Steffen's Tech Blog

Recently, I spent some time to search for free, open-source alternatives for commercial mathematics programs such as Matlab and Mathcad. By far the most promising software I have found was Sage. Sage combines the power of many (currently 71) existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface. It can be used to explore mathematical constructions in algebra, geometry, number theory, calculus, numerical computation, etc. The combination of proven open-source packages (including excellent Python packages such as Numpy, Matlibplot, Scipy and Sympy) and an excellent web browser based entry of formulas and plots in worksheets called notebooks. The usage of Python as the glue that holds all packages together provides several advantages. First you have the full power of python available in Sage. Second, you don't need to learn another specialized script language that you would otherwise not need. Excellent screencasts together with good tutorials and documentation pages p...

After reading the following article about the status of the GNOME project http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-decadence I decided to check out the KDE 4 desktop by installing the "kubuntu-kde4-desktop" package (via Adept or apt-get) and I have to admit: I really like the new KDE 4 desktop. A lot of improvements have been made compared with its predecessor. I especially like the new version of the image viewer Gwenview and Okular, KDE4's document viewer. Check out http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/applications.php for more details. Unfortunately, the KDE 4 desktop seem not to be stable enough for production use. At least I experienced some crashes that required reboot via " R aising E lephants I s S o U tterly B oring" . In addition, I missed some functionality. Therefore I can't recommend switching to KDE4 right now. But I decided to give it another try as soon as KDE4.1 is available from the Ubuntu repositories in the hope that ...

Today I decided to switch to the newest version of the ATI driver flgrx (version 8.6) instead of the restricted driver that comes with the ubuntu 8.04 distribution. I followed the excellent description on http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Hardy_Installation_Guide . Everything worked fine. I could enable "Extra Visual Effects" without having problems with the video drivers e.g. in Miro (after I changed from xine to gstreamer).