Gretl project on the launchpad
by Ivan Sopov
Hello, gretl developers.
I'm trying to start a translation of help files into russian on
launchpad.net as it seems to be the most suitable tool to participate
for all familiars with econometrics but not with gettext, linux. cvs,
etc.
The problem is that there is already a project for gretl on launchpad
and it is strongly prohibited to start more than one project for a
single program. I cannot contact with Constantine Tsardounis for about
a month, so I think it is time to re-assign that project to someone
else. On the irc-channel of launchpad I was told that
Our admins can re-assign the project to new owners but we'd prefer to
hear from the upstream owners. can you get one of them to submit a
question here:
https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad
But if nobody from main developers wants to register and do something
at launchpad it is possible to assign this function to me and in that
case a letter in this list will probably be enough.
I have prepared a .po-file for genr_funcs.xml and gretl_commands.xml
with the help of po4a utility and got 1511 strings for translation
(strings a rather big).
Good luck, Ivan Sopov.
P.S. My previous letter about using launchpad for translation is
http://lists.wfu.edu/pipermail/gretl-devel/2009-November/002171.html
13 years, 10 months
gretl and openmp
by Allin Cottrell
As some of you know, we're currently experimenting with openmp in
gretl. When building from CVS, use of openmp is the default (if
openmp is supported on the host) unless you pass the option
--disable-openmp to the configure script. In addition the current
snapshots for Windows and OS X are built with openmp support
(using gcc 4.4.3 and gcc 4.2.4 respectively).
This note is just to inform you about the state of play, and to
invite submission of test results if people would like to do that.
Right now, we use openmp only for gretl's native matrix
multiplication. So it'll get used (assuming you have at least two
cores) if you do matrix multiplication in a script, or call a
function that does matrix multiplication (such as qform), or use a
built-in command that happens to call matrix multiplication. If we
decide it's a good idea, we could use openmp directives in other
gretl code (but as along as we rely on lapack for much of our
number-crunching, and as long as lapack is not available in a
parallelized form, the scope for threading will remain somewhat
limited).
In a typical current use situation, with gretl running on a
dual-core machine where there's little other demand being placed
on the processors, the asymptotic speed-up from openmp should be
close to a factor of two. However, it takes a big calculation to
get close to the asymptote, and we've found that with small to
moderate sized matrices the overhead from starting and stopping
threads dominates, producing a slowdown relative to serial code.
This is similar to what we found with regard to the ATLAS
optimized blas; see
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/tmp/gretl_speed.html
Anyway, in case anyone would like to test I'm attaching a matrix
multiplication script that Jack wrote. Right now this is mostly
useful for people building gretl from source, since you want to
run timings both with and without MP, which requires rebuilding.
But if you're currently using a snapshot from before yesterday
(build date 2010-03-21 or earlier) you could run the script, then
download a current snapshot and run it again.
Allin
15 years, 2 months
contributing to gretl
by Allin Cottrell
No, I'm not asking for money ;-) But I am asking for something. As
you may know, there are only two regular gretl coders, myself and
Jack Lucchetti. (Others have contributed code from time to time,
for which many thanks.) It's difficult for us to keep up with all
the coding that needs to be done and also to write all the
documentation. I'm thinking that documentation is something that
others could reasonably help with, particularly in the run-up to
gretl 2.0, which is likely to come out later this year.
So here's the suggestion. Please take a look at the Gretl User's
Guide with various questions in mind:
* Are some parts out of date? (Quite likely.) If so, see if you
can update them.
* Are there things missing? The short answer is Yes. For example,
estimation of simultaneous equations systems should have a chapter
in the "Econometric methods" part of the Guide. And I started a
chapter on forecasting but left several sections empty, partly
because I don't have time to work on this and partly because I'm
no expert on the topic. You may notice other omissions.
* Is the organization wrong? (Quite possibly.) Then give us a
suggested reorganization.
If you see something that's out of date or missing, please send us
a draft of an improvement or new text. The User's Guide is in TeX
in its source form, but you don't have to write TeX if that's
unfamiliar to you. And if you're not a native English speaker,
never mind; we can edit what you send.
I'd suggest that if you'd like to write -- or at least make a
start on -- a substantial new section of the Guide, you post to
this list announcing your intention, then we won't have duplicated
effort. When you have something ready to submit, I suggest
emailing it to myself and/or Jack in the first instance, in
whatever format you find easiest.
