Notes on the OEIS, Feb 14 2006

[N. J. A. Sloane]

Notes on the OEIS, Feb 14 2006

1. Just returned from Belgium, where it was a pleasure to meet some seqfans
that I only knew from email (Eric, Alexandre, Wouter, Gunnar, ...).

There were 6000 new emails waiting
so it will take me a while to get caught up.

1a.  One of the things that we talked about in Belgium
was that it would be nice to have a button that will produce a plot (or graph) 
of the sequence, and another to enable you to listen to the sequence
(maybe as a midi file obtained by reading
the sequence mod 12 and converting the numbers to tones).

So I have a question: what would be the best way to produce a gif (or png)
plot from a sequence?  Gnuplot?  

And what would be the best way to make a midi file?
Do any seqfans have experience with doing this sort of thing?


2. Russ Cox has noticed that Google now knows about all
the sequences, and this has a very nice consequence:

In your browser, you can just type A00720 into the URL window
(not the Google window, which of course also works,
but into the TOP window on your browser)
and it will pull up that sequence, usually.

3.  Last week there was a disk crash on the public machine
(the one that is to be replaced at the end of February).
They replaced the file system with a backup copy from May 2005!

This was corrected later, but it meant the numbers from the 
dispenser got messed up. And everything else!

There were more problems today, but right now things seem to be
working OK.

4. Also there are currently two A-number dispensers. DON'T use the one
on the machine called "public"!

Also some people have exceeded their quota of A-numbers,
and at least one person has submitted two different sequences with the
same A-number, several times.

5. ****  As a result of all this, I had to renumber quite a few     *********
*******  pre-numbered sequences that were submitted in the past 2 weeks. ****

6.  Also, as part of the restructuring of the OEIS files, I have
had to rename some of the associated files that are mentioned
in OEIS entries. 

7.  Several new people have joined the 100K party.  See 
http://www.rersearch.att.com/~njas/sequences/100k.html
and go to the last page.

Neil