linux in a way which provides the learner with the skills needed to build Sage from scratch and set it up as a web service on the Internet. Status: 3/4 done ( http://206.21.94.60/tkosan/distancelearning/etec150/lectures/linux/ ). eBooks on building applications and manually setting up a Sage server still need to be written. 3) Develop an eBook for high school aged students that shows how to use Sage from the ground up. Status: In progress. 4) Develop a series of free mathematics books for high school aged students which are based on Sage. Status: If it can be assumed that the students already know the content in parts 1-3 above, these books should be a joy to write and I bet that people can be located who would be willing to develop these books. #3 above should be able to significantly increase the pool of people who have the Sage skills needed to write Sage-based textbooks. 5) Develop online courses that are based on the above materials. Make the course materials available for free to universities that would like to offer them as post secondary options to their local high schools. Encourage schools to donate some of the profits they make from the post secondary revenues to the Sage project. Status: This is exactly what my university is doing. We just signed a contract for $50,000 with a consortium of 16 high schools in our state capital to offer a course based on the above eBooks, along with 2 other courses. If this goes well, we will be in a good position to market courses to the rest of the schools in Ohio and this will hopefully include mathematics and programming courses based on Sage. Other universities could easily use the eBooks to do the same thing. 6) Similar to #5 except target Tech Prep schools in the US. These schools are easier to communicate with than normal high schools because they are all part of the nation-wide Tech Prep program. Status: My University is currently offering an online post secondary
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On 8/8/07, Chris Chiasson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That's cool. I wrote similar stuff in Mathematica when I had to take finite element classes. I bet yours is a lot more sophisticated than mine. Is your work on the web? No, it isn't on the web at the moment, mainly because some of the code I wrote for it is kind of hackish. The other reason is that I'm trying to finish a paper on it and the numeric piece for the Journal of Symbolic Computation. Unfortunately, it hasn't been high on the priority list. If you're really interested, I could send you the Maple code and a couple of example worksheets. One worksheet derives the mass and stiffness matrices for the St. Louis arch and the other for a rotating Timoshenko beam. The arch is an example that my supervisor is using for a textbook he's writing (my code discovered a problem in his derivation) and the rotating Timoshenko beam is part of my thesis work. Send me an email off-line. Cheers, Tim Lahey --- Tim Lahey PhD Candidate, University of Waterloo Systems Design Engineering. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On Tuesday 07 August 2007 18:22, William Stein wrote: The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I've spent some time evangelizing sage to 3 research mathematicians. I realize the responses below may not be valid given design constraints. But these are hurdles that the average computer-savvy mathematician needs to cross before they are going to even consider SAGE a competitor. Here's the responses I've gotten: 1) Ugh, a web-based interface: My feeling was that this mathematician felt exactly as I do about web-based interfaces -- they are always clunky. I'll admit that the new web interface is *very* smooth, but, it doesn't even begin to compare to a well crafted native interface. * What about hot keys for menu items? * What about syntax highlight? * What about smart python indenting? * Why does my browswer not scroll to contain the entire tab complete list? * How do I insert a cell with my keyboard? * Why do the edits shift up/down a pixel or 2 when focus changes? I don't necessarily mention these things as things to fix -- I honestly believe that to fix them all would make your javascript horridly unmaintainable. This not to mention browser compatibility (I'm on firefox of gentoo). My underlying point here is that the browser interface is off-putting to many experienced computer users and I don't blame them one bit. I think it's stunning that the notebook is this good at all because many web ui's suck far more. 2) Why does sage install so many things that I already have installed?: Really I don't think that this is a valid complaint. I totally understand the reason that sage installs all these things. I'm just pointing out that many linux users consider this blasphemy. I think the solution is better advertising about why this design decision was made. 3) It's not user friendly: I made the mistake of telling this mathematician that sage uses a mainstream programming language. Of course, I considered this a huge advantage -- lack of sensible file IO and string support in mathematica and others have pissed me off for years. These things mean absolutely nothing