Yin-Chi Chan, PhD

Yin-Chi Chan, PhD

Research Associate, Univ. of Cambridge

More software recommendations

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Some more software recommendations to go with my previous post, in no particular order:

Pureline: Beautify your terminal prompt, with Git and virtual environment information. You will need to install a font with Powerline glyphs – here is a good list of such fonts.

ngrok: Easily serve a simple website from your home computer with this free public reverse proxy service.

pipx: Install python apps in an isolated environment. I currently use this for Poetry, so that I can install additional plugins not available in the Ubuntu repos (i.e. the “python3-“) packages.

erd-editor: Good for diagramming database schemas; web and VSCode extension versions exist.

wxMaxima Computer algebra system with graphical interface and plots.

Whatsie: Whatsapp for Linux.

The Battle for Wesnoth: Completely free and open-source game, and a good one (RPG genre).

Console games

  • 2048: https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/2048
  • nskake: https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/nsnake
  • vitetris: https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/vitetris

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Salabim: a discrete-event simulation library for Python

3 minute read

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At one point in my research career, I was creating discrete-event simulation programs from scratch. I had even taught others how to do so as part of my teaching assistant duties at the City University of Hong Kong. Eventually, I discovered SimPy, which saved me the hassle of writing my own event loops, and I started teaching that as well – my GitHub contains a set of examples for this purpose. However, monitoring queues and resources in SimPy requires a bit of monkey-patching. Trying to find an existing solution, I turned to an alternate Python discrete-event simulation library called salabim.