indywikia – explore Wikipedia visually -

indywikia is a great tool to browse through Wikipedia. But instead of reading through a plenthora of text one can discover Wikipedia visually. Its easy to integrate it in a GNU/Linux KDE desktop. Just make sure

Python and
PyQt4

are installed. Download the latest package from the indywikia project site and place the unpacked folder somewhere on your computer. I have chosen to place it as a hidden folder in my home directory (/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.indywikia/).
To call it from K-menu just create a new entry. In my case I put it the section “Internet”.

The corresponding “command” is:

/usr/bin/python /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.indywikia/indywikia.py

To use the icon in the indywikia folder you need to convert them. I quickly did this by “convert“

cd /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.indywikia/
convert icon.jpg icon.png

from imagemagick but any other tool should also do the trick.

RKWard 0.4.8 Final released

Today RKWard 0.4.8 was released. Several optimizations were done to speed up some aspects, slightly, and to reduce typical memory usage. The complete list of changes include:

User visible additions / improvements:
* New plugins: pie chart, dot chart, crosstabulation, two time-series tests, and basic linear regression
* barplot plugin allow specification of custom labels
* graphics export plugin gains option for EPS compatibility
* CLT plugins allow drawing grid
* commands run through the console from the script editor will now be added to the command history (this can be turned off in the settings)
* object viewer also shows summary information, gains an update button, and MDI integration
* add max.print option to R-Backend settings dialog
* all file selection line edits gain filename-completion
* add a basic file selector window
* show the focus indication (thin red border) also for detached windows
* tool windows can be closed and detached in the same way as regular windows
* Messages, warnings, and errors for plugin commands are shown in the output, instead of in a dialog
* new translation: Simplified Chinese (contributed by Roy Qu)

Bug fixes:
* fixed: promise objects (created by delayedAssign()) directly in globalenv() would be forced early
* make wrapper script work, when konsole is not installed
* correct syntax highlighting for ::: and NA_integer_ and others
* fixed: crash when editing a data.frame with logicals (logicals are still mishandled, but less severe)
* fixed: would not work with R 2.6
* more compilation fixes for GCC 4.3
* fixed: inserting / removing rows in the data editor in the presence of invalid fields in later rows would lead to a crash
* fix some internal problems with enabledness/disabledness of plugin components
* fixed: sometimes detecting created X11() windows would fail, esp. under high load
* fix a crash with detached tool windows

Optimizations:
* syntax highlighting is minimally faster for long outputs
* some complex plotting plugins now start up noticeably faster
* create the workspace browser only when it is first shown
* add possibility to blacklist packages from fetching structure information. Package GO is blacklisted by default.
* when fetching the structure of “promise” R objects, don’t keep them in memory
* optimize the function to retrieve the structure of R objects (for display in the object browser, and completion)

Miscellanious / internal:
* silence some GCC 4.2 warnings
* support for including files and snippets in xml files
* add command line option –disable-stack-check for systems where R C stack checking is buggy
* the modifier “not” for boolean properties returns a (negated) boolean sub-propery instead of just a string

Konqueror Web Shortcuts & Google Scholar & Medline/Pubmed

If you use Konqueror you might also be a user of Konqueror Web Shortcuts. To use them for Google Scholar and Medline/Pubmed
you need to add the strings found here.

Universal Access to Human Knowledge

While searching for some movies of the past (e.g. Nosferatu) I stumbled over a rather interresting internet archive. Namely archive.org. It’s a non-profit internet library providing access for everybody to historical collections that exist in digital format. Moreover it’s free to use (free as in “free speech”, and as in “free beer”), though donations are wellcome.

RKWard 0.4.8

After a rather long period of silence I’m happy to tell that the next release of RKWard (v. 0.4.8) is going to happen soon. This release will include some new and enhanced plug-ins, changes to the core of RKWard and of course bugfixes.

RKWard 0.4.6

Today RKWard 0.4.6. was released. This was a quite fast release (less than a month after the last one) which brings quite a lot new features and fixes to RKWard. Most notebale in my opinion are:

* import of SPSS files
* many new distribution plug-ins and improvements to existing
* support for preview functionality in graphing plugins
* some new tests
* many new plot types
* a rather good help

This makes, to my knowledge, RKWard by far the most feature rich GUI to R. However it’s needless to mention everything here. As usual you can find all important information and downloads at RKWard.

BIOCONDUCTOR

If you need to analyse genomic data BIOCONDUCTOR is a good place to look at. BIOCONDUCTOR is based on R, actively developed by scientists worldwide and well documented. Of course it’s open source and therefore free to use for everybody.

Bioconductor is an open source and open development software project for the analysis and comprehension of genomic data.
-by bioconductor.org-

You can find
an example about “microarray image segmentation” in the R Newsletter Volume 6/3, August 2006.

Changes @ Kanotix.com & welcome Sidux

For a long time was Kanotix my favourite Debian derivative (and still is). It was based on Debian Sid an provided therefore quite up to date software and moreover an almost inexhaustible software repository. But it’s rather hard to keep it stable and the developers had to struggle really a lot to achieve stability. Therefore the Kanotix main developer Kano decided to base the distribution on a stable one (may it be Ubuntu or anything else) and many developers left.

These days there started a new project called sidux.

“On 24th of November 2006 sidux was formed by a group of people who strive to do the impossible: making Debian Sid (aka “Unstable”) stable.” -statement by http://www.sidux.com/-

I myself like Debian Sid and hope that sidux
will become what Kanotix was for a Debian Sid based distribution. It’s a young project though based an a lot of experience and there is the chance for everybody to contribute.

kahvi.org

If you are passionate about free electronic grooves you should definitely visit KAHVI.ORG. Though not open source songs from there are free of charge while providing in most cases a good quality (subjective).

Mission: to gather and
provide free electronic grooves
area of operation: internet
(statement by kahvi.org)

If you know any other sources of good free music, please let me know.