What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Hi all. I am asking this open-ended question (bottom of this post) because I am considering making contributions to an open-source project that would directly benefit me and other users.

Some background:

I have worked with an engineering simulation software called Ansys MAPDL basically everyday for the last 4 years, in both an academic and a professional capacity. It's not necessarily relevant whether you are familiar to that program to participate in this discussion. The relevant thing is that the GUI for MAPDL is written in Tcl/Tk and I don’t imagine it is going to be modernized (because of more modern, but distinctly different, replacements). This is a screenshot of the GUI for reference.

Why do people put up with such an old interface?

The power of the program is not its GUI, but the scripting language that can be run to setup and solve simulations. The program name is really the scripting language name, Ansys Parametric Design Language (APDL). It's somewhat like Matlab. The program also offers an enormous amount of control when compared to the more modern GUI that's been released, since the modern GUI holds a totally different philosophy.

The older GUI is really helpful in certain circumstances because it will spit out a file containing commands that were used in the session. This is a great demonstration of how to run a command or use a setting/config command, but a lot of newer features are buried in the documentation and aren't available in the older GUI.

My coding experience

I know the MAPDL language very intimately, but my experience beyond it is limited to some Perl scripting, and a bit of Python exposure.

Motivation

Open-Source Ansys API

Recently, Ansys started supporting an open-source Python project called PyAnsys. MAPDL is otherwise fully closed source, and this is really the only public-facing API. PyAnsys has basically converted a lot of MAPDL script commands to a pythonic format, hence Python can now be used to interact with MAPDL. This is great for several reasons, but is limited regarding interactivity. Interacting with MAPDL via Python is basically happening in a fancy console via Jupyter notebook or IDE like Spyder. Certain commands will bring up Python-based graphics displays of solid models and results plots, but there isn't a dedicated GUI open all the time.

The Question(s)

My question is whether it is feasible to write a frontend GUI to a bunch of python commands. If you were going to do it, how would you do it? What might you write it with? Would you even do it? Is this a stupid endeavor?

I won't give a preamble for this one like I normally do in my ask topics, as I don't want to prime anyone's responses. Feel free to interpret the question however you like, and answer with whatever you feel is relevant.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Following the London E-Prix I thought I'd share some ideas I've had on how Formula E might be able to improve generally. Of course they'll never see this, but that's not the point right?

Live Broadcast

• The timing tower needs some improvement, mostly with adding team colours or logos to help differentiate them at a glance. This is definitely needed to better understand what's happening, especially with a 24-car grid.
• In group qualifying, the live lap timing appears seemingly in whichever order the director selects the drivers in. It would be better to order them showing whoever started their lap first, first.
• The broadcast, both this weekend and previously, has lacked a little polish. I know they're operating on a smaller budget than other world championship motorsports but fixing the audio and team radio issues, and not cutting away from an overtake that's about to happen, are a minimum in my opinion.
• They might do well to showcase the car development a little more. It's not a spec series but you'd be forgiven for thinking it is given how little they mention it - given road relevancy is a key focus of the sport I don't see why they don't focus on development of the powertrains every so often and how that is being carried over to road cars.

Racing

• More consistent penalties would help the sport's reputation a little. At the moment this is an easy way for people who don't watch the sport to criticise it - rightfully, as similar incidents are given very different penalties that seem to have no relevance to the incident itself.
• I think most locations should host double headers. Firstly, why spend all the effort building the track and paddock for a single 45 minute race? Secondly, it's more compelling to say a driver is looking to reverse a poor result "tomorrow" rather than "in three weeks".
• The championship should start and end in the same year. Having to say "2020-21 season" is more wordy than simply "2021 season" and the reason we need to use terms like "season 7" instead.
• I hope they keep group qualifying! The drivers love to complain but it keeps the championship close without artificial reverse-grids, and the title still goes to the team and driver who best maximised the situations they found themselves in.
• FanBoost is difficult - I don't take part in it, but don't hate it either. I like how there's still some skill involved - it's not a guaranteed overtake button, and sometimes the driver fails to get past. I do think it would benefit from preventing drivers repeatedly getting FanBoost, giving others a chance. Perhaps if a driver wins it twice in a row, take them out of voting for one or two races?

Others

• Better communication, especially with ticket sales. Right now it's not a given that an event will be able to host spectators, but they could have announced either way a bit earlier to give fans a chance to make or cancel plans to attend.
• A way to watch historical races would be a benefit! There doesn't seem to be a universal way right now like there is with F1TV & was with Formula E races on their YouTube channel. For some reason, probably broadcasting rights, they took them down - I think it would be beneficial to put them back as it's an easy way for a fan to share a good race with someone else.

What do you think?