[seul-sci] Draft 'Linux In Science' report #2 - for comment

["Pete St. Onge" <pete@seul.org>]

[This will be posted into our reports section in the next day or so. I'm
posting it here so that folks on seul-sci could see it beforehand. Any
suggestions, comments or additions are appreciated. -- Pete]

Some time ago, Nobert Immer created a library abstracting many 3d form
manipulations called 'SNURBS.' He has since stepped back the reworked the
entire library from scratch, building a viewer as well...

From: Norbert Irmer <norbert.irmer@heim9.tu-clausthal.de>

"Thanks for your friendly letter. I have disccontinued the work at "Snurbs",
and started anew. In the new project I use a more generic approach (with C++
and templates), so that it's possible to instantiate the same algorithms for
different data types. I also use now a Graph for storing, manipulating, and
displaying data, which is a very flexible method. I wrote a Tour, in which I
explain the available features and the syntax of the input files (with many
nice screenshots :))"

Norbert's site is located at http://gul.sourceforge.net/ and the 'tour' he
alluded to is a comprehensive demonstration of the syntax for these
functions.


The OpenScience Projecct

Doug Loss (dloss@seul.org) from the SEUL/edu project pointed me to the
OpenScience project (http://www.openscience.org/). Their primary
contribution appears to be a fairly well developed - but as yet mostly
unpopulated - set of links. They are also hosting two Java-based chemistry
apps, a molecular viewer (Jmol) and an editor (JChemPaint).


DEB Packages at the Pasteur Institute

The Pasteur Institute in France maintains a set of packages of various
biological software projects in deb format. The programs range from
phylogenetic analysis to displaying DNA information

http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/sis/debian/biology-en.html

Links to the original project web sites are also present, so one can also
obtain source code to build and hack on.


Scientific Library Project

Herng-Jeng Jou, the founder and maintainer of the Scientific Applciations on
Linux site (http://sal.kachinetech.com/) has set out a rather well-developed
plan for the development of a comprehensive numerical library for Linux.

From the web page at: http://www.KachinaTech.COM/~hjjou/scilib/

"Wouldn't it be nice if there exists a high quality scientific software
library for Linux, Like IBM's ESSL, SGI's SGIMATH library... etc ? That is
the goal of this this ambitious project --- to develop a commonly used
scientific/numerical software library and program collections, for Linux
platforms. This document sketches an early plan of the construction of Sci
Lib, mainly for Linux. Since I am just a happy Linux user and
happen to use some public domain numerical software, my knowledge and
experience is pretty limited. Hence there is no doubt there are
better approaches and thoughts to help this project get better. I would like
to see how many people are interested and would like to help in
this project. If you are interested, please drop me an e.mail to tell me
what you think."