aimmath-developers — Development related messages

[Aimmath-developers] CVS open for development work on AiM 3.1

[Gustav W D. <gu...@ma...>]

I have now moved AiM 3.0 onto its own branch. What this means is that you
can now again freely commit your changes to CVS. They will then be
incorporated into our next release (AiM 3.1). You do your commits as usual
to the HEAD branch.

The AiM_3_0 branch is purely for fixing bugs in AiM 3.0. If you do want to
work on a bug reported for AiM 3.0 then you should check out this branch.

AiM 3.0 is now available both from the SourceForge file release system
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=44411&release_id=1844
89 as well as from the AiM website at http://aimmath.sourceforge.net.

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] small changes to installation instructions

[Gustav W D. <gu...@ma...>]

besides taking out the bit about copying the root directory I also commented
out two other bits from the installation instructions: the bit about tth
because AiM no longer looks for old versions of tth and the bit about
backing up Config.mpl because I don't see any use for such a backed up file.
Rather the careful person should make a backup of the whole AiM directory.

I have uploaded the new file aim.tar.gz that contains release 3.0 to
aimmath.sourceforge.net. I will now test it and then publish it.

Gustav

Re: [Aimmath-developers] copying questions

[Manolis M. <ma...@ma...>]

> What are the symptoms that indicate to you that Maple can't read the
files?

Greg covered pretty much everything ... I was changing installlin.html to
reflect the changes but noticed that Gustav did that already... sorry I have
a cold and couldn't even answer email last night.  Maybe in the next version
we 'll be able to use a tool for that.

Manolis

RE: Fw: [Aimmath-developers] copying questions

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

I keep sending things off with awful typos. ...
On Sun, 14 Sep 2003, Greg Gamble wrote:
> Suppose you have a quiz in a subject called test. Then one can do:
> 
>   1. Let's say the subject is subj. Then in
> 
>      WEB-INF/root/subjects/subj/quizzes
> 
>     one can do a recursive copy of test/ to tes2/, say:
> 
>       cp -r test tes2
> 
>   2. Now one has a directory tes2/ with identical contects to test/
                                                         ^- n, of course
>      There is a .m file in tes2/ now called test.m
>      This needs to be tes2.m. So do:
> 
>       mv test.m tes2.m
>  
>   3. Now this will work already but address thinks in the test/ directory
                                                  ^- g, hmm!
>      So you need to edit the (appropriate) occurrences of test in tes2.m  
>      to be tes2

  Regards,
  Greg

RE: Fw: [Aimmath-developers] copying questions

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Sun, 14 Sep 2003, Gustav W Delius wrote:
> > > Maybe I am doing something awfully wrong but the problem is that the
> > > subject files (the .m ones at least) because (I guess) they are
> > > written from Maple as a blob when you change the directory using a 
> > > ascii manipulation the size is messed up and ... when
> > > Maple tries to read  them again it cant.
> 
> This is a very weird effect that I can not reproduce on my Windows machines.
> I can change from one directory to a different one with a filename of a
> different length and there are no problems. Maybe it is a Unix only problem?
> What symptoms do you observe that indicate that Maple can't read the
> modified files? Has anyone with Windows got a similar problem with renaming?

Just to be clear, this is the sort of thing one *can* do:

Suppose you have a quiz in a subject called test. Then one can do:

  1. Let's say the subject is subj. Then in

     WEB-INF/root/subjects/subj/quizzes

    one can do a recursive copy of test/ to tes2/, say:

      cp -r test tes2

  2. Now one has a directory tes2/ with identical contects to test/
     There is a .m file in tes2/ now called test.m
     This needs to be tes2.m. So do:

      mv test.m tes2.m
 
  3. Now this will work already but address thinks in the test/ directory
     So you need to edit the (appropriate) occurrences of test in tes2.m  
     to be tes2
      
I3Cache/FileContents=%)aim/QuizG%&falseGE\[l-%(RootDirGQ`o/usr/local/tomcat/web
apps/AiM/WEB-INF/root/subjects/subj/quizzes/test6"%.QuestionNamesG7(Q*Question1
                                            ^^^^
F)Q*Question2F)Q,Symboltest1F)Q,Symboltest2F)Q'test_3F)Q'test_4F)%(DueDateGF)%'
AccessGQ$allF)%)SelectorGF)%,SubjectNameGQ%testF)%%NameGF7%1ModificationTimeG"+
                                           ^^^^
`F^j5%&TitleGF7%%ModeGQ)practiceF)%2RandQuestionOrderGF%%'WeightG$"#5!""F)

     The ones underlined need to be changed to tes2.

