Hi. I emailed this list a while ago about possible subject matter for a final year project in engineering (<a href="http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?group=gmane.comp.python.scientific.user&amp;article=8498">http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?group=gmane.comp.python.scientific.user&amp;article=8498
</a>). There was no project resulting directly from the mailing list, but I have now started a project concerning the correction of xray diffraction data using python. It will mainly be concerned with designing a good user interface, but could also involve interpolation and plotting, so I want to see what I can do with scipy in a reasonable time to do this.
<br><br>The installation instructions on the wiki are a bit confusing. I'm inclined to get the optimised packages, so:<br><br>&gt; To build <a href="http://scipy.org/SciPy">SciPy</a> using optimized
lapack and blas on the ubuntu system you should install atlas-3dnow-dev
or atlas-sse2-dev or atlas-sse3-dev depending on your system.<br><br>But those packages are not available in the repos available to me. There are others with similar names, but I'm not certain which to choose. What characteristics of my system will affect this?
<br><br>&gt; atlas2&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas2-sse-dev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas3-headers&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas-dev<br>&gt; atlas2-3dnow-dev&nbsp; atlas3-3dnow&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas3-sse&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas-doc<br>&gt; atlas2-base-dev&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas3-3dnow-dev&nbsp; atlas3-sse2&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas-test
<br>&gt; atlas2-dev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas3-base&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas3-sse2-dev<br>&gt; atlas2-headers&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas3-base-dev&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas3-sse-dev<br>&gt; atlas2-sse2-dev&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas3-doc&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; atlas3-test<br><br>On an unrelated matter, I'm already using the numpy deb package provided at 
<a href="http://astraw.com">astraw.com</a>, and as a learning excercise started making a mechanics of materials module for tensor calculations. I'm not sure if numpy/scipy already provides such functions, so I don't know if this is reinventing the wheel. To calculate the sencond scalar invariant, I thought an easy way would be to calculate the trace of the adjoint of the stress tensor I define. When I went to do it though, I couldn't find any functions in numpy to get an adjoint of a matrix, or get cofactors. Are these functions available in numpy or scipy? I've got it working now by multiplying the inverse of the matrix by the determinant, but if there's a better way I'd like to know. Also, I'd like to assess the validity of such a stress matrix by checking if it's symmetric, but I haven't seen any way to do that either. I thought there might be a 
foo.isSymmetric() bool, but there doesn't seem to be, so I tried doing a comparison, if foo == foo.T: etc., but comparison of matrices doesn't seem to work either. Is the only way to compare them to loop over them using regular python methods?
<br><br>Thanks for help on this. I may be seen a bit more on this mailing list once I get into the computation parts of this project. Is there any interest in using #scipy on freenode?<br><br>Thanks,<br><br>Steve<br>