to most I've talked to. Even the ugly kludges that pass as for-loops in other mathematica-style languages don't arouse peoples understanding! The underlying point I took from this is that real programming languages scare people. Again, this is a matter of better advertising (but it does make me wonder if the appeals of sage aren't niche appeals.) Ok, I'm sorry if this came off a bit rant-like. I really don't mean it that way and I consider SAGE god's gift to mathematicians, but I've realized over the years that the things that make me giddy on a computer mean nothing to the vast majority of the computer-using public. Oh, and I agree with Bill --- you want market share, make a native windows port. Good luck with that! -- Joel --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On 8/8/07, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 8/7/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Regarding Internet Explorer, the fact is it would be 1-2 day's of work to make the SAGE notebook reasonably usable from IE 7. Shift-enter would be replaced by a submit button and some of the CSS would have to be reworked, but otherwise most things would work. It hasn't happened yet, mainly because none of the people who know how the SAGE notebook work actually use IE. Supporting IE7 is definitely worth doing. Depending on funding, this might happen some time this month. It used to be a 2-3 day job, but most features have had their IE-aware code stripped out, since it was often causing more trouble than it was worth. Hopefully many of those features disappeared from SAGE in the new version of the notebook. I optimistically think it is 2 days to get something that is fully usable. (This means that the CSS produces pages that are actually readable, and it is possible to evaluate cells, insert cells, etc.) What does depending on funding mean above, by the way? Does it mean, if I pay you some money out of startup? Another option is that I could finally get the tax-free donation (via credit card, etc.) setup through UW math, and we could see if somebody would donate a total of say $200 to support you spending a few days on this. What do you think? It would be interesting to have a comment in the code listing who paid for certain functionality... I definitely think this should be done if it hasn't already. -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
Anyone who is an academic using SAGE should try to give a little talk on it to your department (unneccessary at UW of course). I did this and I generated a fair amount of interest from our grad students. The faculty weren't overwhelmed, they all wanted particular things that sage currently lacks - an easy linear programming interface, support for R, bifurcation analysis, etc. I think the exhibit at the joint meetings will help a lot. We should do similar things at other meetings - I haven't had the time or energy to do that yet, but after the joint meetings maybe it will be easier for 1-2 people to set up a table at things like MathFest, SIAM, Society for Mathematical Biology, local MAA meetings, whatever. One of my goals is also to do more undergraduate research/development work with sage. One can view big unfergrad poster sessions as free advertising, at least to an academic audience. I agree with some other posters that eye-candy is crucial. I think a lot more could be done with Tachyon that might impress people. Also, exporting to PDF is very important I think, and currently seems a little broken (although maybe I am not doing it right). -Marshall On Aug 7, 4:22 pm, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Sage-Devel, The SAGE downloads during the last week are as follows: Linux Binary 42 OS X Binary 42 Source 91 VMware (= Windows) 57 Total .. 232 The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I'm laying a lot of groundwork (e.g., writing books, articles, etc.) and I think other people are (esp David Joyner), but there is probably much more that could be done. Please share your thoughts! -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
I've never used colinux, but why is vmware a preferable choice than colinux? I would think that it would be much easier to get something that felt like a native windows application with colinux. I also think that it makes more sense in the long term (that is, virtualization is the wave of the future. VMWare looks good for the moment, but it doesn't appear to me to make much sense on the desktop -- we need *application level* virtualization to make things feel good on the desktop. Perhaps VMWare does more than I think, but I always thought it just provided a mass window to a pseudo-machine and didn't allow sensible window-manager-like support.) Anyhow, an idea that builds on this is to build some X application instead of the notebook (ok, I'll admit I'm not a fan of the web notebook) and distribute a free x-server for windows with SAGE for windows. I believe that there might be an x-server out there which could make this feel like a very native solution. Of course, there's still the file transfer problem ... that is, the file system of colinux is distinct from the windows file system. -- Joel --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On Aug 7, 2007, at 11:17 PM, William Stein wrote: The suggestion to make a serious major push for good 3d graphics, is clearly difficult but totally doable. I think this would be the best investment of time at present for the greatest return. The lack of good integrated interactive 3d graphics in SAGE is now the main remaining missing functionality. I still think the best solution is a java applet in the notebook and vtk/mayavi for people using the command line. Good interactive 3d graphics (in the notebook (and also from the command line if Java is installed)) is not as far off as one might think. There's still hard work left to do, but we've got a good plan and a fair amount of code written and I've been planning to start working on it again next week. I still think vtk/mayavi will probably be necessary for visualizing very large data sets. As well as being useful in its own right, I agree with the sentiments that fancy, flashy 3d graphics are a great way to get SAGE noticed. Aaron's suggestion to make it really easy to run the SAGE notebook publicly through apachessl sort of scares me because running the SAGE notebook publicly in anything but a chroot jail is inviting disaster, and that will never change. This is definitely not ready for anybody to trivially do, and probably it should never be. Notice that there are -- as far as I can tell -- no web pages (besides the SAGE notebook) that let a person enter arbitrary Python code, and Python is vastly more popular than SAGE. (Also, running the notebook through apache is already reasonably easy via using mod proxy.) I think a public SAGE notebook is the best and lowest entry point for people trying out SAGE. Unfortunately I think recently this has taken a big step back with requiring signing up to try it out and (though it may not seem like a big deal to some people but can be very scary to those that aren't so computer-savvy) the warnings browsers put up about the apparent insecurity of the self-signed certificate (since every page now uses ssh). I personally would like to see a no- commitment open public notebook again, even if it had limitations (e.g. a short max runtime and non-persistent worksheets, with the explanation that these are security/resource constraints, and one can log in and/or download sage for free). - Robert --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On 8/8/07, Joel B. Mohler wrote: I've never used colinux, but why is vmware a preferable choice than colinux? I would think that it would be much easier to get something that felt like a native windows application with colinux. I think both vmware and colinux do very clumsy things to the Windows network configuration. These have caused me trouble on several occasions. On Windows I find Microsoft's Virtual PC to be simpler and superior: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx I use it to run both SuSE 10 and Solaris 10.2 on my Windows dual-processor desktop very happily. Anyhow, an idea that builds on this is to build some X application instead of the notebook (ok, I'll admit I'm not a fan of the web notebook) and distribute a free x-server for windows with SAGE for windows. I believe that there might be an x-server out there which could make this feel like a very native solution. I run Xming and Putty: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=156984package_id=222154 to provide x-server support under Windows. I use it to run Linux x-windows applications like the Axiom HyperDoc browser and graphics on my Windows desktop. Xmaxima should be ok too. I rarely touch the virtual machine itself. Xming creates application windows that look and feel a lot like Windows windows (depending on the actual UI). For example you can run FireFox as a x-windows application on the same virtual machine that is running Sage. Except for some font differences it looks and works very nearly the same as native Windows FireFox. This seems faster for running the notebook than running native Windows FireFox and accessing the notebook remotely. Of course, there's still the file transfer problem ... that is, the file system of colinux is distinct from the windows file system. The usual solution is to mount a Windows shared directory via Samba smbfs. The big problem with all this is it assumes a fair amount of sophistication for the average Windows user and some knowledge of Linux fundamentals. I do not know how or if it is possible to create a single installer file that would install all of this in one step on a virgin Windows system (with Administrator rights, of course). Regards, Bill Page. