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KDE Conquers Astrophysics With Kst
Telex4 writes "The Free Software community is constantly inundated with interesting new projects, but occasionally something crops up which is really special. Kst is just such a project. Started by Barth Netterfield, an astrophysicist, as a personal project to plot data from his experiments, it has now taken on a life of its own, being used in numerous academic projects, and finding funding from several government agencies. Intrigued by this project's success, and with a little prod from co-developer George Staikos, I interviewed Barth and George about kst, Free Software and physics."
I suppose its slightly better than KastroPhysics.
It's easy to generate png/pdf/ps plots and they look really nice.
For the record, I had nothing to do with this.
As in "konquered astrophysiks"? How else can I tell that it was written for KDE?
The author used Linux/KDE because that is what he was familiar with when he developed it. Its not suprising since universities are very UNIX centric. But that doesn't necessarily mean KDE is better suited for this type of application. In my opinion, no operating system/window manager will really have any significant advantages since the bulk of the work is number crunching. It could of easily been done in Win32.
Why didn't the article headline read, "KDE Konquers Astrophysicists with Kst?"
On a more serious note: This question wouldn't arise if KDE people didn't insist on prefixing EVERYTHING with "K." Of course, same goes for GNOME folks prefixing everything with "G." Why is this necessary?
RTFA!
kst1.png
kst2.png
Keep your eyes to the sky.
It looks good, but I'm skeptical about its usefulness for me. ROOT already produces damn good output and fills most of my needs. And for everything else there's gnuplot.
But I will look at kst. If it's as good as they say it is, I may use it instead of gnuplot.
We need to stop creating all of these astrophysics programs for Linux and develop the ones we have now!
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
... to plot how quickly his site gets slashdotted. ;)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
I thought they were looking to find the Grand Gnunified Theory.
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Anyone else not able to read the instructions because its MIME type is text/html?
Pst (pronounced pissed...or post, depending on who you ask) is a Python fork of the now-popular kst program. Instead of astrophysics, it endeavors to plot a graph of aggression among IT employees.
Finding absolutely no funding from anyone, including government agencies, the project has taken a life of its own among overworked volunteer developers. These Pst programmers work dilligently on the code while concurrently providing enough test data to plot.
Due to its popularity, a port using Microsoft Foundation Classes is in the works. Rumor has it that it will be called MFT (pronounced miffed). A C port is also being made -- and their sourceforge project is located at ifuckinhateusers.sourceforge.net
I used <a href="https://www.wavemetrics.com">Igor</a&g t; as an undergrad for most of my data plotting and graphing (physics), but the interface was not intuitive and without knowing the command-line language, navigating the menus took a very long time, even when you knew what you were looking for. Also, the price ($400 for the latest version) kept me away from using it off campus. Now I tend to stick to <a href="http://root.cern.ch/">ROOT</a> simply because its Cint interpreter is ideal for handling the massive (10^6 n-tuples) amount of data I look over, and because it's free. However, making advanced graphs and plots with ROOT requires a whomping manual and a fairly good grasp of C, as there are virtually no point-and-click features to it. I'm really glad another open-source data manipulation program is in the works, and that it can do the things ROOT can as easliy as Igor can without the emense price restrictions.
/*No comment*/ #No comment
While I agree that the Motif app looks a little outdated, the app is free as in GPL and is really powerful in terms of features. For example, it allows scripting.
For the uninformed ones like me, why exactly are you required to sign an NDA? Isn't science based on sharing information? What am I missing here? How can a researcher be told how to run their research? I don't understand where that power comes from.
Does the functionality overlap with sm or gnuplot?
Like could I consider using kst to replace sm?
Sometimes I think myself lucky that all I need is chalk and a blackboard...
So that's "all" you need? A good blackboard is quite expensive. And if you want a sliding set of blackboards, the cost becomes huge.
Best stick to pen and paper, my friend.
Yes, when "accurate statement" means "complete bullshit troll".
Can't do research without money (for the most part). Can't get published unless you have credibility. Can't have credibility unless you have peer review. Can't have peer review unless you have peers. Can't have peers unless you're at a University from which you get funded.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Most universities have the policy that on everything you write while you are paid by them, they have the copyright. That means: no GPL possible!
I'm glad that Kst has funding from the United States government. I am however, concerned that Kst is using the GPL which restricts my ability to alter the code and make money from it.
I've already paid my taxes that funded this project. Should it not be a BSD licensed project where I can use the code however I want? Why does a tax-funded project have the ability to inflict its restrictions on me?
