Re: statistics graphs

2008-06-08 Thread Prof J C Nash

I think Jean is right to rename


We also might rename the plot_boxplot plugin which implements all these
plots to plot_stats.


However, all the univariate distribution graphs are perhaps named something like

plot_stats_dist

since there are 2D and 3D graphs, as well as some of the high dimensional 
graphs (castles, glyphs, faces, etc.) that eventually may get implemented.

It may be worth looking at the R names, not necessarily because they are a 
great choice, but in case we want to borrow ideas/setup etc.

One trap for the unwary: boxplots and histograms etc. on small samples can be 
very misleading and give different results with different packages. This is the 
issue of how to divide 3 chocolate bars among 4 kids. I've some references if 
needed.

Cheers, JN


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Re: bad file

2008-06-07 Thread Prof J C Nash

I've put a sanitized file at macnash.admin.uottawa.ca/files/badfile.zip

I didn't try this on my laptop, which has suffered enough today, but did 
try loading in a Virtualbox instance of Ubuntu Hardy with Gnumeric 1.8.2 
(the Hardy default) installed. This actually loaded the file, but I then 
had to "Force quit" Gnumeric. Tried twice to be sure.  So it has at 
least some nasties that a likely worth investigation.


Cheers, JN

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Re: File causes lockup

2008-06-07 Thread Prof J C Nash
Will do what I can. The names occur multiple time on different sheets, 
including in the sheet names, so it is many, many times to sort out. 
Unfortunately, we've been sent explicit instructions that linking names 
and student numbers in files that are shared with non-authorized staff 
is a no-no under Ontario privacy legislation.


JN

Jody Goldberg wrote:

On Sat, Jun 07, 2008 at 12:50:46PM -0400, Prof John Nash wrote:
  
Some teaching assistants sent me a file related to assignment marks that  
has a sheet per student (about 60 sheets), each with graphics. This will  
not load in Gnumeric 1.8.2 that comes with Ubuntu Hardy. There is lots  
of disk activity for over 5 mins, and no keyboard or mouse control of  
machine. Even Ctrl-Alt-Bsp and Ctrl-Alt-Del gave no response. I  
eventually had to hit the power. Confirmed with 2 tries. OO and kspread  
seem OK, as does Excel 2007 in WinXP.





Sounds like we're over allocating memory.

Any chance of fuzzing the student names in a different application
and sending of a copy ?
  

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File causes lockup

2008-06-07 Thread Prof J C Nash
Some teaching assistants sent me a file related to assignment marks that 
has a sheet per student (about 60 sheets), each with graphics. This will 
not load in Gnumeric 1.8.2 that comes with Ubuntu Hardy. There is lots 
of disk activity for over 5 mins, and no keyboard or mouse control of 
machine. Even Ctrl-Alt-Bsp and Ctrl-Alt-Del gave no response. I 
eventually had to hit the power. Confirmed with 2 tries. OO and kspread 
seem OK, as does Excel 2007 in WinXP.


Are there known issues with 1.8.2 file open? Because of marks, I cannot 
post the file. However, I am likely meeting Jody for some other work in 
a few weeks if this turns out to be a genuine issue.



JN

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Re: summer of code projects

2008-06-03 Thread Prof J C Nash
This is very good news. In case it is useful (and perhaps others will add 
notes), I've put in some comments on related work:

Mariusz Adamski : 3D Plots
A physics senior from Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland
who will be working with Jean to add surfaces.
 -- Duncan Murdoch (Maths and Stats, U. of Western Ontario) has done quite a 
lot of 
work on the R package RGL. It does rotating 3D graphs. He's approachable and 
helpful.  I've just done a little item on printing very large graphs with him 
that I put up on the r-project.org wiki. R and Gnumeric have a long and 
friendly history.

Daniel Hall : Audit Trails
A CPA studying CS at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
He will be working with Morten to extend the undo/redo code
to provide persistence.
-- Daniel already has been in touch with me, since the telltable.com / 
telltable-s.sf.net projects were a motivation to this (but I'm hoping Gnumeric 
will make them redundant!) Capturing history is not too difficult, capturing so 
it can be used easily and cleanly is, I think, likely to be quite hard. There 
are some commercial packages out there (System 7 and Wimmer Systems come to 
mind) that seem to be able to ask for very big bucks from the pharmaceutical 
industry for clinical trial data handling and from financial institutions for 
handling their investment analysis models etc.

David Torne Berga : Multi-Dimensional Data Visualization
Will be working with me on 'data slicers' (aka pivots and pilots)
-- There's a hard core of Excel users who claim this is the reason they can 
never use anything else. I believe in one close-to-home case it is the 
justification for spending on 100s of copies of Excel, though possibly only one 
user ever uses them -- the person controlling the purchase!

Best wishes to those working on these projects.

JN


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More on jhbuild scripts

2008-05-29 Thread Prof J C Nash
The default jhbuild modulesets try to get gcrypt elements from a gnupg 
site that no longer is functional. (Stage 2 etc of the build.) Nor are 
individual source codes there, but one can download a large bz2 or gz 
tarball.

Perhaps there's one or two others out there interested in fixing the 
scripts with me. Doing it alone takes far too long, while back and forth 
gets things fixed better and more quickly.

JN

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Re: build issues

2008-05-26 Thread Prof J C Nash

Following advice from Priit Laes, I got svn working again but had also 
got it going on a new virtual Debian.

