Wednesday, March 31, 2010

KIle -an integrated Latex environment

Kile is an integrated Latex environment software with the following features(from
its Kile homepage

  • Compile, convert and view your document with one click.
  • Auto-completion of (La)TeX commands
  • Templates and wizards make starting a new document very little work.
  • Easy insertion of many standard tags and symbols and the option to define (an arbitrary number of) user defined tags.
  • Inverse and forward search: click in the DVI viewer and jump to the corresponding LaTeX line in the editor, or jump from the editor to the corresponding page in the viewer.
  • Finding chapter or sections is very easy, Kile constructs a list of all the chapter etc. in your document. You can use the list to jump to the corresponding section.
  • Collect documents that belong together into a project.
  • Easy insertion of citations and references when using projects.
  • Flexible and smart build system to compile your LaTeX documents.
  • QuickPreview, preview a selected part of your document.
  • Easy access to various help sources.
  • Advanced editing commands.
Although Kile is a KDE application, you can still install it in Ubuntu Koala using the standard
sudo apt-get install kile
command in the command line. The aptitude system will pull in a lot of KDE support softwares even if you are more comfortable with the GNOME Desktop. At this writing, the version I have is 2.0.83 in KDE 4.3.2, while the latest unstable version is already at 2.1 Beta 3. Kile is easy to use but you need to know some rudiments of Knuth's Latex typesetting setting system of denoting mathematical equations. As a simple example, let us write the following in kile: The kinetic energy of a body with mass m and speed v is given by (1/2) mv^2. Now run Kile and start with a new article. Automatically, Kile will give you a blank built in article template like this:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

%opening
\title{}
\author{}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\begin{abstract}

\end{abstract}

\section{}

\end{document}




Now edit the above so it will be shown as
 
\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

%opening
\title{Kinetic Energy of a moving body}
\author{Ali Baba}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\begin{abstract}
Example Latex article example
\end{abstract}

\section{Definition}
The kinetic energy of a body with mass $m$ and speed $v$ is given by $\frac{1}{2}m\cdot v^2$.

\end{document}

Save the file to myfirst.tex and then click on Quickbuild icon. If everything is allright, Kile will call support programs to generate a pdf file myfirst.pdf. Here is an image of the output.


If you get this far, congratulations!  There is still so much to discuss but we stop here at this moment. We only illustrate that KIle is an easy to use free-software to generate professional looking typeset documents.


To be continued... Chip in your comments so the post will be more useful to you.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Stellarium- a complement to Kstars

Let me tell you that my previous experience with Stellarium did not go well three years or more ago. It repeatedly crashed and I got some negative feelings over the software.

But today Stellarium redeemed itself. I was presented with a picture of a pasture in Paris and moving the mouse gave me fantastic various viewing transformations including fisheye view pleasures.

Stellarium will complement Kstars. Thankfully my harddisk (120 Gbytes) is large enough to accommodate the two or I have to pick up Kstars based only on familiarity.

When I wanted to visit Mars, I was presented with a Spirit panoramic view of Gusev crater collated from a lot of pictures.


I thank the developers of Stellarium for finally making Stellarium work flawlessly this time on the latest Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala OS.

Till then, we have to write more posts on both Stellarium and Kstars.

Kalzium- a periodic table of elements viewer

Kalzium is a free software available for Linux systems for viewing properties of the elements and for exploring the periodic table. Properties of the elements can be viewed at a glance either individually or grouped. The information on isotopes are also included and wikipedia articles are referenced. Here is a snapshot.




Click on the image for a fuller view. Kalzium is a KDE application. You should install the Kalzium helpfiles (Kalzium handbook) so as to maximize benefits in using the program. Kalzium also include a free chemical equation balancer! Clever people. Kalzium can be obtained from
http://www.kde.org/kalzium if it is not available as a package for your OS. My version of Kalzium is at 2.2.98.

So dont feel bad using Linux in the scientific computing arena. You have lots of free softwares to help you and it is our job current and future to help you maximize the use of these powerful and FREE softwares.Stay tuned for more articles on Kalzium

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Maxima, the free computer algebra system

Maxima was inspired by the first successful computer algebra system, Macsyma developed at MIT. It is able to perform symbolic integration, differentiation, expansions, and simplifications of expressions.

There are several available interfaces for maxima. The basic program can be run from the command line. But a better way to use Maxima is via wxMaxima and xMaxima. Between the two, I gravitate towards wxMaxima. Here are some capabilities of Maxima.

