Kneth's Korner

Mathjs and the Brusselator As a graduate student I implemented kc to simulate oscillating chemical reactions, and in collaboration with Keld Nielsen, I implemented numerical methods to solve ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The Brusselator is a fine example of an oscillating chemical reaction, and for most values of the parameters the behavior is pretty fine (meaning that you don’t see very advanced numerical methods to solve it). I recently noticed that functionality to solve ODEs has been added to Mathjs.

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A new beginning My old blog has been inactive for many years. And for the last five-six years, I haven’t published any articles in computer magazines. It is time to revive my writing habits. This is a new beginning for Kneth’s Korner. As free and open source software is close to my heart, Hugo seems to be a logical choice.

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Git and VSCode Visual Studio Code has since it first public release in 2015 increased fast in popularity. Being a cross-platform editor and released as open source software, many software developers have downloaded it. The fact that Microsoft is behind Visual Studio Code means that programming languages like TypeScript, C#, and C++ are well supported. Git has become the de facto standard for version control systems. In particular Git providers like Gitlab, Bitbucket, and Github have made it easy for software developers to set up Git repositories.

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Review of WebRTC Integrator’s Guide by Altanai Bisht I picked up the book - not because I’m working on WebRTC or related stuff but simply to get an idea of what this new technology is all about. It’s a lengthly book, and the author seems to know every trick of the trade. After finishing the book, I feel that I have a better understanding of what WebRTC (and SIP and PSTN) works - at least on the high level.

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Review of JavaScript Promises Essentials Promises are an old pattern in concurrent programming. In the computer science literature, promises date back to the papers by Friendman and Wise from mid 1970s. Many programming languages have promise - and futures as in Java are a similar idea. A promise is a variable or an object which value is initially unknown and is the result of another task. Modern JavaScript development is highly asynchronous by design: the UI (in the web browser) is updated by calls to the backend using HTTP requests.

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Happy birthday, Grace Yesterday, Grace Hopper would have turn 107 years old. She was one of the first computer scientists. She worked on compilers but she is probably best known for her development of COBOL. COBOL is one of the first high-level programming languages (FORTRAN is the other one). Back in the 1950s, computers were used as calculators, but COBOL and Grace Hopper shown us that computers can be used for much more that simple calculations.

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Review: Storm - real-time processing cookbook Quinton Anderson has written a book on the analysis platform Storm and published it at Packt. I have worked a little with Hadoop in the last couple of years, and it is only natural to take a look at the other big data processing platform. Hadoop is a batch processing platform, and Storm is for real-time processing and analysis of data. That means the two projects are not direct competitors, and they might complement each other.

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Review: Instant ExtJS Starter Recently, Packt Publishing published a book by N. Bhava on ExtJS. It’s a fairly short book, about 60 pages long. The idea is to get you started with ExtJS. If you don’t know what ExtJS, it is a framework to develop the front-end of web applications. Today, users except web applications to behave must like desktop applications, and a typical web developer is much more like a GUI programmer just a few years ago.

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I haven’t been developing front-end code in JavaScript for some time. Well, to be more precise: years. Most of my JavaScript code these days is unit tests for a node.js extension, I’m maintaining at work. Recently, a book on JavaScriptMVC by Wojceich Bednanski was published by Packt. I was curious to see how contemporary web applications are written so I picked up the book. It is a short book - only 124 pages.

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Map/Reduce and GNU Parallel This week I attended a meeting organized by DKUUG. The topic was GNU Parallel and the speaker was Ole Tange - the developer behind GNU Parallel. To be honest, I have not used GNU Parallel before. Of course, I have heard about it as Ole always talks about the program when I meet him. His introduction to the program was great - enjoy it when DKUUG releases the video.

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