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On Aug 8, 12:03 pm, Ted Kosan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It might even be possible to actually use Google analytics to track global Sage notebook usage. If this is implemented, could this please be restricted to sagemath.org? --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On 8/8/07, Chris Chiasson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Aug 8, 12:03 pm, Ted Kosan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It might even be possible to actually use Google analytics to track global Sage notebook usage. If this is implemented, could this please be restricted to sagemath.org? Yes, it would definitely be restricted. We've discussed stuff like this before on sage-devel, and the decision was made to not put any automatic call home features in SAGE. For example, SAGE won't automatically check for updates, report usage patterns, etc., without the user explicitly doing something to opt in. -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On 8/7/07, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I think what might help (at least for the non-mathematicians) is examples of the use of SAGE in applications. For example, Maple has its Maple Application Centre and while I don't use Mathematica, I'm sure something similar exists for it. Certainly MATLAB has something similar. I'm finding SAGE difficult to use at time since most of the examples are done for mathematicians. I tend to think my mathematics background is fairly solid but I have no idea of rings and fields but these are all through the examples in the documentation. The linear algebra documentation doesn't show any examples with symbolic components in the matrix, that would be a useful addition. I haven't even been sure if it was possible until I saw an example that somebody posted a little while back. Maple has excellent documentation for programmers in its Introductory Programming Guide and its Advanced Programming Guide. I learned many new and useful things from these books, and I use those tricks quite often. These are all related to manipulating equations, variables, functions, and lists of equations. The documentation doesn't really discuss manipulation of the low level structures. Are there SAGE equivalents of things like op(), applyop(), indets(), GenerateMatrix()? While I want to use SAGE considerably more than I do, I find myself struggling with getting up to speed. I won't be able to convince people to switch from Maple if I can't use SAGE for my regular work. Cheers, Tim Lahey --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
A few thoughts: * The public sage notebook really needs to be available by default on port 443. This brings up a lot of issues that have been hashed over many times. Most webapps today would be delivered as a package that could run in a standard Apache environment. So maybe something built on Django or Turbogears. This would encourage others to make public notebooks available that they can integrate into their hosting environments. That's the hard solution. The easier solution is to get a separate IP address. The harder solution above can help sage become a widely-installed webapp hosted at various sites so downloads wouldn't be the most important metric anymore. * Wikipedia tie-in: for each mathematical topic in Wikipedia, create a sage-based tutorial that illustrates the concepts. Perhaps this could be a download-able notebook attached to the article that people can fire up to walk through the tutorial. Or they can load it in the public sage notebook. This might help establish sage the free choice for math and could be an exercise that helps make sage more approachable by non-mathematicians as well. * get sage in apt. Again, lots of pain involved here and you all have put in a lot of thought to the problems already. ak On Tue, Aug 07, 2007 at 03:22:36PM -0700, William Stein wrote: Hi Sage-Devel, The SAGE downloads during the last week are as follows: Linux Binary 42 OS X Binary 42 Source 91 VMware (= Windows) 57 Total .. 232 The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I'm laying a lot of groundwork (e.g., writing books, articles, etc.) and I think other people are (esp David Joyner), but there is probably much more that could be done. Please share your thoughts! -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
Being optimistic, I would hope things would pick up in the fall compared to the summer (in fact, I think it's lucky to not have a drop--assuming we're starting to aim for the non-research crowd too). I don't have any specific ideas (yet), but I think the back to school timeline is important to keep in mind. - Robert On Aug 7, 2007, at 3:22 PM, William Stein wrote: Hi Sage-Devel, The SAGE downloads during the last week are as follows: Linux Binary 42 OS X Binary 42 Source 91 VMware (= Windows) 57 Total .. 232 The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I'm laying a lot of groundwork (e.g., writing books, articles, etc.) and I think other people are (esp David Joyner), but there is probably much more that could be done. Please share your thoughts! -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
