University of Sydney / School of Mathematics and Statistics / Computational Algebra Group

Magma

All members of the DIAMANT consortium have a license on the Magma software. For people from Eindhoven, I'm the one who distributes the software and tries to keep it up to date. If you just want to try it, you can login to leopard (our linux calculation server) and just type magma. If you want to have a version on your own machine, let me know.

Shell scripts

Some things I can never quite remember, so I've made a shell script for them (no guarantees, though!)
  • beep.sh: system bell
  • homedirdiskusage.sh: print the disk usage per subdirectory of your TU/e linux homedirectory. Useful if you're (close to) going over quota ;)
  • screen_dump.sh: dump the contents of a screen to stdout
Other things:
  • my .muttrc, with dynamic signature, no moving, and an automatic bcc
  • my .lpoptions, because I always tried to do lp -P<printername>, and that doesn't work
  • and of course, if you want joe to like you, you have to copy /etc/joe/joerc to ~/.joerc, and not just create a .joerc with only -nobackups in there... (Indeed, I tried the latter many times, and joe always crashed without any warning whatsoever)

The Shakespeare Programming Language

"A programming language created with the design goal to make the source code resemble Shakespeare plays," more information on their website, including the possibility to download a translator. It's a strange but great language; for example Hello World starts like this:

	The Infamous Hello World Program.

	Romeo, a young man with a remarkable patience.
	Juliet, a likewise young woman of remarkable grace.
	Ophelia, a remarkable woman much in dispute with Hamlet.
	Hamlet, the flatterer of Andersen Insulting A/S.


	                    Act I: Hamlet's insults and flattery.

	                    Scene I: The insulting of Romeo.

	[Enter Hamlet and Romeo]

	Hamlet:
	 You lying stupid fatherless big smelly half-witted coward!
	 You are as stupid as the difference between a handsome rich brave
	 hero and thyself! Speak your mind!

  ...	
Unfortunately, it does not work out of the box... But it does for me with this small patch:
--- roman_numbers.metaflex.orig 2009-10-29 11:11:43.000000000 +0100
+++ roman_numbers.metaflex      2009-10-29 11:00:18.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 ROMAN_THOUSANDS m+
-ROMAN_HUNDREDS  (c(d|m)|dc{0,3}|c{1,3})
-ROMAN_TENS      (x(l|c)|lx{0,3}|x{1,3})
-ROMAN_ONES      (i(v|x)|vi{0,3}|i{1,3})
+ROMAN_HUNDREDS  (c(d|m)|dc{0,3}|c{1,3}|C(D|M)|DC{0,3}|C{1,3})
+ROMAN_TENS      (x(l|c)|lx{0,3}|x{1,3}|X(L|C)|LX{0,3}|X{1,3})
+ROMAN_ONES      (i(v|x)|vi{0,3}|i{1,3}|I(V|X)|VI{0,3}|I{1,3})
 ROMAN_NUMBER   [...]