The Digital Library of Mathematical Functions Project

If you have ever had to consult Abramowitz and Stegun’s Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables you will know what a useful resource it is. Despite its iconic status, its format and layout looks dated and its searchability could be better.

The Digital Library of Mathematical Functions project is an ongoing effort to perform a complete rewrite of this work, updated for current needs. This resource will be published in book form as the Handbook of Mathematical Functions as well as a free online Digital Library.

Disable Visual Studio Add-ins from Loading

I expect most people know this already, and I’m sure in the distant past I’ve been shown it, but…

If you are ever in the situation where you would like to start up Visual Studio with any add-ins temporarily disabled, hold down the left-shift key while Visual Studio starts.

Reminder: Perth .NET User Group Meeting: Thurs July 10th

Don’t forget, if you’re in Perth this Thursday, join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, July 10th to hear Bill Chesnut talk about Hands on WCF: looking at ways to use WCF from .Net, ASP and BizTalk.

TOPIC: Hands on WCF with Bill Chesnut
DATE: Thursday, July 10th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome.

Perth .NET User Group Meeting: Thurs July 10th

If you are in Perth this Thursday, join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, July 10th to hear Bill Chesnut talk about Hands on WCF: looking at ways to use WCF from .Net, ASP and BizTalk. These are hot topics and Bill is well placed to demonstrate what can be achieved with these Microsoft technologies.

TOPIC: Hands on WCF with Bill Chesnut
DATE: Thursday, July 10th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome.

Bill Chesnut is the Principal Consultant at Stargate Global Consulting. He’s a BizTalk Server MVP, been involved with .Net since before the release of V1, and involved in the IT world since 1983. His current focus is primarily on BizTalk, WF & WCF.

Reminder: Thurs 3rd July, 2008 Community Event

If you are in Perth this Thursday, July 3rd, join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice for a selection of short talks on topics relating to the 2008 launch of Visual Studio and the .NET framework. Each talk will be approximately 10 – 15 minutes long with questions between topics. More details here.

Alistair Waddell: LINQ to SQL
Dave Gardner: New Web development features in Visual Studio 2008
Mike Minutillo: New C# 3.0 language features
Piers Williams: Continuous Integration with Team Build
Mitch Denny: Building a Testable Workflow

Web Pages That Suck!

One way of figuring out what represents good design is by looking at bad design. Web Pages That Suck by Vincent Flanders is a great way of doing that. It’s also a laugh! I took a peek at one of this year’s contenders, Havenworks and I fear I will never be the same again!

Street Fighting Mathematics

Listen up homes!! MIT OpenCourse have published this introduction to solving things without proofs or exact calculations: Street-Fighting Mathematics. The course notes can be downloaded in a single .pdf here.

This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without
doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases
reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization,
generalization, and pictorial analysis
.