As technically hard as it might be, I think having a native Windows version of Sage - even if it includes only a subset of the standard packages - would likely be a big factor in attracting more users. In my experience with Axiom, potential Windows users out number Linux users by a large number (maybe a factor of 100 or more). Windows users are very reluctant in install Linux in a virtual machine or even cygwin just to run Sage. (If they were willing they would probably already be running Linux.) Having even a subset of Sage available as a native Windows application would introduce many more users to Sage and probably motivate some of them to install Linux in order to access the full version. I think the best tool for building a native Windows version of Sage is probably MSYS/MinGW which is really a cross-compiler and gnu tool set that provides a Linux-like environment only during the build. The end product is a native Windows application that does not depend on any Linux emulation layer. Unfortunately some of the standard packages in Sage can not be built in this way and to make matters worse, as far as I know the pexpect module that is required for interface with packages like Maxima has not been successfully ported to Windows. Regards, Bill Page. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
From: Bill Page [EMAIL PROTECTED] As technically hard as it might be, I think having a native Windows version of Sage - even if it includes only a subset of the standard packages - would likely be a big factor in attracting more users. Being a Windows user, I can't agree less. Also, the notebook running in IE 7 would be much more attractive for many Windows users (including me) than in Firefox. Having even a subset of Sage available as a native Windows application would introduce many more users to Sage and probably motivate some of them to install Linux in order to access the full version. I always have few Linuxes installed, just for running programs (such as SAGE) that are not available in Windows. Still, it's not the same. I think the best tool for building a native Windows version of Sage is probably MSYS/MinGW which is really a cross-compiler and gnu tool set that provides a Linux-like environment only during the build. The end product is a native Windows application that does not depend on any Linux emulation layer. Unfortunately some of the standard packages in Sage can not be built in this way and to make matters worse, as far as I know the pexpect module that is required for interface with packages like Maxima has not been successfully ported to Windows. However, for Python extensions, the compiler should be the same as the compiler used to build Python - for Windows it is Visual Studio (Express is OK) 2005. Alec --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
Pick an organization or department that uses Mathematica or Maple or MATLAB. Find out what they use it for. Put the same capabilities into SAGE. Give SAGE to them, possibly with a turnkey demonstration. Rinse and repeat?? On Aug 7, 5:22 pm, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Sage-Devel, The SAGE downloads during the last week are as follows: Linux Binary 42 OS X Binary 42 Source 91 VMware (= Windows) 57 Total .. 232 The number of new downloads of SAGE per week have been roughly constant during the last 2-3 months. The growth of SAGE is definitely not what I hoped for during my talk at SAGE Days 4.Does anybody have any good ideas about how to increase the number of people downloading SAGE? My hope is that this question will spark a relaxed but enthusiastic and positive open-ended brainstorming thread in which a lot of crazy ideas appear. I'm laying a lot of groundwork (e.g., writing books, articles, etc.) and I think other people are (esp David Joyner), but there is probably much more that could be done. Please share your thoughts! -- William --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On 8/7/07, Alec Mihailovs wrote: From: Bill Page [EMAIL PROTECTED] As technically hard as it might be, I think having a native Windows version of Sage - even if it includes only a subset of the standard packages - would likely be a big factor in attracting more users. Being a Windows user, I can't agree less. ??? In my reading of English this sounds like you strongly disagree. :-( Also, the notebook running in IE 7 would be much more attractive for many Windows users (including me) than in Firefox. I draw the line there! I very much prefer FireFox and strongly encourage all the Windows users I know to switch to FireFox. I know from even simple projects that Javascript compatibility between Explorer and FireFox can be a real pain. But yes compatibility of the notebook with Explorer would be nice. What are the known problems if you try it now? I think the best tool for building a native Windows version of Sage is probably MSYS/MinGW which is really a cross-compiler and gnu tool set that provides a Linux-like environment only during the build. The end product is a native Windows application that does not depend on any Linux emulation layer. Unfortunately some of the standard packages in Sage can not be built in this way and to make matters worse, as far as I know the pexpect module that is required for interface with packages like Maxima has not been successfully ported to Windows. However, for Python extensions, the compiler should be the same as the compiler used to build Python - for Windows it is Visual Studio (Express is OK) 2005. I am not sure if this is necessary but apparently Python can be built under MSYS/MinGW (I haven't tried this). See: http://jove.prohosting.com/iwave/ipython/pyMinGW.html Regards, Bill Page. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
