One of the new features in Mathematica 7.0 is allowing the sending of email directly from any Mathematica program. It turns out very convenient for the certain situation. We have some computation tasks take long time to finish, so we let it run on the server. The problem is that once a while I have to ssh to the server to check the outputs to make sure nothing wrong with the computation. Now with the email function, I can get the update immediately for each computation step. This is really helpful, especially now days you can check the email almost everywhere.
If you don’t need to check the detail, sending the update through the twitter is probably more cool.
One thing I am not sure is that how to catch the error. If there is an error raised during the computation, the math kernel can automatically send out the email with the error message, this function will be perfect.
By the way, this week I am working on an algorithm related with the Traveling Salesman Problem. If you check TSP on MathWolrd, download the notebook, you will notice it is created by a newer version of Mathematica. Open the file with any text editor, you will see:
(* CreatedBy='Mathematica 8.0' *).