Here are some simple outputs from Maxima just to get started.

(%i1) diff(x^3, x);
(%o1) 3*x^2
(%i2) expand((x+y)^3);
(%o2) y^3+3*x*y^2+3*x^2*y+x^3
(%i3) integrate(x^3,x);
(%o3) x^4/4
(%i4) factor(x^2 + 2 *x + 1);
(%o4) (x+1)^2
(%i5) 15!
(%o5) 1307674368000

In the above example, after entering ; we press shift enter, not just the enter key to see the results. The outputs are actually pretty printed.

We will add more entries to using Maxima in the future! Stay tuned.

Wolframalpha computational server -secret weapon of smart students

No, wolframalpha is not a free software but rather a currently free computational server (knowledge engine) from the people who developed and sell Mathematica, a powerful symbolic mathematical software.

When my high school graduating niece wanted to factor some polynomial expressions, I simply told her to fire up her browser and visit http://www.wolframalpha.com and type say ( I have forgotten here original expression) x^3 - y^3. Here are snapshots of parts of the screen output of the comptuational service.



















Doubtless, she may not understand what a contour map is at the moment, but the factoring of x^3 -y^3 is part of the output of the server. Integrals and derivatives are even shown!

Now that Wolframalpha is now better known since it was chosen as the best of What's new for 2009 by Popular Science, smart students now have a semiautomated servant in the Internet to help them in their homework.
Wolframalpha will benefit students and their teachers in the college calculus programs. It can display the steps to some of the results, and the fine resolution graphs is more than ice candy. Wolfram alpha deserves more use.

Note: Our Python computational server is idle at the moment. It differs from Wolframalpha in that the latter is very general in scope from stock market questions, to historical significance of dates and has a nice formatted series of outputs.

So you know now one of our secret weapons. Narrow focused "free" solvers say for calculus include wxMaxima and Axiom to name just two.

Enjoy exploring the capabilities of Wolframalpha. Our concern is whether it will continue to be free in the far future.

There is no need to buy an expensive TI-89 or HP 50G unless the instructor absolutely require them. The problem is that in the PHilippines , Internet access is only enjoyed by so few especially in urban areas. Perhaps cell phones, and USB broadband devices can help accelerate the Internet access of the general population. And they will discover a host of currently free, awesome services like wolframalpha.

Is Kstars the best free desktop planetarium?

Kstars is easily installed if your Linux OS is debian based like my Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10. Use synaptic package manager or simply issue from the command line sudo apt-get install kstars and Ubuntu will do all the worrying to completely install the package.
It is a KDE package and if you started with GNOME only, the install might take more than an hour just to install the KDE dependencies. It can interface and control telescopes! and knows the longitude and latitude of most places.




Kstars can display more than a 126,000 stars, 13,0000 deep sky objects, the 88 constellations,
all planets,the Sun , the Moon ,thousand of comets and asteroids and the Milky Way.
At version 1.5.4, Kstars have vastly improved and it is so full of features that we have a problem of presenting a short introduction. We'd rather that the reader install Kstars and not rush doing everything. Instead take time to enjoy the accessiblity of a simulated universe under one's fingertips.

Here is a pic from Kstars. We will write additional blogs on Kstart in the future. We wrote this piece to encourage the reader to install the software.




Want to know where the planets are at now? Just enter the name in the Find utility and Kstars will position the displayed celestial map with the object at the center!

Kstars have evolved and may be useful even to serious astronomy amateurs and professionals alike. Nothing give us satisfaction than a free high quality software that is quite so useful in introducing astronomy to Filipino students.


Stay tuned!

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Euler a compact computational software.

Euler is a computational software with a GUI for real and complex numbers and
matrices and is capable of interval arithmetic. It can visualize
functions in two and three dimensions.

Euler is quite compact and compares favorably in speed with other free
softwares in its class like Octave and Scipy.


The current version installed in my Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is at 1.61.0.
If you have a different version of Linux, it may be available as a package
or if you prefer to install from sources, is available at
http://euler.sourceforge.net.

When you invoke Euler from Applications/Science you wil be greeted with the
following screen which allows you enter commands.





Euler as a calculator
If you type an expression Euler will echo the computed answer unless you end the
expression with a semicolon.

For example, typing sin(pi) ended with the Enter key will print the answer 1. However,
sin(pi); will just be silent.


To be continued.