Monday, 25 May 2015

Life Days

Well my Postachio blog ended abruptly when the creator decided to monetize it. No free option was available. It was pay up or you'll lose access to it. Bastard, let's hope he ends up bankrupt. The original Evernote posts are still there however, so nothing was lost. I continued posting to Evernote but only on prime days as before. Lately however, I've begun making use of Twitter on a daily basis and that is working out well. I've not been posting to Evernote at all since it seems somewhat redundant but I should make a special effort to do so on prime days when there can be quite a lot of information about the number and it is impossible to fit into a tweet.

The daily exercise of tweeting about the number of days I've been alive adds fresh mathematical insights from time to time. The most important recently was day 24156 when I learned that numbers of the form 4^a*(8b+7) where a and b are integers cannot be written as the sum of three squares. This is known as the Legendre three square theorem. In the case of 24156, a=1 and b=754. Of course, some numbers can be written as the sum of two squares and all numbers can be written as the sum of four squares.

Technology-wise, I've just written my first Java program on OS X using the JDK (Java Development Kit) and NetBeans IDE. Here is the link to the web page that I used. I also learned how to create an encrypted disk image (dmg) file using Disk Utility. A little earlier I installed Mahara, an e-portfolio system, on my laptop using Bitnami that sets up the server and database for you in the same way that MAMP does for Moodle. Here is the Bitnami link.