Posted: 2008-09-09 06:27
Two new versions of libquantum have been released. The
1.1.0 development release adds support for exact diagonalization,
while the 1.0.0 stable release contains only bug fixes. Further
information can be found on the libquantum website.
Posted: 2007-09-03 07:13
libquantum 0.9.1 has been released. The new release adds
an interface for time-evolution of arbitrary Hamiltonians using a
fourth-order Runge-Kutta algorithm. The license has been changed to
GPLv3 and several bugs have been fixed. Further information can be
found on the libquantum
website.
Posted: 2007-01-03 12:56
Accessing scientific papers online is great because it spares you the
way to the library. Unfortunately, most journals make their articles
available only to paying subscribers (contrary to Open
Access). So if you want
to read an article at home or while on a conference you have a
problem. This posting shows you how to access it anyway just by
clicking on the download link in a journal. Read more
Posted: 2008-10-22 20:17
I have dropped Mathematica in favor of Maxima some
time ago in order to escape from obscure bugs remaining unfixed and
licensing troubles, and have not regretted it since. Now I just came
across Qinf, which is
a free (as in GPLv2) quantum information suite for Maxima. While the
package is still under development it already contains quite a lot
useful functions like partial traces, entropy calculation, operator
expansion. So if you use Qinf instead of another package relying on
a proprietary CAS, you can prevent your code from being trapped.
Posted: 2010-04-13 18:55
I spent some time playing around with
libquantum, the free quantum
simulation library, and created two musical compositions that
represent the inner workings of a quantum computer. So if you'd like
to know what a quantum computer sounds like, here's your chance!
Read more
Posted: 2008-10-06 18:43
The American Physical Society (APS) is one of the most important
publishers in physics, well-known for its Physical Review
journals, including their flagship Physical Review Letters. Like
most other publishers, APS requires authors to transfer copyright,
meaning you may not use the materials elsewhere without permission
from the APS. This created trouble for some researchers who
wanted to put their research on Wikipedia and other open content
sites because the
APS refused to permit them to do so. Fortunately, the APS has now
changed their
copyright policy, thus resolving the issue.
Read more
Posted: 2009-01-20 18:52
Recently on debian-legal
someone
asked
whether you may freely distribute works created by a US government
entity in other countries than the US. Well, I've asked a guy working
on international copyright law, and unfortunately the answer was
"no". Even though these works do not enjoy copyright protection in
the US, they are still protected in other countries.
Read more
Posted: 2010-02-02 06:33
The guys at Webmasterpro have published a
study
that analyzes the install base of various office packages among German
users. While Microsoft Office comes out top (72%), open source rival
OpenOffice is already installed on 21.5% of all PCs and growing.
Read more
Posted: 2008-07-29 12:02
Over a year after Sun's initial release of OpenJDK as free software,
Debian successfully managed to build a version of
OpenJDK using only
free software. Apparently, the hard part was bootstrapping OpenJDK
with the GNU Java compiler gcj. And it seems they did a very good job,
as there are hardly any drawbacks compared to the proprietary version.
Read more
Posted: 2007-05-29 07:13
Okay, I promise I won't mention every article I write for
OS Reviews on my blog, but here is an exception. I just put up an
article about Nexuiz,
which is definitely the best first-person shooter I've ever
played. And of course it's free as in speech!
Posted: 2011-09-01 03:17
I thought I let you know here that I've recently joined
Diaspora, the privacy-enabled open source social network. I'll
continue using this blog for longer posts, but short notices will
rather go there. My Diaspora handle is hweimer@diasp.org.
Posted: 2008-03-27 08:19
Yesterday, Microsoft and Milan-based Sourcesense
announced
they collaborate to contribute code to Apache
POI, a Java library for manipulating
Microsoft Office files. This collaboration has two possible
consequences: either it will turn POI into the greatest patent laundry
of all time, or it will help Microsoft to launch a patent ambush on
the project. Feel free to decide which one is more likely.
Read more
Posted: 2008-06-24 06:33
Ever wondered why a Word document you received looks garbled when
opening it in OpenOffice.org under GNU/Linux? Most likely, this is not
a bug in OOo's conversion algorithms, but a problem of missing
fonts. Most Word documents use fonts like "Arial" or "Times New
Roman", which are copyrighted by Microsoft. While Microsoft used to
distribute these so-called "core fonts" for non-Windows users, they
no longer do
so. There are
still places where you can get
them legally, but of course this
is not a free-as-in-speech solution. Therefore, these fonts are not
available by default in many GNU/Linux distros.
While the individual glyphs of a font can be copyrighted, their
metrics
(i.e., their spatial dimensions) cannot be, and therefore one can
create a free set of fonts that look different than their proprietary
counterparts, but otherwise behave the same when it comes to things
like linebreaking, hyphenation, etc. Red Hat has done just that, and
some time ago released the Liberation
fonts.
However, due to licensing issues not all major GNU/Linux distros
included the Liberation fonts. But after a long wait and the
persistent work by several people these issues have finally been
settled and the Liberation fonts have been accepted into the
Debian
archive. Other
distros are expected to follow suit soon.
Read more
Posted: 2010-05-05 19:41
Google's Chrome browser has been accepted in
Debian
under the unbranded Chromium name. Currently, it's in the experimental
distribution, but as it does not depend on other stuff from
experimental, installation is not a big problem. Now I can finally get
serious with Web
Sockets programming!
Read more
Posted: 2009-08-13 06:35
When preparing figures for papers or other scientific content I
routinely use PSfrag for
inserting LaTeX commands. Sometimes I would like to edit the result
with Inkscape to add
some fancy stuff, but unfortunately most of the time Inkscape cannot
open the created EPS file. I have written a short guide describing how
to finally get it to work.
Read more
- Copyright 2006--2011 Hendrik Weimer. This document is available under
the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See
the licensing terms for further details.