I'm applying for the interactive Python notebook work, as specified in
[ipynote].
My master thesis [moverthesis] is currently being reviewed by the
faculty at the department of information processing sciences in the
university of Oulu, Finland, while I'm still working on other studies
in the curriculum. The thesis work was Python programming, and the
writeup in fact culminated in API design and evaluation. While the
area there was quite different (controlling 3d animations in VJing),
I'm otherwise familiar with and interested in the document preparation
tools relevant to this work in several ways:
Firstly, that thesis was written in ReST, from which LaTeX source and
finally the PDF for printing are prepared. In debugging some problems
there I got a bit into docutils. Earlier I've written essays and
articles in LaTeX, with and without the Lyx editor mentioned in the
description of the work.
Secondly, my studies and research have been largely about hypermedia,
including participating in the Fenfire project (earlier gzigzag)
[fenfire] [storm], where computer-based authoring of documents is a central
issue.
Thirdly, during the past couple of years I've had a growing deep
interest in programming as a way to study things. That has lead to
some early sketches [ruby-mind] [python-moral], but those have not
been really published yet. The plans are getting ready for changing
the theme on my website [an], to this study of and with programming
[an-programming]. This project caught my eye also as a way to author
the website and related publications -- it would be the tool that is
currently missing.
So with this experience in Python programming, API design and
evaluation, use of relevant document authoring tools, knowledge of the
related research and personal interest and need in the area, I think
I'd be well qualified for this work.
The ipython project leader Fernando Perez, i.e. the mentor to be, has
mentioned that there is enough work for several people here. On the
project's mailing list there was someone discussing the GUI
frameworks. That is actually one area I'm not too familiar with, so am
proposing that my work would be from the ground-up, focusing on the
core functionality and API.
I have contributed to open source projects before, including a
non-trivial patch to Freevo to enable pointer-input support (for touch
screen use) [freevopointerinput], and been programming intensively in
Python for the past few years. That has been mostly visual things,
like a recent 3d interactive plant toy [soyaplant], but as described
above the area of document authoring & processing is familiar and
interesting for me too. Yet regarding API design, I'm following
several Python projects with that in mind (pygame, soya, freevo,
quixote), and have organized some discussion on that regarding Blender
[blenderpython]. I have currently no other work for the summer (am in
talks about things that would start earliest in September), so am
really looking forward to this opportunity.
Sincirely yours,
Toni Alatalo <antont@an.org>
| [storm] | Fallenstein, B.; Lukka, T. J.; Hyytiala, H. & Alatalo; Toni
(2003) Storm: using P2P to make the desktop part of the
Web. Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on
hypertex and hypermedia, HT '03, August 26-30, 2003,
Nottingham, United Kindom |
i'm delighted to announce that this application was accepted. the work
will start showing in a wiki: an:IPyNote <http://studio.kyperjokki.fi/an/org/IPyNote>__.