Saturday, July 25, 2009

EliteBook 8730w - OpenSuse 11.1 - Multimedia keys

To have the volume multimedia keys to work on OpenSuse 11.1 and the elitebook 8730w, you will need to configure the keys with xmodmap:

put in ~/.Xmodpap:

keycode 176=XF86AudioRaiseVolume
keycode 174=XF86AudioLowerVolume
put in .kde4/Autostart/Xmodmap-autoload:
#!/bin/sh
xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap
issue:
chmod +x .kde4/Autostart/Xmodmap-autoload
You may need to check the location of your KDE Autostart directory. This can be found in System Setttings>Personal>About me.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

femio - A python reader for Finite Element Models

femio is an application that allows you to read a Finite Element Model in one of the supported formats and provide tools and functions on the model's contents. Also, it provides the required functionality to allow the user to create tools and manipulate data. Such tools are: model statistics, model image view (screen shot), keyword removal or substitution, etc.

You can see the projects home page here: femio

Femio is based on an older project of mine: abq2img. Recently, I had the need of converting an ABAQUS input model containing *PARAMETER keywords. I used the abq2img codebase and with minimal work, I was able to achieve my goal. Based on that success, I decided to revive the project and extend its functionality and capabilities to over FEM formats.

Its main advantage is that it provides the low level parsing for FE models. This allows the user to manipulate model data while not having to parse the file and provide support for keywords. Thus creating model previews in PNG format is quite easy: