New Blog

http://daniel-m.github.io

Wow, the last time I posted here was 2016!. For a long, long time I wanted to migrate this blog, change styles and such, like wanting for some kind of perfect moment to find the ultimate template, the ultimate contents. In the same way, several posts waited in the "drafts" folder since I wasn't completely satisfied with what was in them.

I guess, in life, we always need to balance the urges to keep improving stuff with the urges to get stuff done. Waiting for better contents and better visuals I end up doing nothing. But those times of stubborness are over (i hope) hence I want to invite my little audience to head to my new blog.

http://daniel-m.github.io

I also blog ocasionaly at http://blog.parallelo.ai, the blog for a start up I work for.

I have to thank the people who comes here to read my stuff, and the ones who had reached me out by email asking questions, that's really the kind of things that drive me to keep writing. At my new blog, I plan to add an entry every 15 days or so, feel free to read me there

Finally, thanks blogger for those years, pretending to run a blog meant (and means) a lot to me

Installation of MathGL 2.3.5 In Debian

Motivation

Despite that MathGL is included in the official Debian repositories, It is not the latest version, and the installed, library includes a lot of wrappers and features I'm unlikely to use.

What is MathGL?

As the official website states, MathGL is,

• a library for making high-quality scientific graphics under Linux and Windows.
• a library for the fast data plotting and data processing of large data arrays.
• a library for working in window and console modes and for easy embedding into other programs.
• a library with large and growing set of graphics.

Here you can see a gallery with MathGL graphics

I've used this library several times from long time ago (like in this project of Hodgking-Huxley action potential) and I think is a very nice library to generate graphics from your final binaries. For example, I've used it when my code is up and running and I want it to generate graphic output directly (png,pdf,...)

Installation

First of all, download the latest source from here, and then proceed to get the required prerequisistes.

Prerequisites

The list of prerequisites depends a lot on what you'd like to do with MathGL. I wanted to be able to work with Qt5 widgets, pdf output,gsl support (GNU Scientifical library),OpenMP, MPI, HDF5, and wxWidget support. I've installed the required libraries as root by,

To see the complete list of supported features you can read the CMakeLists.txt and look for every line containing option(enable-XYZ) so you add -D enable-XYZ when you call cmake.

Building MathGL

Once you've installed the prerequisites, you can build MathGL at the root directory of the source or simply a build directory. I like more the build approach since keeps the source directory clean.

Any errors during the cmake phase can be related to the lack of any prerequisite so keep an eye on the errors, they often say what needs to get installed or fixed.

If everything goes fine, you finally install MathGL as root by,

make install

And that's it.

Resources

• http://mathgl.sourceforge.net
  
  
• http://mathgl.sourceforge.net/doc_en/Installation.html#Installation

Neovim: Next generation vim

Motivation

I was wandering the web looking for some vim plugins that feature golang syntax and autocompletion. I found out about the neovim project and got interested on it, cause I'm a vim user. Here's what I've found.

Neovim?

Official Neovim webpage states,

Neovim is an extension of Vim: feature-parity and backwards compatibility are high priorities. If you are already familiar with Vim, see :help nvim-from-vim to learn about the differences.

After using it for more than a week I gotta say it's worth to use it. The customization is way to easy, as for performance neovim loads faster than my vim (this could be due to the installed plugins or other setups, though). The installation of plugins is pretty easy with the aid of vim-plug which can be installed by a single curl request from the command line.

Installation and use of Plugins

Detailed instructions of installation are located on my repo https://github.com/Daniel-M/nvimConfigFiles where I store my neovim configuration files. The Readme describes all steps to get Neovim up and running in Debian.

References

• https://neovim.io
• https://github.com/neovim/neovim
• https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug
• https://github.com/Daniel-M/nvimConfigFiles