Matlab has msgbox, listdlg, textscan, and many other functions that Octave apparently doesn't have. Is there any extra library with functions like this? Or perhaps different-named functions that will show a message dialog, let user select a data file to process, and read in formatted file?
Check out octave forge. It has msgbox, listdlg and other related methods. There are installation instructions on the home page.
If you are using a Debian-based distribution like Ubuntu or Linux Mint, then you can use the functions mentioned (msgbox, listdlg etc.) by installing the precompiled package octave-java.
In general, the Debian project (and, by side-effect, derived distributions) tries to package as many packages as reasonable from Octave-Forge to provide a Free alternative to proprietary packages like Matlab (sometimes, these packages can provide also implementation of functions of some of the parts of extra/paid Matlab toolboxes).
I am sure that other fine, reputable, high profile Linux distributions (like Fedora) also provide many packages from Octave-Forge, as they also have a policy for such packages.
Related
I have Python 3 on OSX Yosemite installed with Brew. I want to make some simple charts (like in Excel). I run Python from bash. Which library should I investigate, and the proper way to have it installed? I am looking for library which is easy to install, and then easy to use. Output probably png files?
matplotlib is a good choice.
How to install it on OS-X is mentioned in the installation FAQ.
Especially in combination with IPython notebooks it gives you a nice interactive environment to play with it.
Another alternative would be gnuplot. Pre-built packages are available.
It is not tied to Python, it is basically a domain specific language for graphing. There are python bindings available, gut it is also not difficult to use it with subprocess.
If you can use commercial libraries, you may also consider ChartDirector.
This is a conceptual question and I hope it fits into Stackoverflow's question and answer style. I wonder what the concept of installing applications is good for. In my naive understanding of operating systems we do not need a registry and to use an application it should be enough to just copy the executable and files onto your drive and launch that.
Am a Windows user but also worked with Linux a bit and noticed that there are package managers instead of installers. But even those do more than just a copy instruction, I guess.
I do not think that all the installers exist only because the common user expects them out of steady habit. So what is the advantage of installers in contrast to developing applications which are designed to run out of a single folder and copy that over?
I would really like if someone could explain that concept.
Installing applications is a way to embed them in the OS. It's a kind of standard, you offer procedures like installing and uninstalling that should have the same functionalities for all applications (even "change" under Windows).
Countless times I've "installed" applications with a single shell script that came with them, and then had troubles removing such programs, having to look for single files. If the programmer uses the standard of the OS to make an executable that can be installed, that won't happen.
You can also easily view a list of the installed programs at any time.
Under Linux, additionally, if we're talking about a package manager, it is convenient for the user to have an easy way to download and install a program by just typing its name.
Last but not least, some applications are required to be installed and recognized by the OS (for example services in Windows).
I enjoy developing in Haskell, but am presently confronted with a challenge. At my place of education, I don't have administrative rights on my account. I want to debug/test while there. I need a way to run Haskell code without installing haskell-platform or ghci or anything else requiring of an administrative level of privilege. For instance, a web site which will run haskell code (abeit limited to not include file access of course) or a java utility (or standalone .app, though java is preferred due to the nature of the "parental controls"), or something else I haven't thought of. Source or compiled Java, Flash, and source code in Ruby or Python are preferred to native code. This is on Mac OS X 10.6, for reference.
You can install GHC without admin privileges, but you'll have to build from source. Check out the Building on MacOS X for more details.
Essentially, like any other open-source project, you can compile code and install it, generally, anywhere on your filesystem like into a folder in your home folder (I often use the ~/.local folder for that purpose).
As the linked page mentions, you can also use MacPorts and install it to any place you can write to. Once MacPorts is installed you can install GHC.
EDIT
As pointed out by Carl in the comments below, you don't need to build from source. Just grab the binary tarball from http://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_7_4_1#binaries.
In addition to all the other ideas, several companies will rent you virtual (cloud) linux servers for a few cents an hour. You have root on those and can install whatever you want, then freeze the image until you need it again.
Normally this might not be advantageous over a local solution if you can make one work, but a possible extra benefit would be that your work can stay on a single "computer" which you could access while sitting in front of any variety of modern PC that might be available to you on a given day.
