Freeware I Like

My students know that I never use pirated software and I encourage them to do the same. If i do not respect intellectual property how do I expect other people to respect mine especially with my line of work. UP is big on IP nowadays but how can we prosper if our young students are not even aware that they are committing plagiarism when they cut and paste and not even cite their source? I keep reminding my students to acknowledge their sources of info or assistance in their reports in the hope that it becomes a habit with them. (Incidentally, my dear AP 186 students, you have been copying my figures in your blog reports and you didn't even cite me as the source! See Checklist No. 3.)

Since 2000 I've been looking for free educational software which I can let my students install. I learned about freeware back in 1999 when I acquired a new laptop which came with a StarOffice installer (I still have the CD with me!). This was the precursor of OpenOffice which lately is now LibreOffice.

OpenOffice was ahead of Microsoft when it came to creating pdfs of documents. By searching the net I learned how to write a book using OpenOffice.  I like its equation editor most of all. One can also perform simple calculations in tables inserted in the document.

Next I was fortunate to find Scilab, a Matlab-lookalike. It is quite suited for teaching image processing and if you have been following my blog you'll get a lot of image processing tips from me my students.

Before Adobe Photoshop CS2 became free I was already using GIMP for image processing. For video parsing I swear by Avidemux (stick to version 2.5 if you want to parse videos into image frames). For audio analysis Audacity has several processing tools.

Sketchup and Google Earth always get installed in all my laptops.

For compression, I use 7zip for those files which Windows cannot uncompress. For virtual checking of the innards of my computer I use SIW.

I'll probably add to the list (and links!) as I go along.

Checklist for Writing Manuscripts II

It is August. Yes. It means I'm suffering from migraine from reading student papers again. And to ease the pain I shall write about it once more and add to my Pet Peeves in Student Manuscripts. I last ended in No. 6 so now Dear Students Who Will Read This Post as Required Reading  if you do not want to incur my wrath when you have me check your manuscript, read and follow:

7. Equations not part of sentence (Irritation Level : 3 stars out of 5)
Equations should be treated as part of the sentence and NOT AS A FIGURE.
This is wrong:
"The hypotenuse of a triangle is shown in Equation 1. Here x is the length of the base and y is the height of the triangle.
h = sqrt { x^2 + y^2}   [1]"

This is right:
"The hypotenuse h of a triangle is given by
h = sqrt {x^2 + y^2}  [1]
where x is the length of the triangle's base and y is the height."

Need some higher authority to convince you to drop that habit? Here, read the Penn State's style for students guide on writing equations in reports.

8. Citation not part of sentence (Irritation Level : 3 stars out of 5)
Isn't it obvious that  if you write

"Such patterns appeared in the works of Rogers. [6] In other works the dominant texture is the set described by Joyce. [7] We have yet to see works on the patterns we found in the new artefact."

the references [6] and [7] appear to belong to the next sentence because they have been excluded by the period at the end of the previous sentence?

If you read journal papers at all and not just cite them blindly you'll be observant of the proper citation practice.

GRRRR