Introduction

Introduction and Background

My enthusiasms about the internet include acquisition and installation (and usage, I suppose :-) of free technical computing software. This category includes engineering, scientific, and mathematical software that I have used or would like to use in my own work. The interest started when I began to play with Linux. I still like playing with Linux, but I'm getting tired of figuring out how to connect to my internet service provider every time Red Hat Software puts out a new version and every time I change providers.

An interesting idea began to present itself to me. I found that more and more of the technical software for which I lust are putting out binaries for the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as for Linux and other Unix-like systems. Since the Windows 98 OS has a good dialer and all the internet service providers seem to have Windows dialers, and the internet has been absolutely key to the development and dissemination of technical computing software (albeit originally in a Unix context), I found myself becoming more and more interested in Windows-based technical computing.

This is heresy among the computing cognoscenti, I know, but there you are. I was a student until relatively recently (I finally finished my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in December 1997) and got a laptop computer relatively late in that process. My dissertation research used semidefinite programming methods applied to convex, or "convexified," optimization problems and I used Matlab software to model the systems, mainly because it was already available in the department. However their linear matrix inequality ("LMI") was not available and it was not free of charge, thus putting it out of my reach. Fortunately, equivalent open source software called LMITool, was available from INRIA in France. So I downloaded their software binaries, installed them in my own non-root directories of our Unix-box network and began happily producing lots and lots of results. Matlab may not be free, but it is good software and I used it to crunch a lot of numbers.

However... buried in the LMITool documentation, I found a reference to an open source clone of Matlab developed by the same group in France, called Scilab. This made me curious. I was focused on finishing my degree as soon as possible, so I didn't for a minute think of rejiggering the software tools I had developed using Matlab and LMITool for Scilab, but it did cause me to start investigating. I went to the Scilab web site at INRIA and noted that they have a "computer aided control system design" package named Scilab and, oh yes, it duplicates a lot of the functions and functionality of Matlab. And, by the way, in addition to source code to be compiled and installed by the user, they also provided binaries for serveral different operating systems, including MS Windows.
So, I downloaded the Windows binaries, installed it on my trusty laptop computer, which I lugged to school each morning and lugged home each night, and began to play. And... WOW! ... this was an open-source clone of Matlab!!! Have you ever priced Matlab? Even in the campus bookstore, the crippled "student" version of Matlab was over $100. To get the full version was several hundred dollars! And that price didn't include their so-called "toolboxes" which are simply packages of added capabilities, vital to my research, for... you guessed it, additional hundreds of dollars. But here was Scilab, with all of the capabilities I needed, for freeeeeee!!!!

Well, this was my own secular epiphany and I started haunting Usenet and the web looking for more cool technical computing software. Most are for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, but more and more of them are available for Windows. Maybe Linux will become accessible to more and more technically-oriented students (in terms of ease of internet access, in my opinion, the number one requirement for open source development in the near term). After all Gnome is now coming-on line, so who knows, maybe the focus of this web site will change to be more Linux-centric than Windows-centric in the medium term. However, for the moment, Windows is what comes on the laptops being snapped up by new graduate students at Circuit City at the beginning of their careers. Hence, my continuing passion (I have since graduated and am now gainfully employed again) and this website. I look at this website as an ongoing effort and a "living book."