Tuesday, 19 April 2005, 14:11:34 EDT

I have started making a list of the things I want to write about in my experience with my Apple PowerBook. I want to cover everything and I want to make sure that what I write is fairly accurate. That is why I haven't made much mention of it since I acquired the machine. I don't want to do one of those "month with a Mac" or, as OSNews thinks to be relevant, "two days" with a Mac article. Thus far though, I am really digging the system and find more reasons to like it every day; in fact, I just found a neat trick using Exposé while composing this post. It will be a while yet before I write my article. I just ordered the next version of OS X and I want to include that in my article.

Here is a differentiation problem that I think is really neat. I just worked it out and realized I got it completely wrong the first time I worked it about a month and a half ago.

Let ƒ(x) = (x - 1) * (e^x). Differentiate ƒ(x) with respect to x. So, ƒ'(x) = [(x - 1) * dy/dx(e^x)] + [(e^x) * dy/dx(x - 1)] = [(x*e^x - e^x) + e^x] = (e^x)(x - 1) + (e^x).

Now, differentiate ƒ'(x) with respect to x. This results in (read "ƒ double prime") ƒ''(x) = (e^x)(x - 1) + 2(e^x). Can you guess what the third derivative of ƒ(x) will be? How bout the twentieth derivative?

Categories:

Math is teh sux. Dude, you used to hate math class so much.

Posted by Jason on Tuesday, 19 April 2005, 17:31:44 EDT.

I didn't really understand it then either. It really is the same thing as programming though. Which is probably why I like that problem; it is an infinite loop.

I have been considering doing some modifications to my site to support MathML so that I can start writing more of that kind of stuff but MathML support is pitiful.

Posted by James Sumners on Tuesday, 19 April 2005, 18:03:23 EDT.

All of us silly people running Firefox should have little to no problem viewing MathML.
I just read up a little bit at these sites:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/
and
http://www.reallysi.com/newsletter11_3.htm

Posted by Wolven on Wednesday, 20 April 2005, 13:48:19 EDT.

Yes, but it still has problems. For example look at bug 228804 in Mozilla (affects Firefox). That bug alone isn't enough to prevent me from doing it just yet. People also need the proper fonts.

If I decide to implement MathML then I will have to reconvert the site, at least the index page, to XHTML. I am just not sure it is worth the trouble yet. Especially considering the support that MathML is getting from the browser developers -- basically none. I am not sure if MathML is going to be the standard everyone uses.

Posted by James Sumners on Wednesday, 20 April 2005, 13:55:53 EDT.

Yeah, I'm missing a few fonts, according to the W3's test site.
http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/pmathml2.xml

Posted by wolven on Friday, 22 April 2005, 8:25:51 EDT.