Main Page

View between the two wings of the Fitzpatrick Center

Welcome!

Welcome to the Pratt FAQ, hosted at pundit.pratt.duke.edu. If you are new here, you may want to start out by reading the Pratt Wiki Introduction.

NEWSFLASHES

Printing from LaTeX Documents

Due to an error in okular/CIFS and a missing program for evince, the process for actually printing a LaTeX document has changed slightly. Further documentation coming soon but the summary is:

• latex file.tex
• dvips -t letter file.dvi
• evince file.ps &

Now, any time you want to re-process the file, you need to run both latex and dvips on it to get a new version of the ps file. Fortunately, evince will load any new ps file that comes up. You can then print from evince without any troubles. Admittedly, one more run is required but at least it works!

CIFS Does Not Work With VCL

The Linux Lab 2011 lab uses AFS-style directories, so once your home directory is converted to CIFS, you cannot use the 2011 Linux Lab.

Remote Graphics Fixed!

MATLAB's surf, surfc, mesh, and meshc command are again working remotely on matrices large and small. Much thanks to OIT for making that happen! 16:58, 7 November 2012 (EST)

kdvi and kghostview and acroread are gone!

21:32, 27 August 2012 (EDT) kdvi, kghostview, and acroread have all been replaced with okular, so instead of

kdvi blah.dvi &

use

okular blah.dvi &

Note that okular requires the file extension and can read .dvi, .eps, .ps, and .pdf files. Also note! okular has an issue printing things. In order for printing to work, after choosing to print and setting everything up (which pages, print to lp0 or PDF, file name if applicable) you MUST click on the Properties button, then OK, then Print. You do not need to change any properties, you just have to go through that dialog box.

Maple / xmaple are different!

17:52, 28 August 2012 (EDT). To use Maple 15, you will need to run xmaple15 & as the command. xmaple & will run Maple version 14.

Others

Anything of urgent concern will go here. Also see OIT Alerts as well as Dr. G's Machine States page for more information about possible outages.

• Some course numbers have been updated; others haven't. Work in progress!

Purpose

This wiki is specifically devoted to asking and answering questions Pratt students may have about computational methods, MATLAB, LaTeX, and other software or hardware tools typically used in engineering classes. As a start, there is an EGR 103 Startup page for people new to Pratt and in EGR 103 and there is a Welcome Back page for people who need some reminders about how things work or where they are.

We will also include Pratt-specific information about Student Groups, Recommended Hardware, and things of that nature. Finally, some classes will use pages on the wiki as reference material - these classes will show up as categories on the bottom of relevant pages, and the pages will be collected in a category page, such as the one at Category:EGR 103. Note, however, that this is not a general Duke wiki - for that, please see the Duke Wiki, hosted by Andrew Tutt.

Front entrance to Fitzpatrick Center

Front entrance to Hudson Hall

Front entrance to Teer Building

Class Pages

For Fall 2012, there are class pages for Computational Methods in Engineering (EGR 103) and Fundamentals of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE 110).

Top entrance to Vinik Building

Getting Help Working With Wikia

This wiki uses MediaWiki, the same program used by Wikipedia. If you are familiar with that program, you are pretty much good to go here. If not, the Wikipedia Tutorial should come in very handy, especially the parts on editing, formatting, and talk pages. Wikimedia also has a list of help pages for editors.

Asking Questions

Post your questions by editing the discussion page of an article - just click on the discussion tab at the start of the article. Edit the page, then scroll to the bottom and add a question by putting in the characters {{Q}}, followed by your question and finally your signature (with four tildes, i.e. ~~~~). Using the {{Q}} will automatically put the page in the category of pages with questions - you can see this page at Category:Questions. Other editors hoping to help out can then go to that category page to see where the questions are. See the page for the Q Template for details and examples.

For general questions, go to the General Questions page. You should still use the {{Q}} template as well as your signature.

What Can You Do?

At present, there are three places to check out areas identified as needing help. One is the To Do list, which will be a running update of wiki-centric tasks such as which templates and categories have been added. Another is the Projects page, where people can either request additions to the site or look to see possible new pages to create. With respect to the latter, the Wanted Pages page will automatically list any dead-end links that need pages.

Finally, people can use the Q Template on talk pages to place the page on a category page called Category:Questions - go there and you will see pages with as-yet open questions. If you answer a question, please consider using the A Template to let folks know you have answered a question.

Third floor of the Atrium in the Fitzpatrick Center

What Can We Do?

The Community Portal is a good place to discuss the future of this site. As an example, the first discussion in the portal concerns how best to organize "frequently asked questions" - feel free to jump into that conversation or start a new one!

Contacts

This site is primarily a project of Dr. Michael Gustafson (whose typical screen name is DukeEgr93). If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, you can contact him via e-mail at mrg(at)duke(dot)edu or by leaving a message on DukeEgr93's talk page.