Fall 2008
- Mon, Sep 8, 4pm, Math 101, Remote Connection, SSH, and VNC, by Joe McMahon
- Mon, Sep 15, 4pm, Math 102, An introduction to LaTeX and Beamer, by Kevin LaTourette
- Mon, Oct 13, 4pm, Math 101, Paradigm Shifts in Science Based Simulations, by Mac Hyman
- Mon, Oct 27, 4pm, Math 101, SQL for Joy: All your database are belong to us, by Karl Newell
For more details, and talks in past semesters, consult the
full schedule of talks.
Tentative talks:
- Scripting with Bash
- Power Point presentation using LaTeX
- GNU/Linux text editors
Interested in speaking?
Past topics can (and should) be repeated
occasionally. In addition,
here are some topics people might like to hear about:
- Femlab (PDE modeling environment)
- GAP (computer algebra software)
- Getting started with Maple (or Matlab, or Mathematica, ...)
- How to do math on a Mac
- How to filter e-mail spam
- HTML vs. XHTML (the new HTML standard)
- Octave (free Matlab-like system)
- PDAs (handheld personal digital assistants and much more)
- PHP (server-side webpage scripting)
- R (free statistics system)
- Remote access (SSH, VNC, dial-up, ...)
- Scientific WorkPlace (graphical front end to TeX)
- Setting up a dual boot system (DOS/Linux)
- TeX / LaTeX topics
- Using scanners efficiently
- Using the WINEDT editor (a front end to TeX, HTML)
- XML (extensible markup language)
- [your favorite topic here]
To give a talk, please contact
swig@math.arizona.edu.
Animation and Web Pages
by Mark Hays, Cindy Kaus, and Anu Rao
Preliminaries
There are many different graphics formats, and many ways
of generating these various formats. For instance, Matlab can
save graphics plots as GIF files, Maple and Mathematica can
save graphics as postscript files, etc. Note that to produce
the effect of animation, multiple frames/files of a uniform
size (in pixels) are required.
Tools such as xv, the ImageMagick set of commands, or the
NETPBM library of commands can help you modify colors, change
sizes, and convert between various formats. Mark Hays has
compiled a nice summary of these
conversion programs and their capabilities.
Methods
We will present 3 methods by which animation may be
included on web pages.
Comparisons
The methods above differ in significant ways:
- With server push, one starts out with the graphics frames
and a cgi script. Server push sends the images frame by frame
to the client across the network, so the animation frame rate
is at the mercy of the the server AND network load.
- Gifmerge requires a series of GIF images, and
concatenates them into one big GIF file (which can
then be referenced using the normal IMG tag in HTML; the
browser knows to interpret the multiple frames). The images
are downloaded and stored in the cache (just like html
pages).
- The MPEG process starts with a series of graphics files
and gives you a .mpg file, which can then be referenced
easily in the HTML file. When viewed via a browser, it spawns
a viewer on on the local system.