From: Bill Page [EMAIL PROTECTED] Being a Windows user, I can't agree less. ??? In my reading of English this sounds like you strongly disagree. :-( Yes, my English is not that great. Certainly I meant strongly agree :-) I am not sure if this is necessary but apparently Python can be built under MSYS/MinGW (I haven't tried this). See: I meant that the standard Windows Python available from python.org was built using Visual Studio 2005. I tried once to build it with Visual C++ Express 2005 (that is free as beer), and it worked fine, too. In general, I think that the best way for using Sage in Windows would be not to include such things as Python, Singular, GAP etc., but assume that users already have them, or are able to install them themselves - that would make porting much easier. Alec --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On Aug 8, 4:25 am, Alec Mihailovs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Bill Page [EMAIL PROTECTED] Being a Windows user, I can't agree less. ??? In my reading of English this sounds like you strongly disagree. :-( Yes, my English is not that great. Certainly I meant strongly agree :-) I am not sure if this is necessary but apparently Python can be built under MSYS/MinGW (I haven't tried this). See: I meant that the standard Windows Python available from python.org was built using Visual Studio 2005. I tried once to build it with Visual C++ Express 2005 (that is free as beer), and it worked fine, too. In general, I think that the best way for using Sage in Windows would be not to include such things as Python, Singular, GAP etc., but assume that users already have them, or are able to install them themselves - that would make porting much easier. Alec The compartmentilazation of SAGE has been suggested many times before, but as William has stated many times: This makes testing and debugging infinitely more diffcult. It is also extreme likely that if you use even minor different versions of certain packages like Maxima things no longer work properly. Cheers, Michael --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
From: mabshoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] The compartmentilazation of SAGE has been suggested many times before, but as William has stated many times: This makes testing and debugging infinitely more diffcult. It is also extreme likely that if you use even minor different versions of certain packages like Maxima things no longer work properly. Just seems kinda strange to build the same versions of Python, clisp, gsl, gmp, Singular, etc. that are parts of cygwin distribution already. Alec --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: SAGE download stats -- how to increase SAGE usage?
On Aug 8, 5:31 am, Alec Mihailovs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: mabshoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] The compartmentilazation of SAGE has been suggested many times before, but as William has stated many times: This makes testing and debugging infinitely more diffcult. It is also extreme likely that if you use even minor different versions of certain packages like Maxima things no longer work properly. Just seems kinda strange to build the same versions of Python, clisp, gsl, gmp, Singular, etc. that are parts of cygwin distribution already. Well, that is only the case if you run current cygwin. And if you look at the quality of bug reports it doesn't take much to imagine the back forth Which version of $PROGRAM do you run? until there might be a pontential solution which will probably be update to current cygwin and try again in many cases. A while back some guy was asked what operating system he was running as well as his computer configuration and the answer was Emacs ;( I know for sure that the gmp as well as Singular are usually patched, there are also now patches for clisp (which are only relevant on Linux I believe) and python. Either way, I believe Cygwin support was dropped around the 2.5 release because of problems with libSingular not linking. Martin spend more than a week and I spend about 3 days trying to fix that problem with no solution. Because matplotlib as well as some more specialized applications were broken as well as myterious signal problems (thread_ix issue) the decision was made to just drop Cygwin and advocate the VMWare image solution. The main problem with the Cygwin port was that there was little to no interest from the developers side despite the fact that the number of Cygwin downloads exceeded the other downloads combined (at least roughly). Would I prefer that there was still Cygwin support? Sure, but it seemed that I was the only person at that time who would actually try to debug the Cygwin build and resolve issues was me, you might want to search the archives. I also prefer to do my computations on Linux and nowadays I have unfortuntely only very little time to hack on SAGE. The compartmentilazation of SAGE is more about Linux because there you have solid package managment. Alec Cheers, Michael --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: sage download stats
On 5/3/07, Hamptonio [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I gave a talk to my department about SAGE on April 19th. I know at
least a few people downloaded it here after that.