Unfortunately, I seem to be getting loads of bugs with jhbuild, 
particularly concerning python-related problems.  This afternoon, I even 
tried blowing away jhbuild and re-installing as per 
live.gnome.org/jhbuild/, but even that is halting with an error claiming 
I have only automake1.8 rather than 1.9, and failing to find COPYING or 
INSTALL.

Are others seeing similar problems? Or is it time to check my hardware?

JN
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jhbuild svn issue

2008-05-22 Thread Prof J C Nash
I've spent some time trying to downgrade subversion from version 
1.4.6dfsg1-4 without success. Apt was VERY persistent in keeping that 
version. Unfortunately, while I can checkout, for example, gnome-common 
using

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/gnome-common/trunk gnome-common

jhbuild gets "Network socket initialization failure".  On the web under 
debian bugs I find Peter Samuelson commenting on having such a problem 
and someone else saying they would look into the jhbuild script 
('jhbuild update' fails too).

I'd really rather not start from scratch to rewrite something like 
jhbuild. This looks like some sort of jhbuild / debian mismatch that 
could be nasty to resolve.

JN

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svn checkout woes

2008-05-21 Thread Prof J C Nash
Seems there is a bug report
bugs.debian.org      480038

The problem is in the libsvn1 library on client machine. I'll try to 
figure out the fix. It affects a good deal of jhbuild stuff.

JN

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Re: gnumeric subversion repository query

2008-05-21 Thread Prof J C Nash
I'm using anonymous access to my knowledge. And steps 1-4 go OK.

I've just checked that I can run

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-common/trunk gnome-common

and get an updated version. So the issue is more likely somewhere in the 
scripts (again!).

JN


Adrian Custer wrote:
> Any chance this is due to your ssh key being thrown out? Sounds like the
> right level in the interaction. If you haven't heard, all debian derived
> distros going back a couple of years were generating trivially weak keys
> so everyone is resetting their ssh keys.
>
> --adrian
>
>
> On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 22:14 -0400, Prof J C Nash wrote:
>   
>> In retesting my build process, I'm getting
>> "svn: Network socket initialization failed"
>> at step 5/47 of the build (gnome-common).
>>
>> This looks like something is wrong with the subversion server rather 
>> than at my end. Am I correct? If not, any hints where to start debugging?
>>
>> Cheers, JN
>>
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Re: gnumeric subversion repository query

2008-05-20 Thread Prof J C Nash
In retesting my build process, I'm getting
"svn: Network socket initialization failed"
at step 5/47 of the build (gnome-common).

This looks like something is wrong with the subversion server rather 
than at my end. Am I correct? If not, any hints where to start debugging?

Cheers, JN

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Re: IEEE 754 compliance

2008-05-13 Thread Prof J C Nash
The complexities of the "edge effects" are best kept out of the 
spreadsheet, as Morten indicates. However, there are some computations 
that might be influenced by how a particular internal calculation is 
performed. I was earlier looking at the ends of the Gaussian (normal) 
distribution where one gets some weirdness in Excel. This could be 
because very small numbers are handled poorly.

It is in the special functions etc. that I would think Gnumeric and 
other spreadsheets are most likely to be interested in IEEE 754 and its 
revision.

Must admit I was unaware of 754r activity. Thanks Dave. For info, 
there's a nice Wikipedia item at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754r 
with a link to a recent essay by Velvel Kahan (who was really the person 
who got all the floating point stuff going, and in the 1960s pretty well 
embarassed IBM into retrofitting the 360 with guard digits for floating 
point) that gives a nice and nasty example using Excel. I've tried this 
in Gnumeric and get somewhat different results, but which I'm sure would 
upset novice users.

JN


Morten Welinder wrote:
> Gnumeric does not let you access NaN etc.  It would interfere with the
> desired semantics.
>
> Morten
>   
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Re: IEEE 754 compliance

2008-05-13 Thread Prof J C Nash
There are some resources for testing by Nelson Beebe at
http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/software/ieee/timops.html  From what I 
understand, the main issues are handling of edge effects (underflow, 
overflow, divide by 0, etc.) where compilers may do some things 
different from the standard's prescription. There is, of course, an 
interaction here with hardware that may not provide ways to get at the 
bits (literally).

In my efforts to set up some Gnumeric test worksheets, I've tried to 
contact Beebe without success. He may have retired (I believe he is 
older than I, and I'm on the brink of retirement from teaching, but not 
from Gnumeric!) 

If there is interest, and in particular an example where IEEE754 may be 
important, I'll be happy to dig a bit. I was a corresponding (ie vote by 
mail) member of the IEEE 754 committee back in late 70s. Given the 
arcane detail, it will take a bit of review for me to get fully up to speed.


JN

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jhbuild / libgsf more info.

2008-03-25 Thread Prof J C Nash
In case it helps others:

I managed to get a gnumeric build by downloading libgsf version 1.14.6 
and doing a "manual" build of it that matched jhbuild, namely

- download from 
http://download.gnome.org/sources/libgsf/1.14/libgsf-1.14.6.tar.gz
to ~/checkout/gnome2/ 
and unpack
- enter the libgsf-1.14.6  directory
- './configure --prefix=/opt/gnome2'  so the build goes to the same 
place as jhbuild's efforts
- 'jhbuild buildone gnumeric' (I'd already run everything else with 
'jhbuild build gnumeric' before getting an error that the libgsf was 
1.14.5).

Hopefully, I can gradually get more proficient in working with the 
scripts and provide information, fixes, and possibly a build-bot on one 
of my research servers. One of the first things will be to get jhbuild 
up to date with gnumeric.

JN

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Re: jhbuild / libgsf

2008-03-25 Thread Prof J C Nash
"gnumeric.spec.in is not maintained, see bug 159782.
However, 1.14.6 is correct

Morten"

The problem, then, is that jhbuild structure (inc. latest modulesets) is out of 
date, as it builds libgsf 1.14.5. 

I'm prepared to learn how to fix such issues and to dedicate some time to 
maintaining and documenting such matters on an ongoing basis. Indeed, I come 
from a management school and have identified this as a (the?) major threat to 
open source projects. However, I can get there a lot quicker -- and save 
developers dealing with msgs on this list related to build problems -- if I get 
some input from someone with expertise and experience with the scripts. Anyone?

JN




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Another jhbuild libgsf glitch

2008-03-24 Thread Prof J C Nash
Having returned from an academic visit to Perth WA, I'm getting back to 
my attempt to set up a build-bot to allow for building of versions of 
gnumeric that are up to date e.g., Windows cross-compile. I've still 
lots to learn.

My current problem concerns a matter that has appeared several times in 
the archives, namely libgsf. The jhbuild default for building libgsf 
creates 1.14.4, but the gnumeric.spec.in wants 1.14.6.

Can someone point me to documentation on how to put in the correct 
settings? The JHBuild manual gives the syntax, but not the location of 
the defaults.

There's also some glitchiness with scripts for gtk+: Here there appear 
to be no "make" rules for install all or test all, but ignoring the 
errors seems to be OK. However, I'm ultimately going to want to avoid 
stoppages and manual intervention on these scripts.

For information, my goal is to have a web page to select the settings 
for the build and send an email notification when the result is done. 
And I'm painfully aware that this will mean figuring out how to package 
up everything so it works for other folk. Collaboration welcome -- this 
sort of thing is not part of my computer background in numerical and web 
programming.

My gut feeling is that in order to get the system I want set up, I'm 
likely to have to document and clean up some of the scripts, which will 
be useful anyway.

JN

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Re: JHBuild problem in tester for gtk-doc?

2007-12-01 Thread Prof J C Nash
Is anyone else seeing an error in tester.c in the build process for 
Gnumeric when
gtk-doc is being built?

I'm getting what looks to be a pretty straightforward typo (an unexpected
parenthesis error) when running JHBuild.

If this is a "known" issue, I'll just wait a couple of days.

JN
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Re: 1) 600K rows 2) Windows compiles, 3) missing values in graphs

2007-10-25 Thread Prof J C Nash
For both the long rows and the missing values in graphs, I think R might 
be a relatively quick solution. R can read tabular data in CSV form and 
similar, and stores things in "data frames" that are like spreadsheets 
but with column type. And missing values are supported for many if not 
most of the capabilities. www.r-project.org. Note that Gnumeric and R 
have a long cooperative history together.

Compilations: I've been exchanging ideas with Jody about using a server 
I have to allow him to run builds. I've "sort of" got it running and 
installed jhbuild etc., no-password ssh logins, and tried a test build 
(failed because I'm missing a file or two, but getting there). Since 
Jody has plenty on his plate, if there's anyone with some experience 
running builds who wants to work with me to set up appropriate nice 
features, please get in touch off-list. I hope to set up a small set of 
web documentation that could answer some of the periodic questions on 
how to build and possibly offer scripts or other resources bundled from 
working builds. The server is a VM running Debian lenny. At the moment 
the host hardware is only at about 10% CPU tops, even supporting about 
20 VMs. As long as there's no interference with those other VM 
applications, the U of Ottawa will be happy to allow a useful activity 
such as builds to be done. Apparently the VMWare scheduler is set up so 
we likely cannot be too greedy, though I propose to show proper 
etiquette and be watchful of resources used.

JN

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Re: Gnumeric dies on two-means, unequal variances.

2007-10-17 Thread Prof J C Nash
In Gnumeric 1.7.8 distributed with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), selecting the 
Statistical Analysis tool, two-means, unequal variances is like doing 
Alt-F4 or Ctrl-Q: Gnumeric closes. Is this a known bug? If not, I'll 
submit a report.

J Nash

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Re: Polynomial regression - Warning

2007-10-09 Thread Prof J C Nash
Use of the condition number is sensible. If one can detect polynomial 
regression, however, there are alternatives that may improve the 
condition, and it would be nice to tell folk. That's not necessarily 
Gnumeric's job, of course. And there may be more important "bad habits" 
that should be dealt with first. My experience is that users of 
polynomial regression don't want to know they are doing something silly, 
and are wilfully blind to the issues.

There's of course the annoying problem that condition numbers are not 
easy to estimate  Another story. I'll hopefully be able to provide 
some input and reasonable (i.e., plug out, plug in) fixes after a few 
more months of wading through other projects.

JN

Morten Welinder wrote:
> Unfortunately we cannot really know if the user's use of the tool is sane.
> Yes, a chain saw can be dangerous but it is fundamentally a good tool
> when used right.
>
> What we can do -- at least for the GUI regression tool -- is to check the
> condition number of the relevant matrix.  We do that already and warn
> when the result starts to lose significance.  And err when it is completely
> gone.
>
> Morten
>   
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Re: Polynomial regression - Warning

2007-10-09 Thread Prof J C Nash
The type of dialog Adrian suggests would be a very sensible feature. 
Sometimes one really does need to do the polynomial regression, even if 
to show the issues, so it is not right to completely bar an approach. 
However, when we have an interested person, it's a good opportunity to 
point them towards potentially better methods. There was some discussion 
of such dialogs in the 80s for statistical software, and there's some of 
these ideas in some of the packages. Certainly I'm interested in helping 
out on this sort of thing, and have been gradually clawing away at other 
stuff I have to do so I can return to the test spreadsheets, which are 
one way to bring the issues to light.

