Welcome to Literate Musing

Foreword

You’ll find here a modest collection of resources and a few programming or algorithmic concepts for which I felt there was a lack of synthetic presentation or a lack of code samples (and probably both).

This website is also an experiment in literate programming. Which I find appropriate here because it fits well with the purpose of gathering some code samples and explanations, but also because I’m more generally interested in this concept as a way to bridge the gap between people writing ellaborate papers without any kind of (at least) illustrative implementation and people considering that (undocumented) “Code” is self-explaining.

Please keep in mind that what’s published here is the writting of a single person, with the quality level you can expect from mere “notes-to-self”.

If you feel like reading it anyway, don’t hold your criticism and feel free to contact me for suggestions, corrections, or comments.

Contents

• Autocorrelation functions
  • Introduction
  • Bestiary
  • Estimations
  • Implementation by FFT
  • Illustrations
  • References

Making of

The publication of this set of web pages is made possible by a fairly small set of tools.

A the core of it, is the Python language make it possible to write algorithms in not-so-pseudo code (ie code that is readable and actually works).

The literate programming part of this experiment is made possible via Pylit that implements a very simple and elegant way to write literate programs.

The final touch to get a clean rendering and a website structure is done by Sphinx, itself leveraging the goodness of reStructuredText and not to forget the convenience offered by MathJax to display maths on the web using the traditional TeX format.

Note

The whole setup is available in my personal repository and can be checked out via svn by the following command:

svn co http://tibonihoo.net/repo/petprojects/literate_musing

Troubleshooting

Due to the use of MathJax there might be some glitches in the way equations are displayed.

You may have to wait a little after the page is displayed, for all the equations to be set up correctly. This should not be too long, but will depend on your browser’s performances.

And if the equations persist in appearing as genuine LaTeX code, then you should make sure that javascript is enabled in your browser.

If you experience problems that cannot be resolved with the above instructions, please contact me.