What would you highlight in a talk about octave

[Troels Kofoed Jacobsen-2]

Hi guys

I'm giving a talk at my university about Matlab alternatives and I naturally
want to talk a little about octave. As I want to give the best impression I
need som help on what to highlight. Currently I'm planning to talk about:
- Compatibility with Matlab's .m-file format.
- Compatibility with Matlab mex files. (How compatible is Octave curently)
- Octave-forge
- Free software!! This is a major plus on a university as it makes it possible
for the software engineers to look at the internals and learn.
- Also I want to mention that octave is not compatible with matlabs GUI
features and that there are some language differences as function scoping rules
and some octave-only syntax.

Any help is appreciated. The talk is aimed at one of the institutes and not
the students. They are all Matlab fans and I hope to open their eyes for the
many great possibilities of free software. I also plan to talk about
numpy/scipy/matplotlib and maybe mention scilab.

Best Regards
Troels Kofoed Jacobsen

(please cc. me as I'm not on the list)

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[Søren Hauberg]

søn, 01 03 2009 kl. 14:47 +0100, skrev Troels Kofoed Jacobsen:
> Currently I'm planning to talk about:
> - Compatibility with Matlab's .m-file format.

We're almost 100% compatible here.

> - Compatibility with Matlab mex files. (How compatible is Octave curently)

Very compatible. Then only issues I've ever come across are issues
related to GCC not being compatible with MSVC. This means a lot of MEX
code doesn't run on Linux (but, hey, that  code wouldn't be compilable
with Matlab on Linux either).

> - Octave-forge

This is a great way to get some of your research out to many users.

> - Free software!! This is a major plus on a university as it makes it possible
> for the software engineers to look at the internals and learn.

Yes. I don't think you can really call something "science" unless it is
100% transparent.

> Any help is appreciated. The talk is aimed at one of the institutes and not
> the students. They are all Matlab fans and I hope to open their eyes for the
> many great possibilities of free software. I also plan to talk about
> numpy/scipy/matplotlib and maybe mention scilab.

You should search the Octave mailing lists for "presentation". Not that
long ago someone else posted slides to the list.

> Best Regards
> Troels Kofoed Jacobsen

I'm curious. You name sounds Danish. Which University are you attending.
Personally, I'm a PhD student at Dept. of Computer Science at the
University of Copenhagen.

Søren

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[bharat pathak]

I have forwarded following presentations to Mr. Jacobsen

1. History and Outlook : By John W Eaton
2. Octave Past present and future : By John W Eaton.
3. Introducing GNU Octave : Jaroslav Hajek.

In case if someone else is also interested in any of the
above mentioned presentations please email me.

Regards
Bharat Pathak



 
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[Troels Kofoed Jacobsen-2]

Thank you everybody for some quick replies. I have a really good idea of how
to make the presentation now.

>
> I'm curious. You name sounds Danish. Which University are you attending.
> Personally, I'm a PhD student at Dept. of Computer Science at the
> University of Copenhagen.
>
> Søren

I'm a master student at Dept. of Physics at The Technical University of
Denmark. As a physicist I have great interest in numerical calculations and am
a big fan of free and open source software which is where Octave comes into
the picture.

Best regards
Troels Kofoed Jacobsen




 


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[dbateman]

Søren Hauberg wrote:

søn, 01 03 2009 kl. 14:47 +0100, skrev Troels Kofoed Jacobsen:
> Currently I'm planning to talk about:
> - Compatibility with Matlab's .m-file format.

We're almost 100% compatible here.

You can't save anonymous function handles but you can load them and the matlab V7.3 file format for saving 64bit files based on HDF5 is not supported. Both of these would make a nice project for someone.

> - Compatibility with Matlab mex files. (How compatible is Octave curently)

Very compatible. Then only issues I've ever come across are issues
related to GCC not being compatible with MSVC. This means a lot of MEX
code doesn't run on Linux (but, hey, that  code wouldn't be compilable
with Matlab on Linux either).

Don't include the line

#include <matrix.h>

in your mex files. Also the mex interface in octave imposes certain copying of the data and so if you can accept that you code will be GPLed use the oct-file interface instead.


D.