ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 1.0.4 the "Luck" release

[Jiri Lebl <jirka 5z com>]

Genius is a general purpose calculator with many advanced capabilities.
To find out more go to:
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

So that paper that references Genius is having trouble finding the right
home.  This also means it's getting really well polished.  In other news, I
have been using Genius for teaching a bit recently.  Hence I've implemented
the slopefield and vectorfield plots.  I've had some trouble getting the
slopefield line lengths right due to some confusion as to screen vs.  logical
units.  The cool thing is that the book I'm using in the class has plots
which have had the same error (the lines being normalized in logical, not
screen, units).  That made me feel not as stupid.

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 support for matrices, rational numbers, and nice 2D and 3D
plotting.  The GUI version requires GNOME2 (at least glib2 if you don't want
a GUI) a recent enough GMP library and the MPFR library.  You can still use
the command line version if you prefer non-gui interface.

Here are the news in 1.0.4:

* Add slope and vector field plotting, with a graphical solver for the
  slope fields.
* For graphing add SlopefieldPlot, VectorfieldPlot, SlopefieldDrawSolution,
  SlopefieldClearSolutions functions, and LinePlotDrawLegends,
  VectorfieldNormalized parameters.
* Add "Draw legends" checkbox to lineplots
* Add "Reset to original zoom" menuitem and add shortcuts for the zoom items
* Add Eigenvectors (only for 2x2 matrices), Parse, Evaluate, AskString functions
* Update the Mersenne prime list
* Clicking and not dragging on the plot now does a reasonable zoom-in
* Create plot window usable on my netbook
* Fix the compare functions and hence for loops starting at numbers less
  than 0.
* Fix the line plot scales
* Fix bug labeling line plot functions and several other minor bugs
  in the graphing code.
* Handle system errors (such as "out of file descriptors") more gracefully
* Minor other fixes and cleanup
* Translation updates (Hendrik Richter, Jesse Aviles, Djihed Afifi, Leonardo
  Ferreira Fontenelle, Fábio Nogueira, Koos, Jonh Wendell, Carlos Eduardo
  Santos, Jorge Gonzalez, Daniel Nylander, et moi)

http://download.gnome.org/sources/genius/1.0/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/genius/
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

Genius is in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, GARNOME and probably other distribution
repositories, so check those.  Usually you wan to install two packages:
genius and gnome-genius (perhaps also gnome-common on some distros).  Of
course it will be a little bit before this version hits those servers ...

Have fun,

Jiri

--
George <jirka 5z com>
   There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that
   which should not be done at all.
                       -- Peter Drucker