Observe that each of these lines has 79 characters exactly. I guess the 
80th is an invisible newline character.

You will find that doing this at least on Linux all you have to do is
unhide the quiz and it works.

However if you try the same procedure but with a new directory name that
is of a different length to test then AIM says it can't load the quiz, and
that's even if you adjust each line to have exactly 79 characters in it.
It seems that the length of the file is recorded somewhere or something.

Manolis's message referred to copying a whole subject, but I'm sure the
same mechanism applies at the subject level as it does at the quiz level.

  Regards,
  Greg

[Aimmath-developers] Sorry ... new bug in LaTeX translation

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Gustav W Delius wrote:
> 9 hours to go before the release of AiM 3.0!

Sorry but there still seem to be problems with the new LaTeX routines.

So far, I've been finding Maple 7 and Maple 8 perform similarly with
the latest development version of AiM (well they do now ... I noticed
that: sort(..., `<` @ evalf) works fine with Maple 8 to sort real numbers
that might include 3, 3.1, Pi etc., but I needed an extra evalb, i.e.
sort(..., evalb @ `<` @ evalf) to make it work with Maple 7).

However, some tricks (which I probably don't need to use anymore because
of the existence now of Ken's Inert package) don't work anymore:

Here are two examples:

nm> Symboltest1
l> x
h> x := -1;
t> $u @`` + x@$
a> 1
end>
nm> Symboltest2
l> x, xs
h> x := -1;
   xs := ``||x;
t> $@xs + 1@$
a> 1
end>

To explain, $u + @x@$ would give: u + -1
The Maple expression: `` + x 
sums the empty symbol (which is invisible) and x,
if x is positive, say x = 1, that gives: + 1
if x is -1 as above, it gives:           - 1
So, in particular, $u @`` + x@$ after Maple and tth one
should get (and used to):  u - 1         (when x = -1)
and:                       u + 1         (when x = 1)

This was a useful technique for adding a term into an expression
and getting the sign right without the + - juxtaposition, in cases
where one needed to avoid the use of $@u + x@$ for some reason.

At the moment, the first example is throwing up a Maple to LaTeX error.

The second example uses a feature of Maple to generate the symbol -1
(as opposed to the integer). By having x = -1, ``||x gives what looks
exactly like -1 but it's actually a symbol, i.e. a name that does not
get simplified. So, $@xs + 1@$ used to give: -1 + 1
... now it gives: `-1` + 1

I'm guessing that either the change is due to a missing eval somewhere
or changes made to the `aim/LaTeX` routines to make the Inert package
work. Is it possible, to have the old behaviour without breaking Inert?

  Regards,
  Greg

Re: Fw: [Aimmath-developers] copying questions

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Manolis Mavrikis wrote:
> > Manolis wrote:
> >
> > > BUT the optional step of copying your old files across is inaccurate !
> > > Just replacing the directory will not work because there are other
> > > things hardcoded in the .m files not to mention that if you do a text
> > > substitution you ruin the file (I think) you have to change them
> > > manually
> > > with Maple ! (I 've written a procedure to help myself doing that that
> > > but it's not finalised yet)
> 
> > Can you explain in more detail what goes wrong if you do the text
> > substitution?
> > Gustav
> 
> Maybe I am doing something awfully wrong but the problem is that the subject
> files (the .m ones at least) because (I guess) they are written from Maple
> as a blob when you change the directory using a ascii manipulation the size
> is messed up and (I am still guessing here... I am maple ignoramius) when
> Maple tries to read  them again it cant.

