[seul-edu] Numerical Chameleon review

[Gordon Holtslander <holtslander@sask.usask.ca>]

I installed Numerical Chamleon.
http://www.jonelo.de/java/nc/index.html

It is a java based application.  It requires at least java1.3 be one the 
machine.  The installation is all java based.  I have never done a java based 
installation on a linux machine so this was new to me.

Installation issues

I had to run java as the root user, this posed some minor problems due to the 
specifics of my own machine.  The java executable is not on my root user 
$PATH - so I had to give the complete path to start the installation program.  
Its also a graphical installer - my root user is set up not to access X so I 
had to give the xhost +localhost as my regular user in order for the java 
graphical installer to run.  Other users may have the same issues.

The author also provides a command based installer that can be downloaded 
seperately.  This could get around all the above problems, but I didn't try 
this. This is java bases as well.  I had to use the instructions on the web 
page to install it.  The procedure isdifferent from an rpm, deb, or 
traditional souce installation.  If this program was to be installed remotely 
via the console this would be an issue.  A likely scenario in a linux 
terminal server.

The Application.

It appears to work quite well for what it was designed to do.

It converts units. Almost all of them.  Its actually very astounding what this 
is capable of.  It can use 1607 units in 75 categories 

It has lets you choose from these 75 categories and convert between the units 
commonly used in each category

Once a category is selected you can select a source unit and a target unit.
You can enter the value of the source unit and it will return the equivient 
target unit

An example

when the temperature conversion is selected the units offered are:

Centigrade, Fahrenheit, kelvin, Rankine, Reaumur

One can then set the source and target to any of these units

10 Reaumur = 12.5 Centigrade

It can also generate a series of conversions starting and ending at arbitary 
points and step by any integer value.

The conversions

Radix  (bases - from base 2 to base 36)  good for computer science converting 
between binary octal hexadecimal and decimal

Roman Numerals to Decimal

Decimal (0-9) to spoken word (English French Spanish German Italian Finnish 
Hindi Tamil Hungarian Swedish Turkish Polish Portuguese (Brasil & Portugal) 
Romanian

Counting (how many 10's in a million etc)

Converts currencies, areas, temperatures,force. pressure/stress frequency 
velocity acceleration sound leve refraction color Ieee prefices (mega, giga 
etc) unicode, bits&bytes, electric stuff(11 categories) energy (5 categories) 
Light (6 categories) Power (4 categories) Mass (6) radiation (5) Amount and 
proportion of substance viscosity volume (4) angles, water hardness time 
steroe angle

This application  would be a very useful tool in a science or math situation.

-- 
Gordon J. Holtslander           Dept. of Biology
holtslander@sask.usask.ca       112 Science Place
tel: 306 966-4433               University of Saskatchewan
fax: 306 966-4461               Saskatoon, SK. Canada
http://duke.usask.ca/~holtsg    S7N 5E2