Yearly Archives: 2008

MinGW (3.4.5) binaries of GNU Scientific Library 1.11 for use with MinGW and Visual C

Research, Windows, , ,

The binaries for GSL 1.12 are provided in this post: MinGW (3.4.5) binaries of GNU Scientific Library 1.12 for use with MinGW and Visual C++

“The GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is a numerical library for C and C++ programmers. The library provides a wide range of mathematical routines such as random number generators, special functions and least-squares fitting. There are over 1000 functions in total with an extensive test suite”.

GSL is quite Unix centric but one might want to use the library at least with MinGW on Windows. I didn’t find any MinGW binaries of GSL apart from the one provided by the Ascend package or the binaries from GNUWin32 (which is only at version 1.8), but I don’t like graphical installers for libraries and I needed the static library. Therefore I compiled my own library with MSYS (I updated MSYS according to this link) and provide here the tarred binary package, which can also be used with the MinGW compiler without MSYS and with Visual C (import libraries for the shared library are provided).

Continue reading MinGW (3.4.5) binaries of GNU Scientific Library 1.11 for use with MinGW and Visual C →

Instructions on how to create DevPak packages

Miscellaneous debris

I’m in the process of writing a DevPak for the libharu libary. These are actually tar.bz2 packages of whatever you think is a good idea to install into the Dev-C++, Code::Blocks or wxDev-C++ IDEs. E.g. precompiled libraries and necessary header files. In addition one adds a so called DevPackage file, which tells the IDEs where to put all the files. Since you are also allowed to install files into the windows directory, these packages are also quite dangerous – you should check the package content first (rename xxx.DevPak to xxx.tar.bz2). The DevPackage file format is more or less straight forward, but first I couldn’t find a documentation for that. In the cvs repository of Dev-C++ there was actually a documentation (File Format.txt), but it contained some errors. So I updated the file and make it available in this post. Continue reading Instructions on how to create DevPak packages →

Use Mercurial for easy local revision backup

Miscellaneous debris

I regularly make backups of all my data, it’s also synchronized on several computers and hard disks. But since I backup only once a week, I don’t really have several revisions from files available between the backups. This is espacially necessary if you work on some code of a small project, which is not revisioned via svn or cvs – and you don’t want to or have no access to svn. Also you don’t want to set up a local svn or cvs repository. You could use Time Machine on Mac OS X and there are some other tools available on Windows, like FileHamster. But FileHamster wasn’t always trouble free and by coincidence I found another solution which is rather appealing: Mercurial.

The nice thing about Mercurial is, that it is a fast, distributed, lightweight Source Control Management system – you don’t need a server for it. The revisions are save to the local .hg folder. In this post I just explain some basics to get started (on Windows – but apart from the installation process, it’s the same for Mac OS X and Linux).

Continue reading Use Mercurial for easy local revision backup →

MinGW binaries of NetCDF 3.6.2

Research, , ,

“netCDF (network Common Data Form) is a set of software libraries and machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data”. On its homepage you’ll find a lot of precompiled libraries for Unix derivates but only a binary of netCDF 3.6.1 compiled with Visual C++. It’s possible to use this binary in MinGW also, but I prefer to use libraries compiled with the same compiler toolkit I’m working with. Continue reading MinGW binaries of NetCDF 3.6.2 →

Create a movie file from single image files (png, jpegs)

Linux, Research, ,

In research sometimes you want to make a movie from single images, like plots from experimental data or from calculation to visualize changes or so on. In order to achieve this you can use ffmpeg. First you have to create the images and save them, where the images need to have a continuous number in the filename, e.g. img0001.png, img0002.png, …, …img5467.png. Take care that there is no image missing and that you have enough zeroes in front of the image number, so that the files are in the correct order. Continue reading Create a movie file from single image files (png, jpegs) →

Changing the php file upload limit in Ubuntu Linux

Linux, MacOSX

If you have your own Ubuntu server running you may encounter the maximal file size upload limit in php scripts which is set to 2Mb as default. In order to change that we first have a look what the size actually is. In /var/www (standard www directory) create a file called info.php with the following content:

<?php
// Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL
phpinfo();
?>

Continue reading Changing the php file upload limit in Ubuntu Linux →

Mounting directory from Mac OS X host in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon guest in VirtualBox

Linux, MacOSX

There is a new beta version of VirtualBox for Mac OS X available and installing Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon worked like a charm (in opposition to Parallels). The only problem I encountered was, that it was not possible to mount a directory from the Mac OS X host in the guest system with either the internal mechanism (Folder sharing) and just directly via samba. In the latter case I could mount the host directory and could view it once, but than the mount was always busy and I had no access anymore. But I found another solution: sshfs. Here is a short introduction how to do that:

Continue reading Mounting directory from Mac OS X host in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon guest in VirtualBox →

Install gnuplot on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

Linux

I again have updated these instructions for Gnuplot 4.4.0 RC1 and newer Ubuntu versions. Find them in this post.

Some months ago I wrote a small Howto about installing Gnuplot on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn with readline, pdf and wxWidgets terminal support. It turned out, that this howto was of interest for many people, since this blog post was the most visited until Gutsy Gibbon came out – and the readline problem was obviously solved, since it works now if you install the standard Gnuplot package. Still the pdf and wxWidgets terminal are not compiled in by default, therefore I wrote a new (shorter) howto about including this terminals.

So here are the instructions: Continue reading Install gnuplot on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon →