David Andel

All info is on my homepage: http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/~andel (e-mail mailto:[email protected] )

My shortcut is DMA.

Well, not really :) Can you tell us a bit about what you are doing with tcl ? (I saw that you do AI work, how is tcl used in that environment, for example ?) -- AK

Sure :-)

When I started ant navigation research at the AI Lab I jumped into a project using extensive software written by Ralf Moeller (and some others) in tcl/tk with C++ extensions. So I've learned to write and to love tcl/tk :-) It consisted of different packages for digitizing ant trajectories from scanned paper documents, statistical analysis thereof, a simulator implementing models of ant landmark navigation, and libraries for steering Samurai robots.

I've adapted the package used for digitizing trajectories from scanned sheets of paper to a package allowing to digitize ant trajectories right in the fieldplace using a notebook with a graphics tablet, powered by solar panels which I weared on my back (see [L1 ]). At some point I'll move the C++ parts to tcl to make a single tcl application out of it.

Additionally I've adapted and improved the statistical package. At the moment I am moving to use the R package out of the tcl scripts for the pure statistics instead of tcl functions.

The simulator and the Samurai libs are not further developed. We moved to Koala robots some time ago and are working on a control lib in pure C now.

Not related to my research:

• I've looked into Wikit to run my own wiki(s). After quite some testing of Wikit and a number of other wiki packages I've chosen UseMod [L2 ] which I use now in a moderately modified version and like it very much. Well, that means I went into Perl as well... ;-)
• After my medical studies and studying maths now I started to build a very flexible "crammer" without the need to create documents expecially for it, by just using html docs from any source. I plan to release that under the GPL, so if you like the idea please tell me to join forces :-)

AK -- What is a crammer ?

A "learning machine" for everything you want - or have - to know by heart. It is the virtual counterpart of the classical flash cards. The big disadvantage of most of them (besides that almost all are closed-source) is the need to generate the learning stuff especially for them. But there is enough html formatted stuff around already, and the goal of the crammer is to use whichever html docs - or even parts of them - as virtual flash cards. The algorithm for the studying as such is pretty much done, I did that years ago as an Excel makro (well, at that time...) and it just needs to be translated to tcl. But I am struggling with the html interface. I've tested the html-widget, the one in IWidgets, and using a common browser, but am not really satisfied with any of them. The html-widget is too limited, the IWidgets html is basically fine, but I had some problems with setting size and position on the screen, and using a external browser could be problematic in terms of compatibility with different browsers, though I didn't go much into that.

Are you intersted to participate?

AK - This seems to be something DKF might be interested in. Nothing for me though, sorry.