ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 0.6.0 the "plot plot plot plot plot" 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

So it happens that I had a weeks vacation from school and since GNOME is
in a boring freeze and Genius is never in freeze I worked on genius for
a week.  So there's quite a bit of new stuff to play with.  Most visible
are some interface additions.  There is a plot dialog where you can enter
functions/expressions to plot which is a lot more convenient then the command
line for this.  Further the plotting has been greatly improved and we now
do stuff like actually print the scale, allow zooming using mouse and
"Fit Y scale" and such.

You non-GNOME, command line kind of people will also be happy that you
can now compile genius without GNOME (you still need glib2 though).  You will
then get only the command line version of genius (which doesn't of course
do plotting and doesn't have any GUI at all).

Further there was some optimization/simplification in the MP wrapping code
and now I get a speedup of up to 40% on some tests I ran (on some tests there
is little or no difference, and I didn't notice anything that would go
slower).

Also we use the new file selector from GTK 2.4 if you have GTK 2.4 installed
when you compile genius, on the other hand genius should still compile with
older gtk/gnome as well (at least version 2.0).

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.

There is still a lot of work required to make this all nice, mostly it needs
to have the function library improved and verified to be correct and
documentation needs to be written (the complete help system is not yet in
place).  Feel free to help out :)

Here are the news in 0.6.0:

* Zooming/Fitting support on the line plots
* Line plots can now be invoked from a GUI
* Scale is printed on line plots
* In case GTK+ 2.4 is used, use the new file chooser dialog, but still
  compile with older gtk
* Some fixes in case GTK+ 2.4 is used
* Allow compilation without GNOME to get the barebones command line
  version
* SYNTAX: Allow some arithmetic operations on functions, as well as passing
  functions to a few select 1 argument functions such as exp or ln, for
  example: exp(sin) returns a function which does exp(sin(x)) and
  sin^2 returns a function that does sin(x)^2
* SYNTAX: New operator := which acts just like = but is never translated
  to ==
* SYNTAX: e^x now translated to exp(x) for better precision (and should be
  teeny bit faster too)
* Optimize/cleanup the mp wrapper code which on my tests can gain something
  like 40% improvement on code that does lots of handling of smaller integers.
* Add PoissonKernel, DirichletKernel, FejerKernel, MoebiusDiskMapping,
  MoebiusMapping, MoebiusMappingInftyToOne, MoebiusMappingInftyToZero
  and MoebiusMappingInftyToInfty
* Add rotation matrices (2D and 3D euclidean space)
* Fix compilation of parameters
* Fix interruption with ^C
* Lots of other minor fixes
* Documentation updates
* Translation updates (Kostas Papadimas, Petrow Velonis, Vincent van Adrighem,
  Tino Meinen, Danilo Segan, Miloslav Trmac, Robert Sedak, Alastair McKinstry,
  Guntupalli Karunakar, Christophe Merlet, Sebastien Bacher)

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/genius/0.6/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/genius/
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html
(the gnome.org site may not have the new version for a bit until I can
 get in there since I had to change a password and all that)

Note that making RPMS should be simple with rpmbuild -ta <tarball>, you
should also get the updated GMP RPM which has MPFR enabled since that's
a lot better then internal FP routines of genius.  RPM for that is on
the 5z site.  Apparently Fedora might have MFRP at some point enabled in
GMP.

Note that the RPM at the 5z site is built without GtkSourceView and so
there is no syntax highlighting and other such good stuff.  If you install
GtkSourceView then rebuild the RPM and you'll get much nicer editting
capability.

Have fun,

George

PS: This announcement is not silly at all.  I don't know why but Genius
announcements tend to be unsilly.  Mostly I'm too lazy right now (don't have
the time, but being lazy is a better excuse) to make something silly up.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
                       -- Albert Einstein