William E. Hart's Blog

By necessity, I have become quite adept at digging through webspace with search engines like google to figure out "how to do X". But occasionally, it is difficult to get a sense of whether something is easy from written instructions. For example, I recently tried to install PyQT, a Python interface to the popular QT application interface library, and here's the error that I got when trying to use nmake to build the SIP library (which PyQT uses): C:\Python25\sip-4.7.6\sip-4.7.6\siplib>nmake Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility Version 8.00.50727.762 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. cl -c -nologo -Zm200 -O2 -MD -W0 -DUNICODE -DWIN32 -DQT_LARGEFILE_SUPPORT -I. -IC:\Python25\include -Fo @C:\DOCUME~1\wehart\LOCALS~1\Temp\nm271.tmp NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin\cl.EXE"' : return code '0xc0000135' Stop. I had more than a little difficulty figuring out what the ret

In the past year, I have increasingly been using Python to develop a variety of OR-related scientific software. In particular, the Coopr library has been a major focus of this software development. Recently, I have written a paper that will appear in the proceedings of the INFORMS Computing Society Conference 2009 : W. Hart, Python Optimization Modeling Objects (Pyomo) , Proc. INFORMS Computing Society Conference, 2009, (to appear). In this paper, I describe Pyomo, an open-source tool for modeling optimization applications in Python. A key goal of Pyomo is to provide an open-source math programming modeling capability. Although open-source optimization solvers are widely available in packages like COIN-OR , surprisingly few open-source tools have been developed to model optimization applications. Pyomo has been developed in Python because it is a well-used modern programming language that provides a robust foundation for developing and applying scientific software. In this paper, I

If you are interested in the intersection of operations research and computing, then the INFORMS ICS Meeting will be of interest to you! I am organizing a session on open-source software for operations research. Contact me if you are interested in giving a presentation!

Much of my work involves the development of open-source software. Recently, I have been challenged to justify this in several different projects. I recently stumbled across Dave Wheeler's paper , which provides a nice quantitative analysis of the advantages of open-source software.

I'm going to try using ScribeFire to generate these posts. This seems highly recommended. Also, I can work with it offline, which is a definite plus for me!