Oh, my gosh...I couldn't edit your file in Program Files for some reason,
but when I move the program to the Jeff folder, I can? That's bull. A GPL
program I can't edit? I think XP had an option where one could make the
program files editable, but I never found it in Vista. Who would imagine
that the OS itself would be an obstacle to editing the software? That's just
another reason I wish I had Ubuntu or gNewSense.
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:38, Jeffrey Hankins <jhankin1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, I'll try to be more considerate next time. I like Maxima because it
> can do almost everything Maple can do without the hangup of being
> proprietary, overpriced software, so it would be nice if I could contribute
> to its development. Thanks for hearing out my suggestions. I can submit
> stuff like horsepower and cups for inclusion (I don't think too many people
> would be interested in the joke unit). Right now, I'm on my office computer,
> and the graduate student accounts don't let us install anything. It's sad,
> really-I have access to both Maple and Maxima, but not simultaneously. (Same
> thing with TeX compilers-my office computer has WinShell while my apartment
> computer has TeXnicCenter.)
>
> I noticed that irrational conversion factors are allowed, which makes it
> easy to define conversions like RPM->rad/s.
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 11:34, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On 6/22/10, Jeffrey Hankins <jhankin1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Okay...now let's get one thing straight first. I love your package. It
>> > reminds me of a similar feature that existed on the TI-89, and it seems
>> to
>> > be a more complete version of the units package which also exists in
>> Maxima.
>> > I like how simple and freeform it is, and I've been adding plenty of
>> units
>> > to the somewhat incomplete listing (including some related to luminous
>> > intensity, which was the only fundamental dimension that ezunits did not
>> > know about).
>>
>> Yeah, I didn't try to include lots and lots of units.
>> If you're willing to contribute the stuff you've written to the Maxima
>> project, I can take a look to see what could be merged into Maxima.
>>
>> > That being said, I was once trying to add the horsepower to ezunits, but
>> I
>> > noticed that it would come out to 741 point something watts whereas
>> > Wikipedia (and onlineconversion.com) had 745.7 W. After some
>> investigation,
>> > I traced the problem to the built-in definitions of pound-mass and
>> > pound-force-they were not accurate enough to give Wikipedia's conversion
>> > rate for the horsepower. I thought I could get around it by declaring
>> more
>> > accurate conversion factors, but ezunits will not overwrite the old
>> ones.
>> > With both the old and new factors stored, the pound units no longer work
>> > properly. It would have been nice if a "remove_unit_conversion" feature
>> > existed. Other than that, I have not found any problems.
>>
>> I put in 32 feet/s^2 as the gravitational acceleration in the definition
>> of pound force. Probably the easiest way to fix it is to find ezunits.mac
>> in your Maxima installation and change the 32 to 41408/1287
>> (derived from 980.665 cm/s^2). I'll commit that change soon so it
>> will be in the next release.
>>
>> There could be a remove_unit_conversion, or declare_unit_conversion
>> could just be more careful to remove any existing declaration, or both
>> I guess.
>>
>> Thanks for your interest in ezunits. I would be interested to see
>> some examples of how you are using it.
>>
>> Also for what it's worth please post messages related to Maxima
>> stuff to the Maxima mailing list instead of to me personally.
>> That way other people have the opportunity to take a look at it.
>> I don't always have time to deal with stuff.
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>> Robert Dodier
>>
>
>