2002.06.04.txt

Hello,

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, weeks 21 may to 04 june, 2002. 

(Sorry for the persons who receive the cwn directly, I forgot lwn would
not be published last week)

1) Hevea new release
2) New Ensemble release - 1.36
3) OCaml mode for NEdit
4) ant V0.3
5) New version of Active-DVI
6) Signal analysis

======================================================================
1) Hevea new release
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Luc Maranget announced:

It is my pleasure to anounce the new, 1.06, release of HEVEA.

    HEVEA is a LaTeX to HTML translator.  The input language is a fairly
    complete subset of LaTeX2e (old LaTeX style is also accepted) and the
    output language is HTML that is (hopefully) correct with respect to
    version 4.0 (transitional)

    HEVEA web page is
    http://pauillac.inria.fr/~maranget/hevea/


With respect to previous version 1.05, there are numerous changes,
including :
      - Hevea now includes a simple-minded HTML optimizer, and a new
        command line option ``-O'' to invoke it.
        The optimizer is also available as a standalone program
       ``esponja''.

      - New (latex2e style) packages are provided, including the
        listings package for typesetting programs.

      - Image genearation in PNG format is provided.

WARNING
  To compile hevea 1.06, you need ocaml 3.04. However, three binary
  packages are available from hevea home page (Linux/RedHat, Windows and
  Solaris).

======================================================================
2) New Ensemble release - 1.36
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ohad Rodeh announced:

List,
    A new Ensemble version is now available from the system site:
      www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/Projects/Ensemble

Ensemble is a group communication system written by Cornell, and the Hebrew
University.
It allows the creation of process group wherein reliable communication
is supported. The system core is written in ML, with wrappers for
C/C++/Java.

For the most part, the new version allows much better integration with C
applications that
are multithreaded. See the system homepage for more information.

======================================================================
3) OCaml mode for NEdit
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nathaniel Gray announced:

Hello,

There may be one or two other people out there who use NEdit to write OCaml
code, so I thought I'd release the smart-indent macros and syntax hilighting
patterns that I use.

They should work with any version of NEdit after 5.2 and there are
installation instructions at the top of each file.

The macros/patterns can be found here:
http://floating.caltech.edu/~n8gray/code/index.html

For more information on OCaml:
http://www.ocaml.org

For more information on NEdit:
http://www.nedit.org

======================================================================
4) ant V0.3
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Achim Blumensath announced:

Hello,

I'm pleased to announce the release of ant version 0.3. The archive can be
found at

  www-mgi.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~blume/Download.html

ant is a typesetting system inspired by TeX. It does not aim at complete
compatibility with TeX but focuses instead on a flexible, clean, and
modular design.

This release is the first version of ant I consider usable. It has been
rewritten in OCaml and implements most features of (pure) TeX -- major
exceptions being marks, insertions, and tables (i.e., no floats and
footnotes yet). As a side effect of the translation, also the runtime
was drastically reduced.

Achim

PS: Yes, I do know about Apache Ant.

======================================================================
5) New version of Active-DVI
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Pierre Weis announced:

Active-DVI is a presenter and previewer for texts or slides written in LaTeX,
hence the presentation tool of choice for the discriminating hacker.

Version 1.2.0 is now available. As the release number shows, this is a
major improvement w.r.t version 0.4.0 of Active-DVI.

This new version has been developed by Jun Furuse, Didier Rémy and
Pierre Weis with also contributions by Didier Le Botlan, Roberto Di   
Cosmo, Xavier Leroy, and Alan Schmitt.

In addition to the regular features of the Active-DVI previewer:

   * Encapsulated Postscript File inclusion
     (using the graphics LaTeX package)

   * Some effects for presentation (pause, delay, text color change)

this release introduces a lot of new features

   * Interactive demos, via launching of applications from within the slides

   * Background colors and background images for slides

   * Annotations of texts (visible when the mouse is on the annotated text)   

   * Hyper references within the same document or to other dvi files

   * Animated transitions from slide to slide

   * Text movements within the slide

   * Recording of text and arbitrary playback of recorded elements

   * Superposition effects for included images (alpha channels and blending)

   * A manual

   * A lot of examples, including talks using popular LaTeX packages seminar
     and prosper (cf. http://prosper.sourceforge.net/).

   * A new user's interface in the redesigned LaTeX package advi.sty.

Play advi on the demonstration presentation demo.dvi that is in the test
directory of the distribution. Look at source code of various talks in
the directory ``examples''.

The source code, RPM packages, and information are available at

    http://pauillac.inria.fr/activedvi/

Contributions and comments are warmly welcome.

Mailing list advi-list-request@pauillac.inria.fr
Bug reports to advi-bugs@pauillac.inria.fr

======================================================================
6) Signal analysis
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Alessandro Baretta asked:

Hello.

I need some advice on a project I will have to start in a
few days. I need to write code to perform spectral analysis
of digital signals. I do not know the details yet, but I
know that I will have to perform Fourier trasformations on
fairly large arrays, let us say in the neighborhood 2^16
samples. Since the data comes from text files, I would like
to use Ocaml/Ocamllex/Ocamlyacc, but will I be able to
perform the numerical part at a decent speed? I realize
"decent" here could mean just about anything, but since I
have no real time specs, I simply have to crunch the data
fast enough (on a fast enough PC) so as to prevent the user
from getting exceedingly bored and frustrated between
commands. Are there any optimized FFT (and signal analysis)
libraries for Ocaml, or should I code the whole thing from
scratch?

I would appreciate any ideas from anyone having some
previous signal analysis experience with Ocaml.

Thank you very much.

Berke Durak answered:

Hello,

FFTW is really fast, but i've had trouble binding to it, so I ripped
the FFT code from Scheme's SLIB. The result is a small program that
displays in pseudo colour the spectrogram of a 16-bit raw audio
file, using Bigarray and Graphics :

        http://perso.wanadoo.fr/berke/caml/

BTW, couldn't someone hack FFTW to generate Caml code ? I mean, what's
the point of using C ?

Markus Mottl added:

Interfacing to the FFTW-library is indeed awful, because of many options
that interact in fancy ways. Making a half-descent OCaml-library for
FFT-routines using the FFTW would probably take a couple of days full-time
(too long for me, I am more into symbolic stuff ;).

You can grab my unfinished attempt from here:

  http://www.oefai.at/~markus/tmp


======================================================================

Alan Schmitt