I have noticed this effect. Things are ok if the new directory name has
the same number of characters as the old one. Then the size of the file
isn't messed up. For a while, I used this trick, but these days I develop 
on one machine and copy the directories across to another machine (this 
works without problems because I have the same directory structure on the 
other machine), basically by a tar zcf ... and tar zxf procedure. The only 
thing is that I need to unhide the quizzes on the machine I copy to. Also, 
the records get copied across in this process ... this is generally ok,
since it's only records from me and other staff who have been testing
the quiz before release to the students, but if necessary I can get in
and with the appropriate permissions simply remove the record directories
that correspond to me and other staff. I'm sure I could do this in
a cleverer way, but since I'm generally only releasing a few (generally
less than 3) at a time, this procedure is not too onerous.

> Hence what I do .. is open them with Maple, change the RootDir and save them
> again. And then I have to recompile as well (by the way I can't find this
> recompile all at the admin suite of the subject)

I think if you wrote a program to simply trash all the .m files (this 
would make quizzes and questions hidden again), and then recompile and 
unhide questions and quizzes ... this would get around this problem.
If you have the right permissions you could do this at the UNIX level.
It would be nice to have an automatic tool ... I think it would need to 
be non-GUI, so that quizzes and questions that were hidden at the beginning
of this procedure remain hidden after the procedure.

  Regards,
  Greg

Fw: [Aimmath-developers] copying questions

[Manolis M. <ma...@ma...>]

> Manolis wrote:
>
> > BUT the optional step of copying your old files across is inaccurate !
> > Just replacing the directory will not work because there are other
> > things hardcoded in the .m files not to mention that if you do a text
> > substitution you ruin the file (I think) you have to change them
manually
> > with Maple ! (I 've written a procedure to help myself doing that that
> > but it's not finalised yet)
> >

> Can you explain in more detail what goes wrong if you do the text
> substitution?
> Gustav

Maybe I am doing something awfully wrong but the problem is that the subject
files (the .m ones at least) because (I guess) they are written from Maple
as a blob when you change the directory using a ascii manipulation the size
is messed up and (I am still guessing here... I am maple ignoramius) when
Maple tries to read  them again it cant.

Hence what I do .. is open them with Maple, change the RootDir and save them
again. And then I have to recompile as well (by the way I can't find this
recompile all at the admin suite of the subject)

Manolis

[Aimmath-developers] RE: OS X AiM

[Gustav W D. <gu...@ma...>]

I have committed Jon's changes to CVS. I did not commit his changed
AutoConfWin.mpl because OS X installation will not use that file.

9 hours to go before the release of AiM 3.0!

Gustav

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Breitenbucher [mailto:jbr...@wo...]
> Sent: 13 September 2003 17:52
> To: gu...@ma...
> Subject: Re: OS X AiM
>
>
> Well, I am unable to commit. I get an error about needing write access.
> I have the correct passwords so I don't know what is going on. I am
> attaching the changed files in a .zip and a .tgz. I will try to write
> some OS X specific installation instructions. I'm not sure when that
> will happen. The only real difference is installing Tomcat. I used
> Server Logistics Complete Jakarta Tomcat installation at
> http://serverlogistics.com/tomcat.php and created a symlink at
> /usr/local/tomcat. Otherwise I think all of the steps are as for Linux.
>
> I may ask Leah Berman to test the OS X installation. She is the only
> user I know besides me that has OS X.
>
>

[Aimmath-developers] copying questions

[Manolis M. <ma...@ma...>]

The linux installation page (which (Gustav) is not linked in the =
index.html somehow) has a nice description of what steps to take if you =
already have an installation of AIM.=20

BUT the optional step of copying your old files across is inaccurate ! =
Just replacing the directory will not work because there are other =
things hardcoded in the .m files not to mention that if you do a text =
substitution you ruin the file (I think) you have to change them =
manually with Maple ! (I 've written a procedure to help myself doing =
that that but it's not finalised yet)

Manolis

Fw: [Aimmath-developers] relative versus absolute path

[Manolis M. <ma...@ma...>]

>  > also I made I change that I want to consult you about. At AutoConf.mpl
>  > changed the line
>  >
>  > setconfig('ServletURL', cat("http://",Config['FullContext'],"/Alice")):
> > to
>  > setconfig('ServletURL', "/Alice");
>  >
>  > I think this is better as it define the link relative to the current
>  > installation anyway ...