It's a shame that the parent comment will be modded to -1. It is Damn insightful.
You failed to connect this to the NDA being a requirement.
Because without it, your not doing the research. Essentially its because they said so, you can take it or leave it.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I take your point - most of this application, like many, is in principle doable independant of the underlying OS.
However, there are a few pluses on the side of Linux for this application.
2 GB+ files. Some versions of Win32 can do them, some can't. Some can only do it with a following wind. When you're talking scientific data, such file sizes can crop up often, if not a regular feature.
Network independance. This is less of an issue for display, but on the processing side, being able to coordinate multiple tasks, spread across many servers, from one desktop is a big win. Particualrly when it's a 'free' side effect (requires no extra programming). Four boxes are cheaper than a quad box - by quite a sizeable margin.
Which leads us on to the scheduler - with Win2K, a background number crunch task will take longer than on Linux, and impact interactive response more. That's not off the top of my head - that's based off my Linux/KDE desktop and my office mates Win2K systems doing the same tasks (computational chemistry, so essentially big matrix sums).
There's also library support. Not such a big one, as they can be ported, but it's more work that way. By libraries, I mean things like FFTW, LAPACK and BLAS.
So, that's a few areas with modest wins for unix/KDE. I'll add that headless admin for Unix is simpler than for Windows, which helps with the headless cruncher boxes, and conclude that there is a reason that unix is popular in universities, as it's got a slight edge.
Yes, it may well have been as easy to write for Win32 as KDE [0] - but in use, the linux is better for the number crunching.
[0] I wouldn't agree to that personally, but there's a degree of personal preference in there, so that's not objective.
all i get is the raw html page. using mozill 1.7b
I don't recall the case name or anything right off-hand, but I know that at least in California, that was shot down by the state Supreme Court.
bash: rtfm: command not found
While I'm sure the guys over at kdenews are happy this made it to the front page of slashdot, I'm sure they would have appreciated a little credit...
Who is "THEY"? The U.? The sponsor? Is there some pressure on the U.? What is the source of the pressure? Why is the U. interested in NDA? What if they don't get an NDA, what do they lose?
Answer my question full heartedly please.
Q: What does kst stand for?
A: The 'k' in kst stands for the same thing as the K in KDE. (ie, the letter after J and before L). The 's' and the 't' have a similar explanation.
I just notied that the guy who posted the story to kdenews was the same who submitted it to slashdot - he an do as he pleases with his own work...
My apologies.
"THEY" are whomever "YOU" are dealing with. It may be the "U." if they are the "THEY" that wishes to keep the ownership and anything related to the project, or perhaps "THEY" refers to the sponsor if technically "YOU" are working for "THEY" through the "U." In short "THEY" is whomever is asking you to sign the "NDA."
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
What does this provide that you can't do with gnuplot?
What the "HELL!"
Anyone else not able to read the instructions because its MIME type is not text/html?
Ok, please tell me, if you can, how does Philosophy of Science (and in particular, Ethics) deal with NDA's?
Isn't it a little screwy? Isn't the whole point of U. is to resist the political and monetary pressure so as to create a haven for research where thinkers are allowed and even encouraged to be free?
See, this goes back to recent posts I made. It looks to me like U.'s are going down the toylet. I'm always open for suggestions, information and other input (brick on the head, cluestick, etc.). So I am asking here in hopes of getting an answer that will make me think this way, "Aha, yes I see that NDA is a perfectly accetable practice for a scientific researcher, because of _____, and it does not indeed conflict with the ethos of Science." I'm looking for some Aha here, but all I get are vague answer that if anything, just make my current opinions stronger.
I understand that money is needed. The real question is this:
Is it better to do closed research for money or is it better to do no closed research at all? And when you answer, you might as well answer this, "Better for whom and how?"
Another piece of software that became quite a hit in academia is Gretl, the GNU Econometrics, Time-series and regression library.
It's a perfect clone of eViews, and it's free as in "just grab it"
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would have been funny, but you mixed up your nerd categorization. Clearly a Star Wars geek.
They have a tremendous selection of fresh juices
There's so much bullshit in the parent post - it's just mind boggling. First off, every NT based version of Windows supports 2GB+ files. That's since Windows NT 3.51 folks! Wake up!
Network independence section is totally bogus, too. It takes LESS bandwidth to run a Windows box through RDP these days than what a simple X app would create. It's trivial to setup and run, and guess what, Windows has a TCP/IP stack, too.
