Re: Roadmap to 3.8.N

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello Israel.

Ok, I have played with Octave-UPM on Ubuntu 12.04, so I can give you some feedback. First of all, I think it is going in a great direction.  I also realize that this is development code, so I can't expect everything to work. But here are my observations:

1. I've had a hard time moving sub-windows (e.g. command window, directories, history, worspace). For example, I have not been able to put the command window in the centre and the other windows on the sides. That looks like an issue with Qt, so I don't suppose you can do anything about that.

2. The console would work better if it used a monospaced font. That way you could read a data file and the columns would line up. The font also behaves a little... weird. Characters jump sideways when I move the cursor. The best way I can describe it is that the back rectangle that is supposed to represent the position of the cursor is drawn two steps to the right...

Lastly, I tried to reproduce the error I mentioned earlier and for some reason I cannot reproduce it. If I could reproduce it, these would be the steps:

1. From the course web page (http://www.astro.lu.se/Education/utb/ASTM13/projects.html) the student downloads the file with observed galaxies in the Coma cluster (http://www.astro.lu.se/Education/utb/ASTM13/coma.txt).

2. You read the data in this file with:

data = "">

Then what I found before is that dlmread() interprets the file as if there was a column of zeros at the beginning of the data file. What is really odd is that I cannot reproduce this problem on my computer, but I saw it yesterday on a student's computer. I told my students that they could use Octave to do their homework and I was trying to help the one who tried. We spent a while chasing a bug in the code until we realized that dlmread() was inserting that extra column.

I suppose that it is possible that the student had an older version of Ubuntu than I do, so the bug might have been fixed in Octave already... I certainly cannot reproduce the bug with Octave-UPM.

Anyway, I will test Octave-UPM tomorrow on the university computers. Thanks for making it available.

Cheers,

Daniel.