> What has come of this idea?
>
> Gustav

Gustav,

In my version I have it like that (relatively) I think it's better for
several reasons. I should have asked for approval and commit it I guess but
I was waiting for comments. Let's leave it for now as I have made other
changes like that to have less absolute paths in general and I 'll commit
them later (in another release)... after all this only improves the ease of
updating if you want to change your server settings etc. New users will not
have a problem with that and old users will probably not change settings yet
as there are other problems with the  question copying process (see my next
email)

Manolis

[Aimmath-developers] documentation menu

[Gustav W D. <gu...@ma...>]

I have extended the menu for the documentation and also put it into a frame.

Gustav

FW: [Aimmath-developers] aim/Latex package

[Ken M. <mo...@pt...>]

I sent this message last night at 12:44am and it is almost 21 hours later
and I still have not received a copy back from the SourceForge developers
list, but I already received a copy of the message I sent today about the
What's New file, so I will assume that the message below was never
delivered.  So I am attempting to send it a second time.  Sorry if you get
two copies of this eventually once SourceForge finds and distributes the
original.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Monks [mailto:mo...@pt...]
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 12:44 AM
To: Aim Developers
Subject: RE: [Aimmath-developers] aim/Latex package

I just committed a batch of changes that should help with some of the
problems you raise below.  In particular,

1. The default for formatting e is now italics, and not boldmath.  I
originally made it boldmath because TtH doesn't italicize math mode
variables and the plain non-italicized e looked really bad, and I wanted to
emphasize to the students that it was exp(1) and not the variable e.  But
with italics it actually looks pretty good on screen now, it is easy to
distinguish it from the other variables and it look closer to what you see
in textbooks.  It should also look fine in your pdf documents now.  It is a
definite improvement, and now looking back, I realize that I should have
tried italics instead of boldface in the first place.

2. I fixed the problem with @sin(x)@, it now produces \sin \left( x \right).
Same for the other functions too.

3. I found the cause of the original "ln in italics" bug.  For some reason
`latex/ln` and `latex/log` were being unassigned in AliceServer.mpl, but no
replacement for those routines was in LaTeX.mpl.  I changed AliceServer.mpl
so it no longer unassigns them.  However, I'm a little concerned about why
they might have been unassigned in the first place.  Hopefully it was just
some problem with older versions of Maple and TtH. Does anyone know why they
were originally unassigned?

4. The routine `latex/latex/symbol` is no longer modified by AIM. (Neil
deleted it a while ago, then I put it back to fix the ln bug, now we are
back to not needing it again. :)).  I also checked the routine in LaTeX.mpl
for `latex/latex/function` against the code for the same function in Maple 7
and they seemed almost identical, so I also removed that routine from
LaTeX.mpl. I also don't know why we were overriding that routine. Perhaps it
was originally added to add a feature that wasn't present in an older
version?  Anyway, I only commented out both of these routines, so if some
texing bugs reappear we only need to uncomment them to get them back.  I
tested it as much as I could on my machine, but my questions don't test
everything, so it would be helpful if everyone would test their own
questions to see if there are any new formatting quirks introduced.

5. We still override `latex/latex/*` and `latex/latex/**` (for reasons
discussed below) but I replaced both routines with modified versions of the
same routine from Maple 7, so that it is more up to date.  In particular,
this was the original  source of the (I+1)(a-b) bug which is (still) fixed.
I didn't touch the `latex/latex/matrix` in LaTeX.mpl routine since I know
nothing about that.  I also changed the behavior so that the default
formatting for n^(1/2) is \sqrt{n} if n is a one digit integer (see more
discussion on radicals below).