There's no reason to believe that Windows is slower at number crunching. It's faster at everything else, why would it be slower at this particular task.
Libraries DO WORK under windows, LAPACK at the very least.
I mean, Linux has its strengths, but spreading such a smelly bullshit as the parent does is just insulting to my intelligence.
Please don't take this as an insult, but you are quite naive to the ways of the Universities (note, I differentiate U niversities who get all the money for research from u niversities who either don't do much research or are primarily liberal arts institutions). Universities are more political and bureaucratic in nature than many governments. That said, I love working for one as the atmosphere inside individual departments is very laid back and lax. However, once you have to deal with people outside your department, every word you say has to be carefully chosen and your sentences engineered, not written. The fact of the matter is that departments in Universities (and there are lots) are discrete, money making enterprises (whether they are truly "for-profit" or not, semantics makes no difference on reality). Departments are at the beck and call of those who will give them money (big business or government) and will sign NDAs if the need be.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
You know, atoms just want to be free, especially the radical ones...
You open source people have to cover this or Microsoft will walk all over you.
(Satire, probably bad, noted here to CMA.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Yawn, same old third for license issues, third for introduction... Leaves just a couple sentences to what would be most interesting to a geek: what is he doing with it.
gondola pointing sensor time traces, and bolometer detector, sound more like something that a fiction author made up to this not an astro physicist, but reasonably smart. I'd be much more interested in his research and how the program works than all the boring details around the program and who uses it.
Quotes from copyright policy[1] of umich:
Ref.[2]: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=165831&hi ghlight=copyright+university
staff (e.g. server admins): "the University owns works created by staff within the scope of their employment duties"
students: "Students who create academic works [...] own the copyright [...] unless: [...] the works qualify as works made for hire in the course of employment"
So, here, you lose your copyright if you are paid for it. It seems to depend on the university though... [2]
Ref.[1]: http://www.copyright.umich.edu/print-policy.html
...the game Pyst? It was a Myst parody.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
"Isn't the whole point of U. is to resist the political and monetary pressure so as to create a haven for research where thinkers are allowed and even encouraged to be free"
Mod parent up: +5 Funny.
Modern university research is driven by money. A lot of that money comes from private industry or government grants. These are the people asking you to sign an NDA. It doesn't mean the research can't be shared, just that an agreement needs to be in place with the people doing the funding before it is shared with you.
Yet another /. article that doesn't say what the program does.
(And "It's an astrophysics program" is not sufficient.)
To be quite honest, I doubt that this is terribly different from the situation in traditional software companies, who obviously want to protect their code. The main motivation in the academic environment, however, is that you don't want your techniques used by another research group when grants are so hard to come by these days. Again, I'm glad all I deal with is a blackboard.
That's all well and good. So it seems academia is to be just another part of the corporate world. I'm just wondering about one small detail.
How is this piffling little thing called science going to get done? It doesn't work too well when scientists can't disseminate their ideas.
Can anyone comment on this compared with Gnuplot?
LaTeX and Gnuplot got me through college without having to pay for laser printing papers (the laser printers on the unix machines were free, but the ones on the PCs and Macs were a nickel a page.).
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
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People share their ideas and publish, because if they don't they don't get tenure or graduate or whatever. But there's often a big development investment involved in going from some paper published in a journal to working code. The published paper may give you the major differences between what they've done and the previous work, but most any important achievement builds on a bunch of prior work which is, say, contained in 5 other papers, which in turn were each based on 5 other papers each, and tracking all that down and getting it and translated into code can take a long time.
So say I'm the guy who published the paper -- while you're spending all your time re-implementing my previous method, I've already gone on and developed another few enhancements or a whole new method, and gotten another paper or two out of it, while you're still trying to recreate what I did last year.
So basically, just because the ideas in academia are basically open, that doesn't mean the implementations are. In fact, I've heard some math guys voice the opinion that releasing your source code is just a waste. It takes a significant time investment on your part to get it all packaged up, perhaps cleaning up the code some, and then to answer questions people have about it etc. And when it comes time for tenure review, they don't ask you how much source code you released. No, all that matters is how many journals you published in. So while you were busy cleaning up your source code for release, fixing non-critical bugs and adding non-essential features, you could have been working on the next publication instead.
Of course a lot of researchers do go all the way with openness and release source. But I've seen plenty of both strategies.