An alternative not only for Haskell is http://ideone.com/
For the website option, TryHaskell will hardly cut it, it's way to limited.
codepad, OTOH, is more liberal, and should be of more use.
But honestly the bindist option is the best one, clearly!
If you truly can't install anything, then there's
http://tryhaskell.org/ -- like GHCi, but you can't load modules, which means not only that you can't use many standard functions (say, the functions in Data.List), but also that you can't use certain language features (like user-defined algebraic data types).
I also remember a hpaste-style site which executes its code -- and allows you to have private pastes -- but I can't remember it at the moment. Edit: I was thinking of http://codepad.org/ -- thanks #Mog
Try http://hiji.tinyrocket.se/ It is a haskell interpreter written using javascript.
http://ghc.io/ GHC.IO is a version of the Haskell interactive interpreter, ghci, that runs online in a web browser.
You just need to install homebrew, which you can do without root rights if you do so in your home directory. You can then brew install cabal-install
which will automatically install cabal and ghc, or brew install stack to install stack.
There is a web-based interpreter for Haskell at http://tryhaskell.org/. However, it may not provide enough functionality for your requirements.
I would like to create a terminal based installer/wizard.
Ideally, it'd be like the Ubuntu server installer, or the Arch Linux installer - a ncurses (?) heavy GUI with lots of form and arrow key goodness.
Second best would be a simpler question/answer type thing, similar to the "adduser" command prompting for password, username, etc.
I am Ruby biased, and would prefer a scripting language (not C), but I'm open to anything. It will only run on Ubuntu server, if that helps.
What are my options?
I'm not certain what you're asking. If you're looking for an implementation tool, you could look at urwid, which is a Python-based GUI toolkit library. It lets you write programs using GTK-style widgets and event interfaces for a text-based interface. If you're a decent scripter, it shouldn't be too hard to start from there and write the code to drive an installation process.
InstallJammer can do what you want in the second form. No ncurses interface to speak of though. 0-] It's written in Tcl/Tk, so it meets your scripting requirement though obviously not in your language of choice. We all have our language of choice, I suppose. 0-]
It would be easier to answer if you specified what you're trying to do. If you're installing something, it might make sense to just create a debian package and use install time configuration options available via debhelper.
If bash or shell scripting is okay, I'd suggest looking at package "dialog". Just put "dialog" as pre-depends for your package and you can use dialog features for your deb installer.
Another possibility could be the "pdmenu" package (origin: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/pdmenu/).
I've gone through the academic Scheme stuff (read SICP, The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer, TSPL) and been playing with Scheme as a toy for a while.
But I want to get practical.
Today I needed to write a shell script to do some batch file processing, and thought "why not do it in Scheme?". I did, and it was a joy.
Now I'm forced to wonder what the best implementation is for shell script type stuff.
I know all implementations differ in terms of what they implement beyond R5RS. (Basically, they differ in all the useful and practical extensions you'd want in a scripting language).
So I'd like to pick one implementation and stick to it. I'm looking for something that:
Is cross platform (Linux, OS X, Windows).
Has extensions that are useful in day-to-day shell scripting, and those extensions are part of the base install.
Is easy to install. (e.g. there are a number of pre-built binaries, and/or it is a standard package on many distros.)
Is actively developed, with an active community.
Has Unicode support.
I've been using Gambit so far. It seems to satisfy the above constraints. PLT seems like overkill. Wondering about Guile, MIT/GNU, etc.
PLT Scheme meets all of your criteria. Since it looks like you know that already, you should to use the MzScheme package. MzScheme is the runtime on top of which all of PLT is built.
If you were to download the full PLT Scheme install it would seem large as it includes a lot of documentation and an IDE in addition to the runtime.
Have you heard of scsh? I haven't used it, but it sounds a lot like what you want.
I recommend Gauche, which is:
Running on Linux, OS X, Windows w/
Cygwin and some other UNIX-like
platforms,
The base install contains
POSIX-compliant system libraries and
useful modules such as
network protocols, file system,
DBM, multithreading, etc...
Several package system such as MacPorts, apt-get, yum are available
(or just say configure, make and
make install),
There are active English and Japanese mailing list,
Supports UTF-8 as an internal encoding.