So they are the changes I just committed.  Let me now reply to your original
message:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gustav W Delius
> Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 6:11 PM
> To: AIM developers
> Subject: [Aimmath-developers] aim/Latex package
>
>
> As you know, I am passing the AiM latex output through pdflatex to obtain
> nicely typeset problem and solution sheets. Unfortunately it turns out
that
> the latex that AiM produces has some shortcomings. I need help from people
> who understand the aim/Latex package to overcome these problems.
>
> As far as I understand the aim/Latex package has 3 goals:
>
> 1) remove shortcomings in Maple's Latex,
>
> 2) avoid some of the simplifications that Maple would do automatically
that
> the Inert package doesn't want,

Let me clarify this a bit.  One main purpose of the Inert package is to
override the latex formatting that AIM and Maple produce for a given
expression. An InertExpr object carries around its own latex formatting
internally, so it doesn't depend on what AIM or Maple decides is the latex
string for a given expression. So in that sense, whatever changes we make to
the default latex formatting for Maple expressions, it will have no effect
on the way InertExpr objects display.

However, there are several situations where you can't override the default
latex formatting with the Inert package.  The most obvious one is the when
AIM echo's back the student's answer to the student.  Since the students are
entering ordinary Maple expressions and not inert expressions the formatting
of their answer is determined by Maple's latex package and the modifications
to it that we incorporate into AIM.  Another place where the default
formatting is important is when printing the value of an InertExpr, since
that is an ordinary Maple expression.  This comes up quite often when
showing a solution, where you might start with the unevaluated expression
and simplify it in a few steps with the last step being the inert
expression's value.

The bottom line is that what we choose for the default latex formatting of
Maple expressions is important, but it doesn't affect the display of inert
expressions, so we can choose it to be whatever we like without affect that
package per se.

> 3) change the latex so that it looks good after conversion by tth.
>
> Now I think 1) and 2) are a good idea. Obviously I am not so excited about
> 3) because what makes tth look good doesn't necessarily look good when
> typeset. Clearly I would want to switch off this tth conditioning to
produce
> good latex output. That would be easy to do if only I knew which parts of
> aim/Latex served which goal.

I can tell you about the parts I know about.

Currently aim/LaTeX.mpl overrides the following built-in Maple functions
from Maple's latex package:

1. `latex/latex/*`

The only reason this is overridden is to prevent it from resetting the value
of _LatexSmallFractionConstant to 50 when formatting a product with a
numerical first factor.  Maple has the default for this constant set to 50,
but I changed the default to 5000 in AliceServer.mpl.  The motivation for
doing this is that Maple latex formats any numerical fraction n/m
vertically, i.e. \frac{n}{m}, whenever the value of abs(n*m) is greater than
_LatexSmallFractionConstant, but horizontally as n/m otherwise.  However,
TtH is very bad at formatting fractions vertically in inline math mode (it
basically can't) so this causes a headache in questions where randomization
might choose 2/3 for the fraction in one question instance and 7/8 in
another instance.  With the original default value of
_LatexSmallFractionConstant=50, 2/3 would format horizontally, but the 7/8
would be formatted vertically, resulting in (a) an ugly inline display
because of TtH and (b) inconsistent formatting in the question even in
display math mode depending on the particular randomization.

2. `latex/latex/**`

The main modification to this routine is to prevent Maple from producing
radical's, since TtH is terrible at producing anything but the simplest
expression using radicals.  Even in display math mode, it can't connect the
leading root symbol to the overbar on a big expression. The only thing that
looks half decent is something like \sqrt{x} or \sqrt(2) where there is only
one character after the root sign, since then it doesn't try to put the
overbar above the character.  So I just tweaked it so @n^(1/2)@ becomes
\sqrt{n} if n is a single digit integer.  It would be easy enough to change
it so it would work for single character variables too, but I don't think we
should do that.  It is better to let all of the expressions that have
rational exponents format in a consistent manner, and it is usually more
useable to have them in exponential form than radical form when writing
solutions to questions.

The only other tweak to this routine is to prevent it from putting
parentheses around the e when formatting @exp(1)^2@.  Maple doesn't
automatically simplify this expression to exp(2), so if a student enters e^2
for his answer, then since we have defined e:=exp(1), this is the actual
expression that AIM tries to format.  The default is (e)^2 instead of just
e^2, so this tweak prevents the parentheses in that case.

