TeachingLaboratory Notes AddendumThis web page presents a collection of additional information to supplement the Theory and Lab course textbooks and enrich your student experience. Computational ElectromagneticsThe advancement of computer development gave birth to a variety of computational sciences including Computational Electromagnetics (CEM). Application of computer power allows to solve complex scientific problems. Transforming pure Mathematics into discretised algorithms, programming the algorithms and running them in a parallel manner on a number of computers are the typical tasks of a computational science. X11 ForwardingA step-by-step guide on fetching graphical output from Linux to Windows and Linux to Linux. Required Software:
You can install Linux on your home computer and connect via ssh to the course Linux server. This way you will be able to work from home. The X Window Server such as Exceed is required on Windows machine to set up remote connections with graphical output. Exceed is a licenced commercial software. You have to pay for a licence to install Exceed on your home machine. Therefore the easiest way to work on your assignments remotely is by using one of the University computer clusters. All University computers have the same software installed. Find the nearest cluster and work from there. Follow the instructions in your Labs textbook (Chapter 1, pp. 7–12) on how to connect to the course Linux server. Essential Linux commandsRead chapters 19 and 36 in the openSUSE 10.3 Reference to boost up your command-line utilities knowledge.
TypesettingOne of the most popular and powerful text editors on Linux is emacs. Although you may use it the same way as you would use any Windows text editor, emacs is aimed towards a keyboard usage. Most of emacs text editing features are accessible via keyboard command combinations. Therefore completing the emacs built-in tutorial is strongly recommended. To start the tutorial you have to launch emacs, then press Ctrl+h together, release all buttons and press t. Estimated practise time is about 60–90 minutes. You may print out the emacs reference card after completing the tutorial. The emacs learning curve is steep, but once you learn the commands it will speed up your work dramatically. To get a full flavour of the academic style text editing you may compile your assignment reports in LaTeX. LaTeX is a very powerful document markup language similar to HTML. The LaTeX Wikibook will help you to master the typesetting basics. User Activity LoggingUse Linux utility script prior to starting any work on your assignment. Supply the log file name using the option -a <file name>:
Type exit to finish the execution of script. Starting script with -a and the same file name will append all current user activities to the old file. This way you will keep the full log of all commands you executed. You may use the script log file as a remainder while compiling your lab assignment. Keep your assignment log files in corresponding lab directories. Fourier TransformA collection of Wolfram's Research articles will refresh your knowledge on:
Netpbm Image File FormatsPortable Gray Map (PGM) and Portable Pix Map (PPM) are the basic graphical formats widely used in the scientific domain. Both parts of the Netpbm image file formats, PGM represents the data in gray-scale and PPM—in the Red Green Blue (RGB) colour model. Text ProcessingLinux is well-known for its powerful command-line text processing capabilities. Although the Lab exercise book gives you the basic commands to use in the assignments, working through the sed and awk tutorials is advisable:
Recommended ReadingS.M. Rao and N. Balakrishnan Clifford C. Shang Kane S. Yee, Allen Taflove and Susan C. Hagness, Daniel J. Barrett, Student Email ListAn email list EPS-CEST@listserv.manchester.ac.uk was created to encourage communication between students taking the course. Using the list you may share the information, ask questions and help each other. Send the following email to subscribe:
Send a sign off request to unsubscribe:
You will receive a confirmation message as soon as you request the list subscription. Follow the instructions in the newly received email. Please allow some time for a confirmation message to arrive. Finally, use the list email address EPS-CEST@listserv.manchester.ac.uk to send your message to all members of the list. Learn and follow the efficient question asking guidelines published by Eric Steven Raymond. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||