JN


Adrian Custer wrote:
> Lovely repartee, just the sophisticated answer that gnumeric brings to
> the spreadsheet world.
>
> Any chance you can craft this into a good popup dialog? e.g.
>
> You are trying to use SOME_METHOD which exists in gnumeric only
> to allow compatibility with other older spreadsheet programs.
> The computations involved in that method are known to be
> exceedingly problematic. However, you might be able to solve
> your problem using SOME_OTHER_METHOD. Would you like to use that
> instead?
>
> Of course, this is all over my head. I'm merely hoping to leverage your
> 40 years of knowledge into a helpful dialog.
>
> --adrian
>
>
> On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 14:46 -0400, Prof J C Nash wrote:
>   
>> Polynomial regression was where I came into numerical analysis at the 
>> beginning of my academic career 40 years ago. It is a dangerously 
>> ill-conditioned problem, meaning that the regression parameters are 
>> untrustworthy, though the "fit", i.e., the model, may be useful if the 
>> calculations are done properly. There are ways of doing it that are 
>> "less dangerous" using orthogonal polynomials.
>>
>> Just a warning that it should not be a high priority to add. Let the 
>> Excel users drive off the cliff. If it is added for Excel compatibility, 
>> then I'd still recommend a "Gnumeric does Vista" and pop up warnings 
>> asking if the dangerous move should be allowed. Come to think of it, one 
>> could borrow exactly the Vista popups so folk would blame Bill.
>>
>> Seriously, think if you really need polynomial regression or can use a 
>> less troublesome approach.
>>
>> JN
>>
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Polynomial regression - Warning

2007-10-09 Thread Prof J C Nash
Polynomial regression was where I came into numerical analysis at the 
beginning of my academic career 40 years ago. It is a dangerously 
ill-conditioned problem, meaning that the regression parameters are 
untrustworthy, though the "fit", i.e., the model, may be useful if the 
calculations are done properly. There are ways of doing it that are 
"less dangerous" using orthogonal polynomials.

Just a warning that it should not be a high priority to add. Let the 
Excel users drive off the cliff. If it is added for Excel compatibility, 
then I'd still recommend a "Gnumeric does Vista" and pop up warnings 
asking if the dangerous move should be allowed. Come to think of it, one 
could borrow exactly the Vista popups so folk would blame Bill.

Seriously, think if you really need polynomial regression or can use a 
less troublesome approach.

JN

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Query regarding hypergeometric function

2007-09-27 Thread Prof J C Nash
This is a query about what "should happen" when a function is given 
arguments that are in some sense out of range.

The hypergeometric distribution function computes the probability that x 
"successes" are observed in a sample of n trials from a finite 
population of N  elements  where M of the N are "successes. We sample 
WITHOUT replacement. Example: 10 people in a village of 100 have math 
anxiety. We sample 5 of them and clearly don't check the same people 
twice ('without replacement'). Hypergeometric distribution gives the 
probabilities we get 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 with MA in our sample.

Now suppose we have nobody with the disease. Clearly P(0, 5, 0, 100) =1 
and the rest should be 0. Gnumeric reports for "=hypgeomdist(1,5,0,100)" 
the result

#NUM!

which has some merit, since we are doing something that is "impossible" 
(getting 1 out of none).

I can see reporting an error for

=hypgeomdist(1,15,0,10)

i.e., sample bigger than population. But I know I'd rather get 0 for the 
values that are "impossible" in a feasible sample.

There are several of these borderline cases throughout the functions. It 
would be nice to document them and then come up with a good set of choices.

Comments welcome.

JN

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Virtual build environment

2007-08-27 Thread Prof J C Nash
I have made this a separate posting from my build woes as it may be of 
value to the Gnumeric and other communities.

As I had some difficulties doing the Gnumeric build in Ubuntu, which I 
now believe to be due to the Ubuntu folk having to change a set of 
library file names because of a name collision between two pieces of 
software, I have been building in a virtual machine. At first I used VM 
Ware server free version, but I believe that may be time limited. Now 
I"m using Innotek's VirtualBox and have found it quite useful, indeed in 
more ways than just for builds.

I have tested copying the VBox "hard drive" of my virtual machine. It's 
a little big at 5.1GB, but when I got it on a second machine it came up 
and had preserved the state -- my final error msg was on the screen in 
the terminal window.

It seems to me that a VBox "hard drive" set up to to builds would be a 
relatively painless way to get more folk able to do the builds. Setting 
up JHBUILD is non-trivial. I plan to post some notes when (if?) I 
succeed. However, I know I would have jumped at doing a bittorrent 
download of a disk image.

Am I a late-comer to this idea? It seems a no-brainer except for the 
file size, which is big, but not exceptionally so.

JN
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Re: Continuing build problems with JHBUILD

2007-08-27 Thread Prof J C Nash
Following up Jody's msg (removing files from checkout to ensure cairo 
build etc.) allowed my build to continue to the last stage 47/47. But ...

