[Edu-sig] a quick look at GIS

[kirby urner]

Yo pyfolk --

So I've been looking into Google's Ruby API to SketchUp (free
version), thanks to cues from a visiting Reed College alum, Trevor
also a SketchUp man on my neighborhood team, doing some think tanky
stuff with it.

Not jumping to Ruby though, though every time I study it I think it's
a great stepping stone after Perl, given the :: operator and so on.

What Sketchup provides that VPython does not of course, is a
user-friendly non-programmer mode, per the CAD genre more generally.
VPython is not a CAD package.

ESRI's ArcGIS is user-friendly, and with the Python API, but it's not
open source or all that affordable to casual users I don't think

On the topic of Google services, I feel drawn back to Google app
engine projects.  Anyone working on one of those who wants to share
about it?

Yesterday's visit to Immersive an eye-opener:
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2008/06/immersion-experience.html

Still working with math group on stepping stones needed for RSA
pre-college, an already well-marked trail (Fermat's Little, Euler's
Theorem) including my localized video and so on.**

As a vendor, I keep pitching the need for long integers, all in a
day's work in IDLE.

Lots of math teachers are still squarely in TIs domain, but we gnu
math teachers have the advantage of open source to help us make
inroads.

Ninth graders wanna Fermat test ( pow(2, p - 1, p) == 1 for p in
primes ) and like that -- so forget the TI calculators for now, get
some more real estate (screen space), real beef (Intel inside), or an
XO or whatever.  Then ( pow(2, p - 1, p) == 1 for p in pseudoprimes )
with primes and pseudoprimes writable as generators.

Kirby
4D

** http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/rsa.html

Old exhibits:

Gregor working on Sieve of Eratosthenes

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/2004-January/027900.html

Me getting help from Tim Peters:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2000-December/000827.html