ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 1.0.5 the "One off" 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

It turns out that EulersMethod had a one off error which made the thing not
work (it returned y(x1+h) not y(x1), DUH!).  I actually found this out while
teaching, I did a calculation using genius and then when I did the
calculation on the board I got a different answer.  I think I was more
confused than the students at that point though, so it's ok.  Not only this,
but the documentation id tag was off so "help EulersMethod" didn't take you
to the right thing.  It's funny how errors can pile up.

While I was there I noticed that EulersMethod and RungeKutta could just as
well accept vectors for y and solve systems, so I made it do that.  The code
is the same, we just relax argument checking!

Simon Munton also found a buffer overrun (also kind of a one-off, since it
was 1 byte overrun).  Getting into the mood of memory fixes and found a few
memory leaks as well.  Since the overrun can be serious (lead to crashes on
library compile), here's a new release.

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 1.0.5:

* Fix buffer overrun in print (Simon Munton)
* Fix EulersMethod (and also fix it's documentation)
* EulersMethod and RungeKutta now solve systems by accepting vectors
* Fix several memory leaks
* Translation update (Jorge Gonzalez, Javier F. Serrador)

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>
   Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who.
                       -- Monty Python