Now I get an error that appears to be something omitted from the script.
Here is the output:

/bin/sh ../../libtool --tag=CC   --mode=link gcc  -g -O2 
-DG_DISABLE_DEPRECATED -DPANGO_DISABLE_DEPRECATED 
-DGDK_PIXBUF_DISABLE_DEPRECATED -DGDK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED 
-DGDK_MULTIHEAD_SAFE -DLIBGLADE_DISABLE_DEPRECATED -Wall 
-Wmissing-prototypes  -Wsign-compare -Wpointer-arith -Wnested-externs 
-Wchar-subscripts -Wwrite-strings -Wdeclaration-after-statement 
-Wnested-externs -Wmissing-noreturn -Wstrict-prototypes 
-Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -Wno-pointer-sign -module 
-avoid-version  -L /opt/gnome2/lib -lpython2.4 -o python_loader.la 
-rpath /opt/gnome2/lib/gnumeric/1.7.12/plugins/python-loader 
python-loader.lo gnm-python.lo gnm-py-interpreter.lo py-gnumeric.lo 
py-interpreter-selector.lo py-command-line.lo py-console.lo boot.lo  -lm
gcc -shared  .libs/python-loader.o .libs/gnm-python.o 
.libs/gnm-py-interpreter.o .libs/py-gnumeric.o 
.libs/py-interpreter-selector.o .libs/py-command-line.o 
.libs/py-console.o .libs/boot.o  
-L/home/john/checkout/gnome2/gnumeric/plugins/python-loader -lpython2.4 
-lm  -Wl,-soname -Wl,python_loader.so -o .libs/python_loader.so
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lpython2.4
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[3]: *** [python_loader.la] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory 
`/home/john/checkout/gnome2/gnumeric/plugins/python-loader'
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/john/checkout/gnome2/gnumeric/plugins'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/john/checkout/gnome2/gnumeric'
make: *** [all] Error 2
*** error during stage build of gnumeric: ## Error running 
make   *** [47/47]


  [1] rerun stage build
  [2] ignore error and continue to install
  [3] give up on module
  [4] start shell
  [5] go to stage force_checkout
  [6] go to stage configure
choice:

Suggestions welcome. I seem to be so close!

JN


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Re: gtk+ build problem - cairo-xlib.h

2007-08-22 Thread Prof J C Nash
Since having some pretty severe problems a year ago with building the 
latest gnumeric under Ubuntu due (apparently) to library naming issues 
in that distribution, I've had some success by running the build under 
Debian Testing via a virtual machine. First I used VM Ware, but after 
changing to new hardware, I installed Debian Testing under VirtualBox 
since there is an Ubuntu package for this.

However, running JHBUILD to build Gnumeric in this environment, I 
encounter an error at stage 18/47 (gtk+). The error is given as

gtkdrawable-x11.c:32:24: error: cairo-xlib.h: No such file or directory

I've tried installing some of the dev libraries such as 
xlibs-static-dev, but no joy. Also, since cairo-xlib.h is available in 
the src collections elsewhere, I've tried placing it in 
/opt/gnome2/include/cairo/ but that then produces an error "cairo was 
not compiled with support for xlib backend".

I suspect that there is a minor bug in one of the configure or build 
scripts. Anyone have suggestions for overcoming the problem?

JN

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Re: Median and other quantiles

2007-02-10 Thread Prof J C Nash
The rather heated discussion on the median has a historic quality. It is 
not quite as old as the arguments about how many angels can sit on the 
head of a pin, but not too far off. Perhaps I can cool things down by
providing some perspective.

There are, to the eyes of someone who has been teaching and working with 
this stuff for nearly 4 decades, three issues that are causing conflict:

1) The question of what we actually want "MEDIAN" to compute.
2) The question of how to express this clearly.
3) The question of how to actually do it.

Question (1) concerns the allowed values for the quantity returned by a 
function of type "quantile", the general term for a median, percentile, 
or any other quantity that returns the "value in the scale of the data 
with rank k from the minimum (or, alternatively, from the maximum".

We can insist on returning values from within the original data set, in 
which case we must sometimes choose between two values, or we can 
specify a rule for interpolation.

The most common rule for the median is to interpolate when the number of 
elements, n, is even, leading to the "definition" that the median is the 
average of the middle ranked values for this case, while it takes the 
value of the middle rank datum when n is odd. I believe all the 
spreadsheets use this rule. Percentiles are usually (but not always) 
computed using interpolation, and I have seen some variety in the values 
given for quartiles in different statistical packages. Rob Hyndman 
published a quite good paper in The American Statistician about 8-10 
years ago on the subject.

John Tukey (stem and leaf graphs, box and whisker plots, five number 
summaries, Exploratory Data Analysis, etc.) liked to have measures that 
belonged to the data set. So he defined Depth as the rank of an 
observation from the nearest "end" (highest or lowest) and Tukey 
boxplots use Hinges rather than Quartiles (which are generally 
interpolated, but not always by consistent formulas).

See http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca/files/stembox.txt for a bit of a 
discussion on Depths etc.

Ultimately, this question boils down to where to cut to divide 4 candies 
among 5 children. No matter what you do, things get ugly. For large n, 
whether you use interpolation, and what formula for interpolating, 
becomes less important.

When we come to (2), I am surprised nobody is using RANK rather than 
SORT. To compute quantiles, one does need to rank the data in some way, 
but we don't actually need to sort it. There were a number of articles 
about 30 years ago on ranking vs sorting, and if anyone is interested I 
can try to dig some up. If I were writing the MEDIAN definition for the 
TC, I would change it in one word to:

MEDIAN logically _ranks_ the numbers (lowest to highest).  If given an 
odd number of values, MEDIAN returns the middle value. If given an even
number of values, MEDIAN returns the arithmetic average of the two
middle values.

In other words, I'll live with the interpolation. Actually, I believe 
Tukey (someone correct me if I'm wrong, my copy of EDA is in another 
office) defined median as the value with maximum depth from either end 
or the arithmetic average of the two values having maximal depth if the 
value is not unique.