Another part of the equation is that Universities these days all want a piece of the action on anything invented within their walls. So they want you file for patents and such, and try to find people that will license those patents. And naturally a big cut of the licensing fees go to the Universtity. And then there's folks who dream of starting their own multi-million dollar spin-off technology company, so they don't want to let too many details about what they're doing to leak out until they've got all the patents lined up.
This should be illegal. Universities are funded (for the most part) by the government.. the taxpayers. They have no right to make their research unavailable to the public that funds them. Research would go faster if information was shared, and as a member of the taxpaying public, that's what I care about, not which professor gets credit for it.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
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To the anonymous poster: Would you be so kind as to explain what the asterisk and space character before the word "whatever" signify? Or do you just throw random characters in the middle of all your posts?
pick one, this pile of M$ FUD has all three. go back in your hole, you stupid fucking troll!
Mod parent [-1: Naive]
A lot of Univerities count on their research to yield money in the future. They have contracts with Biotech companies etc. to patent, license the technologies that come out of the research done on campus.
One summer I worked at a lab that had contrcts with about 3 biotech companies to test and develop new drugs. Most of the time I had no idea what the other people in the lab worked on. Protocols were kept secret, some people never presented their data and sometimes I had no idea what I was working on.
From time to time some guy from a biotech would show up with a briefcase full of vials. All they had on the label was a bar code and a string of numbes and letters. We would use them in the experiments, two weeks later he'd show up and pick up a CD with the data...
-1 Troll? That's not fair. Someone's on crack. Dunno why I even bothered to check this. But the screenshots look good, like everything else in KDE. Now if it doesn't do it already, it should be able to process a stream of data and produce graphs realtime :) Now where's the movie? :-P
/. I need to get a life.
Goodnight, to much
You know all those "Segmentation Fault" errors that ROOT gives you?
A real tool doesn't do that.
It's really very cute how enamored particle physicists are by C++. It's very fitting it turns every software construct into something they're familiar with, a particle! er, object. Too bad they can't ditch the FORTRAN habits.
"You can write bad FORTRAN in any language." - my advisor
"Real" physicists use ROOT: :-)
http://root.cern.ch
It is nice to have the choice though...
I've seen many instances of arguments between research students and faculty about open-sourcing code.
The greater problem, in my experience, has been a general lack of motivation or interest in publishing software at all. Often time software is just written as an in-house hack. Very little effort goes into generality, and even less frequently does someone go to the effort to package something up for distribution. Scientists are specialists in their particular field, and are usually not really aware of the open source community, or at least not aware that they potentially have a place within it.
however, dont ask me about the name root
R project (www.r-project.org) can do many (if not all) of what Kst is doing. And R is available fo ryears - meaning it's stable and mature.
The CERN Fortran and C++ LIbraries are GPL. They include also very good graphical tools like paw
"Started by Barth Netterfield, an astrophysicist,"
is it just me, but when i first scanned that my brain said
"Started by Battlefield Earth..."
What if they don't get an NDA, what do they lose?
Well, besides the pressure for NDAs from commercial sponsors, Barth Netterfield in the interview mentioned some completely research-based pressures. He mentioned how some researchers feel themselves to be in competition with other researchers. This can give rise to fears such as losing publication/discovery credit, and losing priority of publication, e.g. because somebody else gets in first using tools/information acquired from their scientific competitor if there is no restraint. (This is of course in addition to the losses that business sponsors fear they may suffer -- which include fear that a competitor may get the tools/information and build products and patent rights on top of them if there is no restraint in its competitive use.)
NDAs often present headaches to all concerned, and often there is difficulty in getting them written to express properly what either side wants, plus the difficulties getting both sides to agree. Careless drafting often means they are too broad or (less often perhaps) too narrow.
But the reasons why they are needed boil down to one thing in principle: that nowadays there are many things that the outside world could do with research results, that the makers of those results feel could harm their academic or commercial interests. Therefore they want some degree of controls placed on what the outside world does, the degrees and types of control vary with the situation. Perhaps in long-gone days there may have been near-consensus about scientific etiquette, and maybe that controlled some of these matters. But it seems that etiquette alone may have failed to give satisfaction often enough, and/or the world may have got more complex and overtly aggressive enough, that many people now want what should happen spelled out in writing.
-wb-
Gastrophysics !!!
(bleh, what else to do that write silly comments on Slashdot on a boring day like this...)
An extensive range of astronomy software is available through the UK's Starlink project
That doesn't mean "no GPL". If there is dual rights and the original author retains copyright, then they can still issue their copyright under the GPL.
