maruku 0.6.1 → 0.7.0.beta1

data/tests/others/sss06.md

@@ -1,352 +0,0 @@
-Category: sss06
-Date: Sep 10 2006
-From: "Andrea Censi" <andrea.censi@dis.uniroma1.it>
-Subject: A report about Oxford and the 2006 SLAM Summer School
-Encoding: BlueCloth FlickrHTML
-format: bluecloth>
-inMenu: true
-
-Let me quote the words of a renowned Oxford scholar:
-
-> "Life is too important to be taken seriously."
-
-If you do not wholeheartedly agree with this statement,
-please stop reading this.
-
-----------------------
-
-I stayed three weeks in Oxford: one week for the SLAM school and,
-before that, two weeks for an English course. You might ask: why?
-A very good question indeed - "Why I am not on a sunny beach?" -
-I kept asking myself as I walked down the misty alleys of the old town,
-wearing a scarf on August, 16th, and realizing that - maybe - I would not
-need the three pairs of shorts and the swimsuit I had brought.
-
-
-Summary:
-
-1. The Queen's English
-2. The Harry Potter experience
-3. Parsnip, Marmite and the tea conspiracy
-4. The Summer School
-5. Minor open issues in SLAM  
-
-> Appendix: How to offend seven nationalities at once
-
-`I`. The Queen's English
-----------------------
- 
-It turns out that a course of English at an advanced level is mostly
-about vocabulary and idioms: by the end of the first week I knew seven
-different ways to address a "promiscuous" woman, and I can tell which ones
-are applicable to American and which to British English. It remains to be
-seen how this will benefit my academic writing.
-
-It was a lot of fun to learn the differences (or, as the teacher put it,
-"to purify my English after years of prolonged unhealthy exposure to American
-media"), which are not only linguistic, but above all in attitude and
-social norms.
-For example, in the US the first question that people ask you is
-"What do you do?" (meaning: "How much do you earn?"), while in England such
-a question would be felt as unnecessary direct and impolite. 
-As a rule,
-it is compulsory to exchange comments about the weather, and there is a lot
-of specialized vocabulary for this; the following table might prove handy
-to understand your acquaintance:
-
-- "It's a lovely day!" = "It doesn't rain"
-- "It's a nice day!" = "It doesn't rain heavily"
-- "What a wonderful day!"="This morning, at 10:13, I caught a glimpse of the sun"
-
-(the correct answer to any of these is "isn't it?")
-
-`II`. The Harry Potter experience
--------------------------
-
-  flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/censi/232006603/
-
-During my three-week stay I tried my best to immerse myself in the English
-atmosphere.
-
-I went to a place called Oxford Story [3], where we paid &pound;7 to go through a
-painfully slow indoor ride, sat on a mobile school-desk in the dark for 25
-minutes. It is the claustrophobic equivalent of the American Epcot center in
-Disney World.
-
-At Epcot, I learned that the final goal of all the scientific progress in the
-last three millennia was to let Walt Disney broadcast Snow White using
-Siemens equipment (Siemens sponsored the ride).
-In Oxford, I learned that the glorious University is the repository of all
-human knowledge, and that the English understatement is a legend. At the end of
-the ride, I was amazed that in Italy I had managed to learn to read and write.
-
-  flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/censi/232023681/
-
-Still, one thing the ride did not explain is how the well-educated,
-smart elite students of Oxford can possibly find rowing fun --
-(probably it IS fun, compared to cricket).
-
-  flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/censi/232529032/
-
-I went to a candle-light baroque concert in the Exeter college chapel.
-The ensemble was 75% Asian, all Oxford researchers, and we were given
-a twenty minute speech about the effort they put in the historical
-research of this obscure composer, that they had a microfilm of the original
-manuscript delivered from a German library, that the viola would be played
-in the original style, blah blah blah. Only in Oxford!
-
-  flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/censi/232031895/
-
-I read "The Hobbit" (Tolkien was a fellow of Exeter college) - I discovered
-that the only two peoples in the known and invented universes to have
-the concept of a "second breakfast" are Hobbits and Italians.
-
-
-I watched a performance of MacBeth at an open-air theatre.
-I couldn't understand but one sentence, which is worth mentioning:
-"Alcohol provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance"
-
-Regarding alcohol, England is one of the places where you can't drink if you
-are under 21 (in Italy, at 18 you have decided to quit).
-Young people have their ID checked at the entrance of pubs and in liquor
-stores: that's only a minor annoyance, as they just need to wait outside
-the store for the first Spanish guy passing by that will buy the wine for them
-(and be compensated with just the change - did you keep the penny, Felix?).
-
-Anyway the guys at the door use the ID checking mostly as a form of flattery:
-"You are 32? I thought you were 20!" is probably the best pick-up line that
-the English can come up with.
-
-The other characteristic thing is that in English pubs there is no table
-service: you have to walk to the bar and ask by yourself. The first time can
-be confusing: and you can spend quite some time waiting at the table whining
-about the "poor service".
-
-`III`. Parsnip, Marmite & the tea conspiracy 
----------------------------------------------
-
-During the first week I was a guest of a lovely 79-year-old lady.
-Working at the University, she made a point of speaking very posh English.
-And she made a point of cooking traditional English food.