3. `latex/exp`

This is overridden so it formats exp(1) as {\it e} and exp(x) as {\it
e}^{x}.

4. `latex/latex/float`

I rewrote almost all of this routine to improve the default latex formatting
for Maple floats in AIM questions.  In particular, the default for Maple is
to latex format a float using all of the digits determined by the global
variable Digits.  This is almost always way too many digits for a reasonable
question involving floats.  This routine now uses a new global variable
'LaTeXDigits' to determine how many digits it should use by default when
displaying a float.  Thus we can specify the number of digits displayed in
the latex output of a float without affecting the accuracy of the internal
computation (as it would be if we reset Digits instead).  The default is
three digits.

So that is the complete list of the modifications I have made to the latex
code.  Aside from whatever is going on in `latex/latex/matrix`, they are the
only variations from what Maple produces by default.

> Some things are obvious, for example typesetting $e^x$ with a bold e is
good
> for on-screen display but something I would want to switch off for
> conventional mathematical typesetting.

I changed this to italics now, so it should be good for both.

> Another thing that I certainly want
> to switch off is the typesetting of $\sqrt{2}$ as $2^{1/2}$.

This is changed now too, but only for single digit integers.  I think it
will be a bad idea to do this for other expressions.

> But there already I have difficulties finding where it is done. Can you
help?
>
> Finally there is the matter of the missing \ in front of \cos and similar
> things. I don't know if that is a bug or part of 3)

This is fixed now.

One final philosophical comment about this topic...

I think we really should try to keep the pdf and on screen versions of an
AIM quiz as identical as possible.  In particular, if TtH cannot display
radicals like $$\sqrt[3]{\frac{x+1}{x}}$$ and so we have it print as
$${\frac{x+1}{x}}^(1/3)$$ instead, then we should not use the radical
notation in the pdf quiz and the exponential notation on the onscreen
version.  Otherwise we will have angry mobs of students pounding down our
office doors saying "When I saw the question on the screen it had a 1/3
power but when I printed the quiz it changed to a different question with
roots and stuff! So I just skipped that one because I didn't know which
question you wanted me to answer?"

:)

KEN

RE: [Aimmath-developers] What's New in 3.0

[Gustav W D. <gu...@ma...>]

I like Ken's "What's New in Release 3.0" document. I have added a few
things. I will post it on the website but changes and additions to the
document in CVS are still welcomed and will be reflected on the website.

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] relative versus absolute path

[Gustav W D. <gu...@ma...>]

While looking through the mailing list archive I came across the following
exchange between > Manolis and Greg:

 > also I made I change that I want to consult you about. At AutoConf.mpl I
 > changed the line
 >
 > setconfig('ServletURL', cat("http://",Config['FullContext'],"/Alice")):
to
 > setconfig('ServletURL', "/Alice");
 >
 > I think this is better as it define the link relative to the current
 > installation anyway ...

 Ah! ... that's an interseting idea, change the definition of ServletURL
 to be relative instead of absolute ... that ought to work oughtn't it,
 since one never descends into deeper directories. How far have you tested
 it?

What has come of this idea?

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] [ aimmath-Feature Requests-805356 ] Improve navigation and help for admin pages

[SourceForge.net <no...@so...>]

Feature Requests item #805356, was opened at 2003-09-12 21:33
Message generated for change (Tracker Item Submitted) made by Item Submitter
You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=439482&aid=805356&group_id=44411

Category: None
Group: None
Status: Open
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Gustav W Delius (gustav_delius)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Improve navigation and help for admin pages

Initial Comment:
I move the following post from the mailing list here:



 > 1) improve navigation for the lecturer by having a 

navigational bar on all

 > administrative pages that allows the lecturer to jump 

directly to the most

 > important administrative pages.

 

 We could do some ad hoc improvements for the current 

release.  In the longer

 term, we should have toolbars and drop-down menus, 

more in the style of

 other

 standard applications, and we should have some new 

functions in Admin.mpl to

 support the creation of such widgets, rather than the 

current piecemeal

 approach.

