Tex Live For reasons unknown, a TeX Live package is not available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Centos 5 from the major repositories (EPEL or DAG). I consider this to be a glaring omission, since TeXLive is a great improvement upon teTeX. Since I don’t have time right now to package it myself, I installed TeX […]
TeXLive and Asymptote on CentOS 5 Read More »
This post describes how to get GNU Octave up and running on a CentOS 5 Linux system for use in reading, processing, and writing video files. You will need to use the EPEL and DAG/rpmforge repositories, but I won’t explain how to do that here. NOTE: I had to go through some trial and error
How to install Octave video tools on CentOS 5 Read More »
EDIT: added –enable-shared to configure script for building Python, and added /home/yourname/lib to shared library path. This is necessary for building some packages such as pycairo (which you may need to build pygtk and matplotlib). EDIT 2: you should use the –prefix=/home/yourusername instead of –user. The prefix option places packages in the standard location: /home/yourusername/lib/python2.7/site-packages.
How to build ScipPy with Python 2.7.2 on CentOS5 Read More »
Fortran would not be my first choice for working with text, in any form! However, sometimes even numerical codes need to read data from configuration files. The easiest way to read a configuration file from a Fortran 90 routine is by using namelist I/O (I really need to add an example of that). If you’re
Parsing INI configuration files with FORTRAN Read More »
Sometimes, the frame around a matplotlib plot can detract from the information you are trying to convey. How do you remove the frame, ticks, or axes from a matplotlib plot? Some books you may find useful when working with matplotlib: The full example is available on github.
Removing an axis or both axes from a matplotlib plot Read More »
Git is an amazing tool…but what is the best way to use it? Like any tool that gives you great power and flexibility, it’s up to you to use the tool in the best way to suit your purpose. A friend of mine who manages an enterprise-class software development team recommended the git branching strategy
A git branching strategy suitable for large projects Read More »
The easiest way to run Sage on Windows is with a virtual machine. Sage is a collection of tools that were primarily developed for UNIX-based operating systems (such as Solaris or Mac OS X) or UNIX-like operating systems (BSD, Linux, etc). Since a standard Windows installation lacks many of the features provided by a UNIX-like
Running Sage on Windows with VirtualBox Read More »
Microsoft Word isn’t the best software for technical writing, but sometimes we have to use it. Here is the best way I’ve found to emulate the automatic equation numbering that LaTeX has been doing for years: Insert an equation (old-style) Use the Object button on the Insert tab to bring up the dialog box. Choose
Numbering equations in Word 2007 Read More »
Get the code for this example The zip function in Python accepts a number of sequences (such as lists or arrays) and returns a list of tuples. The first element of each tuple comes from the first sequence, the second from the second sequence, and so on. For example: [(0, 5, 10), (1, 6, 11),
Python: lists to tuples and tuples to lists Read More »
I’m almost finished with a round of updates to the infrastructure of this site. I upgraded WordPress and changed my hosting from a friend’s virtual server to Linux hosting with GoDaddy.com. The price is right and so far the service has been great. I’ve used GoDaddy for domain name registration for many years. [ad#GoDaddy Hosting]
Blog infrastructure updated Read More »