prashanth manik

October 2009

( Monthly archive )

Plotting Data on Linux

Monday, 5. October 2009, 16:05:04

Many a times you are faced with a situation where you have some simulation data to be plotted. Most of the times people get away with such situations by making use of plot feature available in ~~MS-Excel~~. while Linux still provides Open office, there are still more fancy softwares available for free.These provide lot more functionality like curve-fitting, analysis, statistical measurements and what not.One such package is LabPlot in KDE environment. It provides features like importing data from spreadsheets, or other file formats from simulations..There is also kst similar to Labplot albeit not with as much varied functionality. There is also the well known gnuplot which is not so easy to use ( no GUI ) but very powerful.These plotting tools can be used for plotting any type of data.One such use is to plot simulation data from measurement of HSPICE, NGSpice etc.With commands like sp2sp (provided by a waveform viwer called gwave) converting the spice simulation data to ascii data files is easy.

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Songbird ! the firefox of media players

Friday, 2. October 2009, 17:36:11

Today i tried songbird, an open source media player from mozilla camp.This
one promises to be the next big thing in media players.With a lot of functionality,
simplicity and plenty of add-ons I am sure there is not getting bored of this player.
Features like display of wiki,discography and reviews about a track's artist and several
visually appealing skins ( called feathers ) stand out.Among the available add-ons, the
scrolling lyric was the best one.There are even add-ons for displaying the guitar tabs
of the track being played (possible only when you have a well organized media library

)
I tried this both on Win XP and Fedora 10 and there wasn't much difference except that
the fedora version seemed more streamlined with the OS ( or may be am biased towards linux )
All in all , i would say Songbird is the best media player out there right now.

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