ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 0.7.7 the "Yay! I got job(s)!" 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

Well, here is one of the now sort of twice yearly release cycles of genius.
Basically whenever I need to do something and genius doesn't do it, I have to
implement it.  Apart from some UI improvements (for example "show full
answer" menu item which is absolutely needed if you get large matrices as
results), the biggest new thing I suppose is the fact that I've implemented
the cubic and quartic formulas correctly.  As a result we can of course now
compute eigenvalues for matrices up to 4x4, yay!

As for the release title, I have 2 job offers now.  I just have to decide
what kind of weather I like: central Illinois deep freeze cold (UIUC) or
deadly Texas head (Texas A&M).

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 0.7.7:

* Add IsPositiveDefinite, IsPositiveSemidefinite, QuarticFormula
* SEMANTICS: QuadraticFormula, CubicFormula, Eigenvalues, and DiagonalOf
  now consistently return a column vector
* Fix CubicFormula for complex coefficients and better handle real roots,
  and use QuarticFormula in PolynomialRoots
* Eigenvalues now computes eigenvalues for 3x3 and 4x4 matrices
* Add undo/redo capability
* CHANGE: It's RayleighQuotient not RaleighQuotient
* "Show Full Answer" menu item to show the full answer in a
  scrollable text window
* "Next/Previous Tab" menu items and accelerators, also
  Programs menu now always displayed and has a "Console"
  menuitem too.
* Mixed fractions can now be set in the preference box
* The preference box has options for remembering (or forgetting)
  the output/precision settings.  Normally these settings are probably
  temporary and hence we don't want to remember them always.
* Preference box has "Help" button
* When graphing a surface when we encounter complex value or other errors,
  don't assume 0, but just don't graph anything at that point.
* Cosmetic changes to UI
* Documentation updates
* Fix plugin reading
* Portability fixes
* Translation updates (Pema Geyleg, David Lodge, Francisco Javier F. Serrador,
  Djihed Afifi, Pawan Chitrakar, et moi)

http://download.gnome.org/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>.  Genius is now in the Ubuntu
repositories and hence this version should appear there at some point.

Have fun,

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior
   to all others because you were born in it.
                       -- George Bernard Shaw