Question (3) is one for the programmers and algorithm performance 
people. I think a fast ranking algorithm would be very useful to improve 
performance in a lot of spreadsheet features, not just the median. But 
it should be an algorithm that is quite "clean" so that application to 
more than just a column or row range doesn't end up causing all kinds of 
potential for bugs. For the sake of development and testing, it may be 
useful to use compile or even execution switches based on some stored 
control parameter, so that informed users can try out different ranking 
algorithms. Note that this may be helpful for increasing sort 
performance on very large sheets.

Note that RANK() gives the rank of a number in a set. We actually want 
the number that is ranked at some level.

No doubt the discussion will continue.

JN

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Re: interest rates

2007-02-09 Thread Prof J C Nash
The important issue is what conventions are used for time and rate.

About 25 years ago I tried to get information on this from Canadian
banks. Some were cooperative. As I recall, the three that responded used
three DIFFERENT rules. This was for weekly payment mortgages.

In Canada, there is a little known law that prescribes that mortgage
interest be computed "annually or semi-annually, not in advance".
Moreover, if nominal annual rate is over 6%, the borrower must be
provided with a schedule of payments, or everything defaults to the
6% rate after the fact. There've been some interesting commercial
mortgage cases from the early 80s where rates were around 20% and the
schedule was not correct.

To get to monthly, weekly or daily mortgage payments, you have to know
how many periods there are. For monthly payments, we can use 6 months,
so the "working" rate is 100 * [(1 + nominal_rate/200)^(1/6) - 1 ]

Is everybody still there?

Weekly or daily? Well, there are, as I recall between 181 and 185 days
(I should check this, it's been a while) in a "half-year, depending on
the start date and whether one uses calendar "date". Or using days, one
has to decide when things end. Or 365/2 = 182/5. But 182.5/7 is a bit
more than 26 weeks, worse in leap years. Which is where the fun begins.

I'm not sure I want to put canned formulas into Gnumeric or any other
spreadsheet for this, and I would definitely like to see more 
transparent output for mortgage payments.

Of course, in the UK (or at least England as Scotland may have its own
rules) most mortgages are demand loans so use floating rates.

JN

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Re: strings in gnumeric / awk / etc.

2007-01-16 Thread Prof J C Nash

Some of the issues being raised suggest that a spreadsheet is not the 
right analytic tool. How about a data frame in R? There are easy 
transformations from spreadsheet to data-frame and back (and they should 
be better set up but are not to my knowledge!). R allows character 
strings to be converted to factors which can be very useful in some 
analyses e.g., regressions. There are quite a few character handling 
functions, and some support for regexes, though I will not claim any 
expertise in using the latter.

My own opinion, as a supporter of gnumeric, is that we sometimes try too 
hard to do everything in the spreadsheet.

JN

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Bug Buddy failure!

2007-01-10 Thread Prof J C Nash
I managed to crash Gnumeric 1.7.0 (on Ubuntu Edgy) three times trying 
same operation.

Had one spreadsheet (xls, opened in Gnumeric), added a sheet, copied a 
region from another file (wb3, opened in Gnumeric), tried paste. Bang.

On third try, I'd opened a new spreadsheet and copied the wb3 info there 
first, then copied again.

So then I thought I'd use Bug Buddy. Not so good!

"Bug Buddy has encountered an error while submitting your report to the 
Bugzilla server.  Details of the error are included below.

The component specified doesn't exist or has been renamed.  Please 
upgrade to the latest version."

For the record, things work in ooffice 2.

Maybe this is known. If so, I'll try to upgrade asap, though it's easier 
to use Ubuntu package updates.

JN



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Re: accuracy ...

2006-11-11 Thread Prof J C Nash
The discussion is revisiting a lot of work that was done in the 1950s
and 1960s on floating point arithmetic. The gold standard is to
accumulate in a double length mantissa. On some architectures that was
easy to do. The i386 architecture uses IEEE 754 as far as I am aware (I
have not looked at details for a while). This makes it fairly easy to
double length accumulate reals, but almost all current s/w uses doubles
by default (roughly 15 decimal digits equivalent). This means
accumulations have to be done in quad, which wasn't part of the standard
toolkit.

If I ever get jhbuild to complete, I may even be willing to try.

JN

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Re: gnumeric-list Digest, Vol 27, Issue 1

2006-07-10 Thread Prof J C Nash
I've seen a number of msgs on this list about compiling a verion, 
usually the latest, of Gnumeric. I've tried myself too.

What I haven't found yet, and not only for Gnumeric, is a good how-to on
actually doing such compiling safely and cleanly without disrupting 
one's working environment. That is, I have 2 "main" working machines, 
one running Xandros 3.02, which gets Gnumeric 1.4.3 (sigh!) using 
apt-get, and Ubuntu Dapper, which get's (as far as I can tell) 1.59 (it 
may have just got to 1.61). But to really check tests, I need the latest 
release.

The difficulties are that if one tries to install the "new" libraries, 
existing and needed applications can become unworkable. Some sort of 
safe sandbox (chroot environment) is likely needed. But some good, sane, 
advice would be helpful. I've had suggestions of putting up Gentoo, but 
I've played distro-roulette enough to now be very careful about making 
changes. I've also some critical, everyday things I must keep working.

To ensure that I'm not just complaining, if someone sends me rough notes 
and I get things working, I'll be happy to edit and prepare the HowTo 
and to the extent my schedule allows maintain it. I use Linux, but I'm 
prepared to try to help out on other platforms with editing a HowTo or 
possibly running a WinXP boot that I do have available.