 

 > 2) improve help by having pop-up help windows for 

most of the links on the

 > administrative pages. I want to do this moodle-style, 

i.e., with a little

 > question mark icon next to the link. When clicking on 

the question mark a

 > pop-up window opens with a description of the page 

that will be opened by

 > that link. I won't have to do too much writing 

because the help text is

 > already there in teacher.html.

 

 That is an excellent idea, which I had also thought of 

implementing.  There

 should again be some development of Admin.mpl to 

support it, but that should

 not be too much work.  Nonetheless, it will probably 

need to wait for the

 next release.

 



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[Aimmath-developers] [ aimmath-Feature Requests-805346 ] Multiple answerboxes

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Feature Requests item #805346, was opened at 2003-09-12 21:24
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Category: None
Group: None
Status: Open
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Gustav W Delius (gustav_delius)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Multiple answerboxes

Initial Comment:
I move the following post from the mailing list here so 

that it doesn't get lost:



 > The original proposal was to allow an arbitrary number 

of answerboxes

 embedded

 > anywhere within the text of the question. One 

possible syntax would

 > be to include the answerboxes inside the t> flag as 

something like

 > %(type,size)

 > where type is the required Maple type of the anwer 

and size is the size of

 > the box.

 >

 > t> Find two primes $p_1$ and $p_2$ such that $p_2 

> p_1 > @lowerbound@$.\

 >    $p_1=$ %(posint,4) and $p_2=$ %(posint,4).

 > s> [ proc(ans1,ans2) ......

 

 Yes, I would like to see this type of question some 

day.  I suggested

 something similar to this to the JISC list last November.  

WeBWorK already

 has exactly this capability, for example.  I would modify 

your suggestion

 slightly so the answerbox syntax would be:

 

 %(name,type,hsize,vsize)

 

 so that we can specify the horizontal and vertical size 

to each answer box

 (for example, if you want to make a survey or essay 

question with a very

 large answer box (if hsize or vsize are omitted they 

would have a default

 value). By naming the answer boxes we could just 

return a single table as

 the student's answer, i.e.

 

 > t> Find two primes $p_1$ and $p_2$ such that $p_2 

> p_1 > @lowerbound@$.\

 >    $p_1=$ %(p,posint,4) and $p_2=$ %(p2,posint,4).

 > s> [ proc(ans)

          if isprime(ans[p1]) and

             isprime(ans[p2]) and

             ans[p1]<ans[p2] and

             lowerbound < ans[p1] then

           return 1;

          else

           ......

 

 We could call this a TableQuestion, since it returns a 

table instead of a

 Matrix.  The advantage to naming this is that it makes 

the coding a bit more

 readable when you have many answer boxes, and if you 

later reformat the

 question to put the answer boxes in a different order or 

if you randomize

 the wording of the question so that the boxes randomly 

occur in a different

 order, you could have a single solution proc that 

doesn't need to take the

 order of the boxes into account.

 

 In this case the validation mechanism would not accept 

any student answers

 unless all of the boxes satisfied the correct type, and 

all boxes would be

 graded simultaneously each time.

 

 Another possible syntax might be

 

 %(type,name,hsize,vsize)

 

 so that if 'name' is omitted, the question boxes are just 

numbered in order

 1,2,3, so that in the s> proc we would have ans[1], ans

[2], etc.  That way

 naming the boxes would be optional.  I like your idea of 

putting the type in

 the answer box specifier.  I guess if that was omitted 

too it could default

 to 'anything', so that %() would be the minimalists 

answer box. :) Actually,

 to be consistent with the @-substitution syntax, 

perhaps the answerbox

 syntax should be

 

 %type,name,hsize,vsize%

 

 Anyway this is definitely on the wish list for future AiM.  

I don't think we

 will have it before Monday though. :)

 

 KEN



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[Aimmath-developers] [ aimmath-Bugs-803750 ] No value for "PartLabel" supplied following Results link

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Bugs item #803750, was opened at 2003-09-10 14:03
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Category: Admin Interface
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Gustav W Delius (gustav_delius)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: No value for "PartLabel" supplied following Results link

Initial Comment:
When I follow the "Results" links next to a question on 

the quiz admin page, I get the error message: 



Error, (in aim/admin/GetParameter) No value 

for "PartLabel" supplied 



Note, this is only for the "Results" for the individual 

question, the "Results" link for the whole quiz at the top 

of the page is working fine.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

>Comment By: Gustav W Delius (gustav_delius)
Date: 2003-09-12 21:10

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=737246

This is currently our only open bug. Is it real? Can any of you 

reproduce it?

