ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 0.7.5 the "Maia Karolina Lebl (July 27th 2006, 3.2kg)" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

To find out what Genius is, skip a few paragraphs down, or go to
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

As evident by the release name, I'm now a dad.  I have not yet set up a
gallery with the pics we got, but my mom put up some at:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=fq7bkko.1h39wu9w&x=0&y=wxqaxz

A few weeks ago I needed to run some tests for my research and I found
several bugs and memory leaks that made the tests run slow and crash.  So I
fired up valgrind and about a day or two later it ran correctly, not leaking
memory but slowly.  So I optimized a bunch of functions I needed in the
linear algebra section.  I also fixed some confusion in the linear algebra
functions with respect to inner products (HermitianProduct is now the complex
hermitian product and DotProduct is the standard dot product even for complex
numbers, that is, no conjugates).  Once I was at it I added a bunch of other
functions.

In any case, Genius is one of the oldest GNOME projects, it has been the
original GNOME calculator before I got wild ideas about it doing absolutely
everything.  It is programmable has a powerful language and handles many fun
features including matlab like support for matrices.  It requires GNOME2 (at
least glib2 if you don't want a GUI) and a recent enough gmp library.
However you can still use the command line version if you prefer non-gui
interface.

Here are the news in 0.7.5:

* Added functions: CatalanConstant, atan2, NextCombination, CountZeroColumns,
  QRDecomposition, SesquilinearForm, SesquilinearFormFunction
* REMOVED: function GramSchmidtDot, it is now redundant
* SEMANTICS: DotProduct is now the normal (real) DotProduct not the
  hermitian product, places that used DotProduct now use HermitianProduct,
  InnerProduct is now an alias for HermitianProduct
* GramSchmidt now normalizes it's vectors
* GramSchmidt, Projection, VectorAngle have the inner product as optional
  argument now and all take it in the same way
* OuterProduct now actually does outer product
* Port some gel functions to C for speed: StripZeroColumns, IsIn, Intersection,
  SetMinus, HermitianProduct
* Some further small optimizations
* Minor update of the manual
* SYNTAX: entries in a matrix are now evaluated in a logical order rather
  then in the rather odd order they were before.
* MANY fixes to memory management, fixed many leaks and crashes
* In the GNOME version, resizing works like in gnome-terminal now,
  which fixes issues with bleeding edge vte and is probably right anyway
* Update internal MPFR to version 2.2.0 and require at least version 2.2.0
* Other minor fixes
* Translation updates (Francisco Javier F. Serrador, Kjartan Maraas,
  Pawan Chitrakar, Chao-Hsiung Liao, Miloslav Trmac, Adam Weinberger)

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/genius/0.7/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/genius/
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

Note that a recent MPFR is normally included in genius and it is build as a
private static library, so you don't need to install it separately, though
I'd recommend using 2.2.0 and building against it as a shared library.

I no longer run Fedora, but Ubuntu.  So no more RPMS, but you should be able
to build RPMS with rpmbuild -ta <tarball>.  I don't have any DEBs for genius
because I'm lazy I suppose.

Have fun,

George

PS: I have nowdays a yogurt culture degree in math (C.Phil.) so I suppose
that makes a math package written by me a little more credible, though you
should note that most of the design of genius was done when I was still
working on my BA.  Maybe I'll work on genius more once they kick me out with
a PhD.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun
   than you can with a kind word alone.
                       -- Al Capone