JN  (nashjc _AT_ uottawa.ca for off-list communications)

-- 
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Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
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Re: compiling gnumeric etc.

2006-04-25 Thread Prof J C Nash

As Morten points out:
> It is not simple and there are more traps than you might

want.




My own experience is that it is not too difficult to GET the code, but 
the configure/compile/link are far from trivial. The main issues in my 
case have been libraries that are not as recent as Gnumeric wants. 
Unfortunately, installing newer libraries can "break" other 
applications. There are ways round this I've heard about but not tried, 
in large measure because I haven't found a good tutorial that might be 
entitled "How to safely build a program that uses more recent libraries 
than your system uses". I'd be happy to learn of such a HowTo, or to 
contribute to its development by being a suitable test "stooge".


One thing I have done is use Debian "apt-get source gnumeric" to get a 
version of the source code I COULD build. In my case I managed fine with 
1.4.3 on a Xandros 3.02 box, and 1.5.9 on Ubuntu Breezy.


JN

--
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Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
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test of normal distribution functions

2006-04-15 Thread Prof J C Nash
Morten is right that some values input for inverses tests are not fair 
to any spreadsheet processor. I hope to find ways to provide more 
informative output, that is, how the calculation fares in relation to 
what is reasonable at the default precision. The current example is VERY 
preliminary, and I simply copied values from one test to another.


Some of the more interesting tests are the bounds ones. These allow 
comparison with simple functions that can be locally computed. There are 
other examples of such functions, and a compromise is needed between 
different objectives to get a "nice" test.


For the moment I am avoiding the r.foo functions. Later on I hope to add 
to the Gnumeric-specific test files. For the moment I'm concentrating on 
ones that can be saved as .xls. I find these useful to send to Excel 
addicts.


JN


--
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Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
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New test spreadsheet for normal distribution

2006-04-14 Thread Prof J C Nash

Much, much later than I had intended, I have prepared a more detailed
test of the normal distribution functions (normdist, norminv, normsdist,
normsinv). This is still not complete, but shows some directions that
tests of these functions could take.

The file is at http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca/files/normtest.xls

There is a "rubbish" Sheet3 which can be ignored.

I welcome comments, suggestions, and offers of collaboration on this 
work, which I intend to gradually extend to other functions.


JN
--
John C. Nash, School of Management, University of Ottawa,
Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
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Re: Attempt to provide warning of sorting bug

2006-04-01 Thread Prof J C Nash

After a bit of struggling, I managed to download and compile
sane collections of code to experiment with. Morten suggested looking
in commands.c, where I found the sort command quite easily and the
call to sheet_range_contains_region function which is, I believe, the
check for arrays in the sort range (in sheet.c).

I think I need to use sheet_foreach_cell_in_range for a first check, but 
am wondering if there is any write-up, even provisional, that will give 
me some examples of use. Afraid I am someone who learns mostly from 
examples rather than reading the book. I've been around long enough to 
know an example that works is worth a lot more than a book that may have 
errors. Essentially I need to learn how information is passed between 
the sub-programs, as it appears the setup is pretty organized with 
common data structures to move info around.


Plan is to first figure out if I can properly detect different 
conditions, namely:


1) is there a cell reference within the sort range

If there is, then
2) a) which of these references are absolute refs OUTSIDE the range (OK)
   b) which are references within a row (sorting rows, so refs are 
across columns)  (should be OK)
   c) which are references to other cells, possibly in the sort range 
(not OK)


Once I have code to test these conditions, I'll need to learn more about 
the GUI, as I want to be able to highlight cells, particularly the 
dangerous ones.


For info, a colleague had group work in his class and was marking the 
teams. If column F contained the marks, and row 1 was leader of team 1, 
row 2 team 2, row 3 team 3 and the rest of the rows were the rest of the 
students . He entered the team mark, then used =f1 or f2 or f3 to apply 
the mark. Then sorted! A mess.


If anyone else thinks this a worthwhile warning to add, do get in touch 
outside the list. Looks doable without too much pain. I'd like to make 
it work so folk can suggest how to do it better before suggesting it as 
a new feature.


JN

--
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Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
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Re: sorting with forumulas or references

2006-03-28 Thread Prof J C Nash

Finally managed to get bugzilla to send me a pw. and found
discussion related to formulas in sort ranges as bug
59144. It appears to remain an open issue.

JN

--
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Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
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Re: sorting "bug"

2006-03-27 Thread Prof J C Nash

Whether this is a bug or a feature or ?? is not clear. What is clear is
that it is TROUBLE. My colleague Andy Adler sent me a msg pointing out
that spreadsheets (OO, Gnumerice, Excel) all take the sheet

A  B
1   3  1
2   2 =B1  (<- set to 1)
3   1  3

and sort it on A to

A  B
1   1  3
2   2 =B1 (<- set to 3)
3   3  1

It is also interesting to sort on B.

Longer examples show that the cell with the reference can be moved to 
where it makes no sense and gives a #REF error.

For example:

A B
1 6
2 7
3 6 = B1
4 9

and sort A in reverse order. Gives an error as
=B1 points to =B0 (doesn't exist).

The sorting is taking the data in the cells and ignoring the reference.

The big danger is when we don't get any indication that we've made a 
reference, but the data is changed, as in marks for 600 students in my 
statistics for business courses. Nasty!


What should we be doing?

1) formulas with references INSIDE the sort area should not be sorted. 
Indeed, one could say that sort should pre-check this and red-flag it.
As far as I know (I'd be delighted if there is a way to do this), no 
spreadsheet does this yet.


