For about the past week, I am finally a proper Illinoisan, having at last gotten my local drivers license. It is quite a different experience from California, where they send you everything by mail usually much later than they promise. Here we got our licenses and the plates and all on the spot. I have to admit the test and application had some logically nonsensical questions. For example there is a question that says something to the effect of "Do you drink alcohol such that it inhibits your driving ability?" Now you have to answer no to this else they won't give you the license. Some idiot didn't think the question through logically. Of course I drink to the point where it would inhibit my driving ability. The question is: do I drive after that? But what they asked didn't have this component, thus anybody but an abstinent must lie to get an Illinois drivers license. Or if you are sure that drinking does not affect your driving ability, then you can answer no to the question, and still get hammered and drive drunk without having lied on your application. Hmmm...

After several weeks of not being able to produce anything useful, I've made a whole bunch of updates to genius and made a 1.0.0 release. It's not that it's so much more featureful than 0.7.7, but hell, it's been 10 years now, there ought to be a 1.0.0 release one of these days. I know I made a pledge to not release until it can do eigenvalues/eigenvectors in general, but I'm not sure when I will implement that. There is RQI code in there now, so you can get an eigenvalue and an eqigenvector for a general matrix, but I suppose the correct solution is to hook it up to some lapack code or some such. libgsl has some matrix stuff for double precision which I suppose would be fine, but it doesn't yet do arbitrary complex matrices either and I was too lazy to hook it up. Plus I'd need to depend on fairly new libgsl ...

I've made them install genius and maxima on all the linux boxes in the UIUC math department even though most people here use Mathematica since Wolfram is here in town. Strange as it seems, there are actual genius users out there, so perhaps it is time to make their ranks larger (no pun intended).

I'm also still working on a paper on which I was working when I last wrote a blog entry. I've yet again made the theorems slightly stronger in hopes of improving exposition (doesn't that sound weird). So it's still not arxiv ready I don't think for another week or so. So far people that have seen it like it.