James Spencer
James is a third year PhD student working with Ali Alavi. He's probably hacking something...
For a (useable) command line calculator (and much, much more):
alias calc="python -Qnew -ic 'from math import *'"
A better way to do this is use ipython and change your profile.
Python documentation locally:
pydoc -p 1774 &
and then go to http://localhost:1774. Google gets less traffic these days...
Without source code management life would be rather unpleasant: SVN Page.
Code testing
I have written a package (two actually: this is the second generation) that runs a set of test calculations and compares it to previous results. More details: testcode.
Every night the Alavi group code is downloaded from the trunk of the repository, compiled and tested, with any errors sent out via email. This enables us to keep on top of any bugs that have been accidentally committed (accidental as all code is tested before it's committed to the trunk, of course!).