2) formulas with references OUTSIDE the sort area should be OK.

3) references across a row for row sorts or down a column for column 
sorts should be OK, but we should warn the user that the references are 
there. (yellow flag)


Burns in his Spreadsheet Addiction paper 
http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html

warns of this danger but in more general terms.

Is this worth putting into the bugs system? Or is it a feature request?
Or ???

J Nash

--
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Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
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Re: www.gnumeric.org?

2005-11-10 Thread Prof J C Nash
I'm wondering if there is any progress on this. I've several sets of 
slides on the web that I'll need to update if it keeps going to the 
Novell site.


JN

--
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Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
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Re: Formatting rules -- one use?

2005-10-17 Thread Prof J C Nash

It seems that the formatting could be used in interesting
ways when following an audit trail. Jody and I have had
discussions on this, and perhaps he can enlighten the group on
status of the audit trail capability. This would be useful to me in
particular as I am giving a technical talk to the Ottawa
Carleton Linux User Group about spreadsheets and Gnumeric
especially (Nov 1) and a somewhat more broad talk on
spreadsheet addiction and its risks for government and
business to some relatively senior federal govt. folk
on Nov 18. Most will not have ever heard of Gnumeric, so
I'm hoping to get at least a little play in that direction.

I'm also trying to improve the function test spreadsheets.

Contributions and discussions on these efforts welcome.

JN

--
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Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
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Re: handheld Gnumeric

2005-08-21 Thread Prof J C Nash
Since there have been some items here on Gnumeric for cell-phones etc., 
the call for papers on HandHeld computing at

http://old-www.cis.uoguelph.ca/~qmahmoud/sac2006-hhc/
may be of interest.

JN

John C. Nash, School of Management, University of Ottawa,
Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
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Re: missing "help"

2005-08-17 Thread Prof J C Nash
Having persuaded a friend to start using Gnumeric on her first Linux PC, 
I am embarassed that she points out that the Help functionality is not 
present. I don't have her version of Libranet distro (a Debian variant), 
but my own Xandros 3.0.2 let 1.4.2 be installed via apt and it also says 
it cannot find the "specified file" when I ask for help contents.


I am willing to help find and document this bug, but could use some 
pointers as to the "usual" place to find the help file. If it turns out 
to simply be mis-located, perhaps we can get someone who knows "deb" 
packages to assist in fixing.


John Nash, U of Ottawa School of Management

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Re: directly executable Gnumeric (was USB/CD version)

2005-08-07 Thread Prof J C Nash
I apparently failed to make clear that my wish is to have an executable 
of Gnumeric (and other Gnome stuff too) that can be run from CD or USB. 
I've remastered Knoppix once (see www.telltable.com), but that is a very 
different situation since one reboots. I'm looking to plug in a USB and 
run Gnumeric on a "foreign" system without installing it. Some Win apps 
and some Linux ones can be run this way, but I'm not familiar with the 
requirements for so doing.


Truthfully, there could be obstacles that render this idea infeasible, 
but clearly it could make it much easier to "show and tell" and also to 
get folk trying good applications.


JN
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Gnumeric from USB key or mini-CD?

2005-08-06 Thread Prof J C Nash

This message is both a query and a suggestion.

I am wondering if anyone has run Gnumeric from a USB key or from a CD. 
If so, under what platforms?


My feeling is that one of the biggest obstacles to the wider use and 
adoption of Gnumeric is that folk have to install it. If we had Gnumeric 
on a USB key and/or on a CD (mini CD with logo would be nice, or even 
full size Gnome tools), especially if major platforms were present, 
those of us who use it could run it when we need to, even as guests on 
other machines.


I'm not an expert compilation/configuration, but willing to work on this 
as I think the eventual payback would be large. I'm guessing that lots 
of folk would use Gnumeric / AbiWord etc. if they didn't have to install 
it. My own particular interest is when I need to run ssconvert somewhere 
to extract files from .xls.


Comments on feasibility and desirability welcome.

JN

--
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Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
"Practical Forecasting for Managers" web site is at
http://www.arnoldpublishers.com/support/nash/
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Re:ssconvert - from gnumeric-list Digest, Vol 14, Issue 26

2005-06-21 Thread Prof J C Nash


I'd like to add to comments re: ssconvert.

I've found it useful for doing a number of things like converting 
between spreadsheet formats. Also in doing a large number of experiments 
on forecasting, I output 1 "row" of tab-delimited items per run to a 
file (I append to a text file, which is pretty easy in just about all 
applications), then use ssconvert to make an .xls file. (No flames 
please, my clients have clients who don't "get it" yet. Sigh.)


One complaint: I so far (in Win XP -- again, not by choice, as things 
run fine from wherever in Xandros Linux) seem to have to move files to 
the right C:\Program Files\gnumeric\bin\ directory
before running ssconvert because otherwise it cannot find the 
appropriate dll's. Does anyone know if ssconvert could be recompiled to 
include all the dll stuff? Or some other mechanism so it is in the PATH 
appropriately and can be run from any location?


Cheers, JN
--
John C. Nash, School of Management, University of Ottawa,
Vanier Hall 451, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Private,
P.O. Box 450, Stn A, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Canada
email: nashjc on mail server uottawa.ca, voice mail: 613 562 5800 X 4796
fax 613 562 5164,  Web URL = http://macnash.admin.uottawa.ca
"Practical Forecasting for Managers" web site is at
http://www.arnoldpublishers.com/support/nash/
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