-The typical English dish is some meat with two vegetables aside.
-For the vegetables, pick any two in {parsnip, carrot, potato}.
-
-Don't look in your dictionary for a translation of "parsnip" as probably
-there isn't one. The lady would tell me that in the next-to-last century,
-this famous professor spent years raising the finest crossbreed of Parsnip as
-to finally obtain what is best described as a big white carrot
-with no taste whatsoever [4].
-
-Nevertheless, the many regional variants give spectacular variety to the
-English cuisine: the two vegetables can be boiled, fried, baked, microwaved,
-or roasted. There exist also exotic twists, in which the vegetables are put
-on top of the meat, or underneath, or even inside.
-In important occasions, the recipes stay the same but gain a French name.
-
-
-   flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/censi/232526897/
-
-
-I tried a thing called Marmite, which the teacher sold to me as "the British
-answer to Nutella". It has the aspect and consistency of engine grease, and,
-as far as I know, also the taste is similar (I've never tasted the grease,
-but next time, presented with choice, I'd give it a go).
-
-The austerity of English food can be explained by the pitiless weather; but
-how can you explain Marmite, if not with alimentary masochism?
-
-But... there's one thing that is much better in England: tea. Wherever I tried
-it (at the old lady's, at tearooms, at coffee breaks) it was sooo delicious.
-In Italy we don't get the real thing. Why is that? Is this some sort of
-conspiracy orchestrated by the Italian coffee producers? And is it the
-tea cartello which does not allow good coffee to be imported in England?
-
-`IV`. The Summer School
----------------------
-
-If you go for a career in research, in general you don't get much money,
-or fame, and you don't get to rescue the princess either.
-The two benefits that you do get are: playing with very expensive toys
-and the occasional trip in which you meet all sort of people.
-
-And when you talk with them, it's sort of strange to realize that your
-interlocutor is one of the 5 people - worldwide - that actually care about your
-research theme, and yet the things you have in common end there, as he has
-different culture, race, religion, and while you two happen to agree that Lie
-brackets are an indispensable tool to characterize the propagation of errors
-on the Euclidean group, you have very different answers to the important
-questions about life, the universe and everything. (In these cases I have
-anecdotal proof that it is much better to stick to research talk, and to
-avoid at all costs the kind of jokes that you can find in the Appendix).
-
-Instead, at this particular school, I would say that the European character was
-clearly perceived, and I enjoyed it -- but whether England is in Europe is a
-delicate matter.
-
-
-Here are some impressions of the people.
-
- * Juan Domingo Tardos (aka Mingo) is the funniest of the bunch, the man you
-   want to go partying with.
-   
-   He taught us two deep truths about SLAM and life:
-   1. The size of your banana matters.
-   2. Never under-estimate the size of your lemons.
-   
-   I thought: wow, I want to write a paper with "banana" in the title - finally
-   some inspiration from the school! I already had big projects for Fig. 1,2
-   and a full-page Fig. 3, but after a little googling I found:
-   "Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed Wire"[5]
-   "Dealing with large bananas" [6].
-   I gave up: I cannot beat this last one. And the existence of [6] proves
-   once again that SLAM is a solved problem.
-
- * Paul Newman, the organizer, told us, more than once, that the future of SLAM
-   is in long term operation if we want the systems to be reliable.
-   (Personally, I disagree: I think that it is possible to build anything at
-   the desired level of reliability, given reasonable funding, time, and
-   an appropriate number of German engineers)
-
- * One of the lessons learned in the school is that almost everything has
-   already been done by someone else.
-   More specifically, most of the things have already been done by
-   Durrant-Whyte some twenty years ago, when men were men, CS was electrical
-   engineering, master students knew calculus, and Kalman filters ran
-   free in the wild lands of Australia.
-
- * Frank Dellaert is a jolly chap as well, and he does interesting things with
-   graphs. As he introduced three different formalisms in the first
-   three slides, I regretted not to have put more CS in my curriculum, then
-   shut my eyes. Interestingly, at summer schools and conferences, if you close
-   your eyes people assume that you are very smart and that you are thinking
-   about some new impressive algorithm -- I was just dreaming of a sunny beach.
-
- * Henrik Christensen has implemented SLAM on the cleaning robot for $45
-   in sensors and electronics. It puts things in perspective, especially
-   if you consider that I paid  &pound;16 for a one-hour coach trip from Heathrow
-   to Oxford.
-
- * Andy Davison is a wonderful person, he tutored the practicals with
-   infinite patience. Never did I meet such a knowledgeable, affable,
-   and humble person. (Probably he is the kind of person that some day will
-   show up at work with automatic guns)
-
- * Wolfram Burgard - he wins my "best robot" award for the photo of our
-   beloved Albert [7].
-
- * Dieter Fox wins "most nostalgic slide from the 90s": and every time we feel
-   the same emotion as the first time.
-
- * Kurt Konolige reminded me why I bought a Mac.
-
- * Simon Lacroix - Once we sat at the same table during lunch. While he
-   talked with Dellaert, he would send me alarmed glances, the kind of glances
-   that you would reserve to a relative returning from death. I wanted