Allin Cottrell
15 years, 11 months
New (or fairly new) in CVS
by Allin Cottrell
I thought I might draw people's attention to a few new things in
CVS, and encourage testing:
"bundles": we have a new data type, the bundle. This was Jack's
idea, and we worked on it earlier this summer. It's mostly
intended to make life easier for writers of ambitious function
packages. It's documented in the new chapter of the User's Guide
titled "Gretl data types". (That may not the permanent home for
the bundle documentation but it'll do for now.)
filters: I've been corresponding with Stephen (D.S.G.) Pollock and
under the Filters menu for time-series data we now have two items
that he has advocated (and coded in the IDEOLOG software that he
described at last year's gretl conference). That is, the
Butterworth filter and polynomial trend fitting. The Butterworth
filter is described, with an example, in the chapter of the User's
Guide titled "Special functions in genr". Polynomial trend fitting
is, of course, something you could do in gretl before, but
Stephen's algorithm is fast and light on memory, and does not
require you to add powers of t to the dataset. It's also
numerically robust, being based on "orthogonal polynomials" rather
than linear regression on powers of time.
Both of these things are also scriptable, via new functions bwfilt
and polyfit (the first is documented, the second not yet).
A smaller thing is that in the model table you can now select the
precision of the printing in terms of digits after the decimal
point rather than total significant digits if you wish.
A larger thing is in the works and likely to be unveiled before
long, but it's not quite ready yet. Watch this space!
Allin
15 years, 12 months
String not marked for translation
by Hélio Guilherme
Hi,
Here are the lines of code with the text to translate:
./gui2/selector.c: errbox("You can't use the dependent variable as an
instrument");
./lib/src/tsls.c: gretl_errmsg_set("You can't use the dependent
variable as an instrument");
cheers,
Hélio.
15 years, 12 months
wish list
by Summers, Peter
Folks,
I've had a few things on my wish list for gretl for some time now, and in preparation for the coming semester I thought I'd finally get around to proposing them. These are features that are available on other programs that I use (matlab mostly), that I think would streamline gretl a bit (for me, anyway).
1) have some way to clear the console window (but retain the command history), like clc in matlab
2) allow formatting of rtf model output similar to what's available for LaTeX (number of digits reported, etc)
3) allow matrices to be copied or exported from the icon view to excel, latex, csv, etc. Being able to control the number of digits would be nice here too.
Any thoughts?
PS
===============================
Dr. Peter Summers
Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
Texas Tech University
===============================
15 years, 12 months
Translation Question
by Henrique Andrade
Dear Allin,
Excuse me for my lack of knowledge, but I would like to know if the line
"Choi meta-tests:" is a typo (Choi or Chow)?
Best,
--
Henrique C. de Andrade
Doutorando em Economia Aplicada
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
www.ufrgs.br/ppge
16 years
Ox files problem
by Henrique Andrade
Dear Gretl Team,
Open an Ox file (File -> Script files -> New script -> Ox program) it is not
possible if the name of the extension is written using capital letters.
Please take a look at the example below:
Lowercase.ox (Gretl can find the file and can open it)
Uppercase.OX (Gretl cannot find the file)
Is this a bug?
Best,
Henrique C. de Andrade
Doutorando em Economia Aplicada
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
www.ufrgs.br/ppge
16 years
Translation
by Henrique Andrade
Dear Allin,
The string, "To add your own \"bars\" to a plot, you must supply the name of
a plain text file containing pairs of dates." is marked for translations,
but when we use the option in Gretl plot controls (Show bars -> other) it
appears in English.
Best regards,
Henrique C. de Andrade
Doutorando em Economia Aplicada
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
www.ufrgs.br/ppge
16 years
Problem with LaTeX doc compilation
by Marcin Błażejowski
Hi,
today I've tried to build new pdfdocs and get following error:
-------------------------
LaTeX Warning: Reference `fig:QNCfilt' on page 31 undefined on input
line 266.
! LaTeX Error: File `figures/QNCpergm' not found.
See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type H <return> for immediate help.
...
l.271 ...degraphics[scale=0.85]{figures/QNCpergm}} \\
-------------------------
Marcin
--
Marcin Błażejowski
http://www.wrzosy.nsb.pl/~marcin/
GG# 203127
16 years