Thanks!
I had some explicit interest from our statistics folks on getting R
incorporated. I tried to install R and rpy on my mac pro (i.e. intel
os X) and had the same problems I had on an os X ppc - some sort of
linking problem. I will continue to try.
Thanks! Report anything here.
I was also asked if SAGE had linear programming functions. I know
that there is one included with cddlib, which is added as part of
polymake - is there another that is easier to use?
No, there's nothing that is easy to use yet, that I'm aware of.
It would be if either somebody made a SageX interface to
cddlib, or investigated other options (e.g., does GSL do
anything?).
-Marshall Hampton
On May 1, 11:36 pm, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
By the way, here are some download stats for SAGE fromwww.sagemath.org(the
master site). These measure only the *unique* IP addresses that actually
downloaded the indicated item in the given period (see below).
Summary: The total number of downloads during April 2007 was 829,
divided up as follows:
Window/Cygwin Binary: 208 (!!)
Source: 203
Linux Binary: 174
VMware: 145
OS X Binary: 99
Regarding the mailing lists:
sage-devel has 128 members; there were 401 posts in March and 286 in
April.
sage-forum has 106 members
sage-support has 88 members
Here are some more refined recent download statistics by date:
The last 2.5 days:
Windows Binary (this is the Cygwin version)
41
Linux Binary
31
OS X Binary
35
Source
20
VMware
22
The week starting April 22:
Windows Binary
30
Linux Binary
31
OS X Binary
15
Source
41
VMware
25
The week starting April 15:
Windows Binary
37
Linux Binary
42
OS X Binary
15
Source
49
VMware
28
The week starting April 8:
Windows Binary
49
Linux Binary
31
OS X Binary
11
Source
47
VMware
30
The week starting April 1:
Windows Binary
51
Linux Binary
39
OS X Binary
23
Source
46
VMware
40
I created these using this shell script.
echo Windows Binary
zgrep sage.*tar.gz H $1 | grep -i windows | awk '{ print $1 }' |sort
|uniq|wc -l
echo Linux Binary
zgrep sage.*tar.gz H $1 | grep -i linux | awk '{ print $1 }' |sort
|uniq|wc -l
echo OS X Binary
zgrep sage.*tar.gz H $1 | grep -i osx | awk '{ print $1 }' |sort |uniq|wc
-l
echo Source
zgrep sage.*tar H $1 | awk '{ print $1 }' |sort |uniq|wc -l
echo VMware
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washingtonhttp://www.williamstein.org
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://www.williamstein.org
--~--~-~--~~~---~--~~
To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel
URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/
-~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[sage-devel] Re: sage download stats
On May 2, 6:36 am, William Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: By the way, here are some download stats for SAGE fromwww.sagemath.org(the master site). These measure only the *unique* IP addresses that actually downloaded the indicated item in the given period (see below). Summary: The total number of downloads during April 2007 was 829, divided up as follows: Window/Cygwin Binary: 208 (!!) Source: 203 Linux Binary: 174 VMware: 145 OS X Binary: 99 SNIP I am quite curious about this week's download statistics. The day after the sage link did show up on that slashdot story I had ~40 downloads of binary sage which was roughly double the number of binary downloads for the whole last month from the cocoa.mathematik mirror. Of those 36 were for cygwin, which I would not expect from the slashdot crowd. Maybe somebody should submit the release announcement for sage 2.5 to digg and slashdot once the release has been made. Cheers, Michael --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