-   to ask him why, but then I decided I'd better not to (was I so wasted
-   from the night before?).
-
- * Simon Julier -- he seems very smart, but he lost me between slide #3 and #4.
-   I started to be seasick from all those covariance matrices -
-   so I muttered to my neighbours: "I wonder whether it still holds in
-   higher-dimensional spaces...", then I closed my eyes and was back again on
-   the sunny beach.
-
- * But all in all, the most interesting presentation was the magical show
-   that Davide Scaramuzza (who at daytime pretends to work at ETHZ) gave to a
-   selected audience after the banquet ([8]).
-   It was another confirmation that all the time spent in front of a monitor is,
-   in fact, wasted, and all of us should have studied card tricks instead:
-   you have NO IDEA of how a girl's face brightens up and her eyes expand when
-   she watches a magician.
-
-`V`. Other minor issues in SLAM 
---------------------------------
-
-We all know that the most important open problem in SLAM is that there are
-not enough women doing research in the area and coming at summer schools.
-As for the other minor issues, this is the result of asking
-"What is the future of SLAM?" to a random sampling of the participants.
-(the list does not include answers given after 10:00 PM)
-
- - For 30% of the respondents, SLAM is a solved problem, and we just need some
-   German engineers to work out the details of the implementations.
- - Long term operation: make filters that reconsider their decisions at a
-   a later time (so not delaying decisions, but explicitly reconsider).
- - Make it robust for real applications: or, your method should work in more
-   than one experiment and possibly also outside of your lab.
- - Put more knowledge in SLAM about the environment. Teach your
-   filter what is a tree, a road, a mirror so that it can make smarter
-   decisions.
- - Active SLAM and SLAM-guided exploration (once we figure out good acronyms).
- - Some boring work is to be done for taking into account linearization errors
-   in the already existing results about consistency, sparsity, etc.
- - "Where can I get some real coffee?" (2 people)
- - Methods and representations for real sensor fusion (laser, camera, etc).
- - Do robust stuff with a single camera. Omnidirectional cameras are cool.
-   Mix different techniques at different time-scales: visual odometry between
-   frames, then stable features, then databases of places to close the loop
-   (or don't close the loop at all).
-
-Appendix. How to offend seven nationalities at once
---------------------------------------------------
-
-In Oxford I learned the ultimate rude stereotypical joke -- I think it's
-worth sharing.
-
-> **Heaven & Hell**
->
-> *In Heaven*: the policemen are British, mechanics are German, chefs are French,
-> wives are Japanese, neighbours are Dutch, lovers are Italian,
-> and the Swiss organize it all.
->
-> *In Hell*: the policemen are German, mechanics are French, chefs are British,
-> neighbours are Japanese, wives are Dutch, lovers are Swiss,
-> and the Italians organize it all.
-
-For related work, see for example [9], [10].
-
-
-And here's the research version:
-
-> **The BEST international research project**
-> 
-> - The French do the overall math analysis,
-> - a Chinese refines a ten-line proof of the main Theorem,
-> - the Germans design the implementation,
-> - Japanese undergrads do the actual work,
-> - the British write the paper,
-> - an American gives the presentation,
-> - the Spanish organize the social events,
-> - and the Italians organize the banquet.
-> 
-> **The WORST international research project**
-> 
-> - The Germans do the overall math analysis,
-> - an American PhD student spends 10 CPU year on his department's 48-node
-> cluster and proves with a Monte Carlo simulation in Matlab that
-> Theorem 1 indeed holds for some values of the parameters,
-> - the French design the implementation,
-> - one Spanish undergrad does the actual work,
-> - the Italians write the papers,
-> - a Chinese gives the presentation,
-> - the Japanese organize the social events,
-> - and the British organize the banquet.
-
-`:-)`
-
-  Flickr: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/censi/232003838>
-
-References
-----------
-
-\[1\]   [http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php](http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php)  
-\[2\] dde [http://www.flickr.com/photos/censi/236722418/](http://www.flickr.com/photos/censi/236722418/)  
-\[3\]  [http://www.oxfordstory.co.uk](http://www.oxfordstory.co.uk)  
-\[4\]   [http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/p/parsni12.html](http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/p/parsni12.html  )  
-\[5\]  E. Meijer, M. Fokkinga, R. Paterson. "Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed Wire" (1991)  
- [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/meijer91functional.html](http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/meijer91functional.html)  
-\[6\]  R. Lammel, J. Visser, J. Kort. "Dealing with large bananas" (2000) <http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/lammel00dealing.html>  
-\[7\]  [http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~burgard/](http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/lammel00dealing.html)  
-\[8\]  [http://asl.epfl.ch/~scaramuz/cabaret/cabaret.wmv](http://asl.epfl.ch/~scaramuz/cabaret/cabaret.wmv)  
-\[9\]  [http://www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/boster/cultvar/euweb/](http://www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/boster/cultvar/euweb/)  
-\[10\]  [http://www.infonegocio.com/xeron/bruno/italy.html](http://www.infonegocio.com/xeron/bruno/italy.html)  

