Ross Isenegger : Weblog

This mirroring has got to stop

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:28:12 GMT

I am tired of having my traffic split between this site and http://mathfest.blogspot.com , so from now on you will have to go there to see what I have been writing.

Regular Expressions in Excel

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:00:15 GMT

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/regular-expressions-in-excel.ht

Once I learned a bit about regular expressions in Actionscript 2, I wanted to use them in Microsoft Excel.

It turns out that there is a VBA extension for Regular Expressions and a installable set of custom functions for Excel that includes regular expressions. To make it work, here is what I did:

In Excel, hit alt-F11 to bring up the code screen.
Choose Tools | References and check Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5
Close Excel.
Download and install Morefunc 5 from download.cnet.com.
Open Excel and start writing functions like "=REGEX.SUBSTITUTE(V2, " .......$| ....... |^....... |^......$|^.......$"," ???????? ")"

To learn more, check out the Morefunc documentation, sites like this, or sites that I referred to in my previous post. You can also write your own functions like lispy does.

Open Question: What do Excel for Mac users do?

Pretty soon you will be ordering this cup:

Regular Expressions in Actionscript 2

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:00:15 GMT

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/regular-expressions-in-actionsc

Regular Expressions are a powerful method of working with text strings based on dynamic patterns. For example, you might want to extract all the numbers from a string like "Michael travels 550km in 6.2 hours using 40L of gasoline", or replace any occurrence of "INV" followed by an arbitrary number of alphanumerics followed by a space with "- reference removed -".

Regular Expressions are useful in parsing user input or creating grammars for strings.

Flash decided not to support a RegExp class in Actionscript 2, though it is implemented in Actionscript 3, Javascript, and JScript.

Pavils Jurjans bemoaned this fact and created his own RegExp class for Flash 5, which was encapsulated by Joey Lott into a .as file for Actionscript 2. Pavils also created a very handy tester, which together with websina's page, helped me to get started with regular expressions.

The CLIPS programmers have started to use our version of the class, which has been documented with ZenDocs, and includes a trim, rtrim, ltrim and slightly modified replace method. A simple tester .fla is available to interact with the class.

I probably feel as excited learning this new skill as the fellow in this xkcd.com comic.

Running DOS Games on Windows

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:30:40 GMT

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/running-dos-games-on-windows.ht

In my last post, I mentioned trying to get Colourful Math to work on Windows, collecting a few delicious bookmarks along the way.

Today, I downloaded dosbox after a bit of an internet search to get a sense of its reliability (since the zombie-like dude in the top corner did not inspire a lot of confidence). dosbox allows you to run all sorts of DOS programs under Windows, Mac and Linux - Doom and Railroad Tycoon (which is a free download now) seem especially popular.

When you run doxbox, type

mount c: c:colourfulmath (where c:colourfulmath is the directory where the files are)

c:
dir
cd clrmath
4colours (the bat or exe)

and voila!, you have a blast from the past in a nice tidy emulator (or virtual console?) window.

I received a very pleasant email from the Claude Laflamme, the developer (with Industry Canada funding) of Colourful Math. He indicated that his developer interest turned to lyryx.com and Colourful Math has not been ported to any more modern operating systems.

I was thinking that folks of a certain age (probably over 18) might like to know that there could be a way to play their favorite MS-DOS games on their current operating systems, using dosbox, if they are keen on having waves of nostalgia wash over them. My kids spent hours on the evaluation version of Soleau games like Wallpipe, Ant Run and Bolo Ball - which are still available - the rousing Sine Dancing-like antrun theme is playing on my speakers as I type (even after exiting!).

How useful are games in teaching Math?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:30:24 GMT

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-useful-are-games-in-teachin

I have been thinking about this question for a while and the answer depends a lot on the type of games we are talking about. There are cross-number puzzles, ciphers to decode pun-ish riddles, drill and practice games, role-playing games, etc.

It may be that "game" is a organizer for "play" which is really a state of engagement. Students can engage in a game for hours, puzzling out the rules and feeling accomplishment.

I wish that I could be at Maria Andersen's presentation - Playing to Learn Math.

.prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }

Playing to Learn Math? on Prezi

Does our view of Math education allow us to imagine a time when a robot could do a better job of much of our teaching, as the Koreans and Japanese are working on?

This week my daughter, who is studying Math at UW and is currently in a graph theory course, was reminded of a set of games that she played as a youngster - expressly designed to introduce colouring problems in an engaging way. They are MS-DOS based and I have got them to run enough to recognize the screens, but not really to enjoy.

When I am trying to get Sketchpad or Flash to produce a certain figure or interaction, I can enter an engaged state that social psychologists refer to as "Flow", which I find enjoyable.

Keith Devlin would like a couple of hundred million dollars to develop a MMP game that would allow players to construct math learning. I admit to being a tad skeptical, but what would such an environment be worth?

What role have games and play had in your Mathematical development?

Farewell Kate

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:30:02 GMT

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2010/01/farewell-kate.html

Anyone who was a schoolchild when I was has a particular affinity for this NFB short. The world said goodbye to Kate McGarrigle this week.

I found this video about a planned re-make of the short, but can't seem to find if it was ever made.

Using a CLIPS Activity in SMART Notebook

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:15:03 GMT

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2009/12/using-clips-activity-in-smart-n

CLIPS are a collection of Math Learning Objects that are organized along research-based instructional trajectories. Greg Clarke gave a complete session at the ECOO Conference in November on ways that having an interactive whiteboard enhances the use of CLIPS.

Giancarlo Brotto, Education Consultant for SMART Technologies in Ontario, presented at one of Advanced Presentation Products Discovery Days in North Bay this fall. He impressed the crowd with his demonstration of the new SMART Notebook Math product and the use of SMART's student response system. I reminded him about CLIPs and the efforts that were made to make them useful offline to teachers. He then created this short demonstration and posted in to the Ontario SMART Forum.

I rank 28th!

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:00:09 GMT

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2009/12/i-rank-28th.html

in North Bay...

From http://feedjit.com/myRank/

Check your Geoblogosphere ranking

NOTE: You must have Feedjit's Live Traffic Feed installed on your blog or website to be listed in the Geoblogosphere. You must not be an adult website and your site can not be web spam or contain any malware.

We also check if your site has been listed as spam, adult, containing malware or if you have been listed as a dangerous site with Google or any other companies.

You Rank #28 in: North Bay, Canada
You Rank #191 in: Erie, United States
You Rank #399 in: Waterville, United States
You Rank #548 in: Rochester, United States
You Rank #605 in: Saint-Priest, France
You Rank #625 in: Auckland, New Zealand
You Rank #749 in: San Giovanni Lupatoto, Italy

Note: We analyze the cities that have sent you the most traffic recently. You may rank in many other cities in the Geoblogosphere.

Does ukulele music appeal disproportionately to geeks?

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:30:02 GMT

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2009/12/does-ukulele-music-appeal.html

One early morning this week, when I definitely had better things to do, a blog post at Inside the CBC, led me to this video by Tim Tamashiro:

So then I decided to see what else was on youtube using infinitube.net. The leading video there now is the one that Greg liked so much. My pre-dawn surfing, however, led me to the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

If, as I hypothesize, these performances appeal more to geeks than the general population, maybe you will like these videos. There are lots more there.

Comment Moderation

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:30:02 GMT

http://mathfest.blogspot.com/2009/12/comment-moderation.html

I have reluctantly turned on comment moderation since the spam comments outnumber by far the real comments. I don't like doing this, but it seems more time efficient.

Is anyone else being plagued by spam comments? Has there been a rash of them in the last six weeks or has some evil blog directory been updated to include mine?