The Uni may not like it, but that's the law.
Netterfield, Barth - I think that's an anagram for a really bad book by Scientology founder Hubbard, or the bad film by John Travolta.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
...not GPL, only GPL-compatible. His code may very well have been licenced under BSD, and the derivative work under BSD and GPL. Since the GPL only consider supersets (licences that give you more rights) compatible, the derivative work is in practice GPL licenced.
That would not prevent you from taking the BSD parts and create a derivative work using another (non-GPL) toolkit under a non-GPL licence though. This is the same logic as SCO against IBM. There are two separate works (Kst source/JFS,RCU and Qt/Unix), and because they've been combined in a derivative work (Kst/AIX), doesn't mean the Qt/Unix licence in any way affects the Kst source/JFS,RCU.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It is hardly necessary, it is however very, very Knecessary. Though I hardly kneeded to say so.
look at his username, trekkie.
I'm not insulted at all. "Naive" is just another way of saying "lacks information". And I wouldn't be asking if I didn't lack information. :)
Thanks for setting me straight. So, it looks like there is very little idealism left at the U. It seems like a mercenery camp in a sense, or like a RnD arm of a corp, like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.
This again goes back to what I was saying. We need to dump the U.s, meaning, let them become what they truly are. Let the U.s IPO and enter the free market the same way as corps do and let them be completely commercial and let's stop pretending that this is about Science. This way at least the charade will end. Because there are many (I think) young people who are deceived by all this. I'm not that young now, and even my view was skewed. I've had my suspicions, but reading some accounts here has made the hair on my neck stand up. Like the post here about biotech research, that's insane. It's downright spooky to me, like it's from some Sci. Fi. book or something.
The fact that my tax money sponsors this cr*p does not make me a happy camper.
Don't take this personally now, I blame this on pervasive human weaknesses like laziness, passivity (qualities which I humbly admit to myself), "It won't hurt any if I screw just this one little bit.", etc. The only people who stand up for their rights it seems are the one's with the money. They seem to value and treasure what they have. But the ones with ideals do not seem to value or treasure their ideals as much as those with the money treasure the money. So the financial interests end up controlling things, and the scientists basically let them.
Because to not let the financial interests control things, you'd need to make a sacrifice and to have some backbone and principles. I can't say I have these in abundance in myself, but at least, I think we should praise and value such things. In other words, I think those things, like say, Scientific ideals and ethos, are worth striving for.
And, it's got a pointless K prefix and a meaningless name. "Kst." It rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
Welcome to the brilliance of OSS marketing.
I just wanted to post my thanks here to everyone who participated in this discussion. I feel like my mind has changed (I feel like I am becoming more jaded and more cynical) as a result of it. It is definitely food for thought. Thank you!
While it's great to see that there are all sorts of free tools and software libraries that handle various types scientific computation, visualization and analysis, it is disappointing that there doesn't seem to be a 'free', integrated tool that can compete with Mathematica.
While Wolfram and his team have done some truely amazing things and produced a product that is worthy of the $1880 price tag, I am astonished that the mathematic and scientific communities have not pooled their resrouces to produce something like it (please tell me I'm wrong about this... if there's something better than Mathematica I'd love to know, especially if it can do symbolic tensor calculus).
There seem to be lots of computer science and mathematics researchers who churn out papers on computational methods for various 'hard' calculations, analysis, symbolic manipulation and visualization. C libraries, produced by their graduate students, for doing these things seem to be abundant.
As mentioned by other posters there are plenty of free graphing, plotting and analysis packages that can deal with specific areas of interest, but there doesn't seem to be a general purpose, extendable, package that can do all of that stuff the way that Mathematica can. I'm sure that Universities all over the world have enough demand for Mathematica licenses from their mathematics and physics professors alone to justify some colaborative effort to create an open tool that can do the same. In addition, a co-ordinated effort like that would provide a platform for those grad students to extend rather than just toss out another computation or analysis library that will gather dust.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
What?!?
What contribution to society? What kind of a loser are you? She is the most evil bitch to ever fuck me over, and all I can hope for is her demise.... Pre mercatur, she was using my freakin' host to fuck over guys around the globe.
Is Alice dead? Hip Hip Hoooray!!!
This has officially ruined my day..
If you look at the slide with all the swatches, there's one for "cornflower blue" Anyone who's seen "Fight Club" should find this funny. I did at least.