data/tests/others/test.md

@@ -1,4 +0,0 @@
-
-           $ python       
-
-

data/tests/s5/s5profiling.md

@@ -1,48 +0,0 @@
-subtitle: news
-author: Andrea Censi
-company: Università La Sapienza
-css: math.css
-
-RDK news
-========
-
-Profiling
----------------------------------------------------------
-
-1. `ragent2` writes profiling information on a pipe.
-2. `rdk-profiler` reads the pipe and creates graphs in HTML+Javascript.
-3. The user reads the data on a browser. 
-
-Things logged
------------------------------------------------------------
-
-	17288397 1730000 0 16384 END pantiltClient 
-	17288439 1730000 0 16384 START pantiltClient 
-	17288564 1730000 0 16384 LOCK pantiltClient:tilt 
-	17288622 1730000 0 16384 UNLOCK pantiltClient:tilt
-
-* `START/END`: how much does it take to ...?
-
-Footnotes 1/2
----------------------------------------------------
-
-You can use footnotes [^1]
-
-[^1]: And they work.
-
-Footnotes 2/2
----------------------------------------------------
-
-Each footnote on its page [^2]
-
-[^2]: alone.
-
-And now: math!
----------------------------------------------------
-
-Consider, for example the group $\int_{a}^{b} x^{a} db$ of 
-
-\[         \alpha_{\beta}^{\gamma} \]
-
-Unfortunately S5 and MathML are mutually exclusive. 
-See <http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/tech/s5/> for explanations.

data/tests/unittest/bug_def.md

@@ -1,28 +0,0 @@
-Write a comment here
-*** Parameters: ***
-{} # params 
-*** Markdown input: ***
-[test][]:
-
-*** Output of inspect ***
-md_el(:document,[md_par([md_link(["test"],"test"), ":"])],{},[])
-*** Output of to_html ***
-<p><span>test</span>:</p>
-*** Output of to_latex ***
-test:
-*** Output of to_md ***
-test:
-*** Output of to_s ***
-test:
-*** EOF ***
-
-
-
-	OK!
-
-
-
-*** Output of Markdown.pl ***
-(not used anymore)
-*** Output of Markdown.pl (parsed) ***
-(not used anymore)

data/tests/unittest/email.md

@@ -1,32 +0,0 @@
-Write a comment abouth the test here.
-*** Parameters: ***
-{}
-*** Markdown input: ***
-
-
-This is an email address: <andrea@invalid.it>
-	
-*** Output of inspect ***
-md_el(:document,[
-	md_par(["This is an email address: ", md_email("andrea@invalid.it")])
-],{},[])
-*** Output of to_html ***
-<p>This is an email address: <a href='mailto:andrea@invalid.it'>&#097;&#110;&#100;&#114;&#101;&#097;&#064;&#105;&#110;&#118;&#097;&#108;&#105;&#100;&#046;&#105;&#116;</a></p>
-*** Output of to_latex ***
-This is an email address: \href{mailto:andrea@invalid.it}{andrea\char64invalid\char46it}
-*** Output of to_md ***
-This is an email address:
-*** Output of to_s ***
-This is an email address:
-*** EOF ***
-
-
-
-	OK!
-
-
-
-*** Output of Markdown.pl ***
-(not used anymore)
-*** Output of Markdown.pl (parsed) ***
-(not used anymore)