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RE: [Aimmath-developers] aim/Latex package

[Gustav W D. <gu...@ma...>]

Ken wrote (and you will get the message eventually,
when SourceForge gets around to delivering it):

> 3. I found the cause of the original "ln in italics" bug.  For some reason
> `latex/ln` and `latex/log` were being unassigned in
> AliceServer.mpl, but no
> replacement for those routines was in LaTeX.mpl.  I changed
> AliceServer.mpl
> so it no longer unassigns them.  However, I'm a little concerned about why
> they might have been unassigned in the first place.  Hopefully it was just
> some problem with older versions of Maple and TtH. Does anyone
> know why they
> were originally unassigned?

I believe to remember that this was an early attempt to get AiM to
work with Maple 9. Is that correct?

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] [ aimmath-Bugs-804025 ] \cos is cos

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Bugs item #804025, was opened at 2003-09-10 21:51
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Category: Formatting
Group: None
>Status: Closed
>Resolution: Fixed
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Gustav W Delius (gustav_delius)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: \cos is cos

Initial Comment:
In the latex produced by AiM function names are missing 

the backslash. I guess one doesn't notice that if one 

uses tth for output, but we need to fix this to be able to 

produce correctly formatted output.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

>Comment By: Gustav W Delius (gustav_delius)
Date: 2003-09-12 20:45

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=737246

Fixed by Ken in version 1.8 of aim/Latex

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[Aimmath-developers] What's New in 3.0

[Ken M. <mo...@pt...>]

I uploaded a rough quickie first draft of a list of new features in AIM 3.0
to the docs directory on CVS.  Basically I just edited one of Neil's
postings to the list and added the other stuff I knew about.  Feel free to
expand on items, delete items, edit, and reformat to your heart's content.
In particular, I'm not familiar with some of the changes other people have
made, so you each might want to expand on things you were responsible for.
Specifically, I have not kept up to speed on the servlet changes for browser
detection and such, so I left that part blank for someone else to fill in at
the bottom.  It's not a pretty document, but at least it gets us started.

KEN
-----------------------------------------
Ken Monks - Professor of Mathematics
            University of Scranton
            Scranton, PA 18510
email: mailto:mo...@sc...
web:   http://www.scranton.edu/~monks
-----------------------------------------

[Aimmath-developers] [ aimmath-Feature Requests-805059 ] default setting for penalty

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Feature Requests item #805059, was opened at 2003-09-12 13:20
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Category: Marking Routines
Group: None
Status: Open
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Gustav W Delius (gustav_delius)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: default setting for penalty

Initial Comment:
Currently the default penalty is hard-coded to 0.1. It 

would be good if one could set a zone-wide default, to 

be overrridden by a subject-wide default, to be 

overridden by a quiz-wide default, to be finally 

overridden by the currently implemented penalty> flag in 

the question.

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RE: [Aimmath-developers] release of AiM 3.0

[Neil S. <N.P...@sh...>]

I won't be able to spend time on AiM for a few weeks; so if we want a 
"New Features" list, then someone else will have to write it :-)

Neil

> Are we still planning to release AiM 3.0 on Sunday? I see no 
> reason not to,
> except that it would be nice to have a "New Features" list so that people
> can decide whether to upgrade.
> 
> Gustav

RE: [Aimmath-developers] new package aim/Calc

[Gustav W D. <gw...@yo...>]

I have discovered why I couldn't load the Calc package right after the Int
package: there was a typo in my first version of aim/Calc. That is now
corrected.

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] release of AiM 3.0

[Gustav W D. <gu...@ma...>]

Are we still planning to release AiM 3.0 on Sunday? I see no reason not to,
except that it would be nice to have a "New Features" list so that people
can decide whether to upgrade.

Gustav