Next: Qn-Qz Up: Linux Software Encyclopedia Previous: Pn-Pz Contents

Qa-Qm

Last checked or modified: Oct. 8, 1998

Q: Q is both a high-level programming language and a common run-time system for very-high-level languages. As a language the features of Q include:

the use of generalized sequences (finite or infinite, sorted or calculated on demand) to avoid explicit looping;

lexical scoping;

some support for logical and constraint programming;

and the capability of either being compiled into C++ or interpreted interactively.

The syntax was designed to make it a convenient interactive command language, i.e. a macro facility together with primitives to run programs is used to make an interactive command language with full shell features. Q is written in C++ and consists of a hierarchical set of classes for representing numbers, functional closures, collections, files, symbols, etc. It also has functions that implement Common Lisp and Scheme functionality, giving it the flavor of a run-time system for very-high-level languages.
Further Q features include:

multiple data types like Lisp, e.g. numbers, vectors, strings, 1st-class functions, etc.;

APL-like vector operations;

abstract general sequences (like APL arrays or Smalltalk collections);

streams computation using lazy memoized vectors;

infinite-precision rational arithmetic;

integration with UNIX (e.g. shell features, a file is a character sequence, a program is a kind of function); and

the capability of mixing Q, Common Lisp or Scheme with C++.

The source code for Q is available along with documentation in Texinfo format. It appears that the distribution hasn't been changed since 1994, so this may be a dead project.
[ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/home/bothner/Q/]
[ftp://ripem.msu.edu/pub/bignum/]
QBPGEN: A Fortran 77 package for generating sparse or dense quadratic bilevel programming problems with a selectable number of known global and local solutions. This is TOMS algorithm 728 and is documented in Calamai and Vicente (1994b) and Calamai and Vicente (1994a).
[http://www.acm.org/calgo/contents/]
[http://www.netlib.org/toms/index.html]
QccPack: The quantization, compression and coding package is a collection of library routines and utility programs for quantization, compression and coding of data. It is meant to provide flexible and general implementations of procedures commonly used on coding and compression applications.
The library routines and utility programs are partitioned into several modules based on functionality including:

QccPack, general prupose tools for data types and file formats, string and error handling, binary values, file access, vector mathematics, etc.;

QccPackENT, a module for entropy coding;

QccPackSQ, a module for scalar quantization;

QccPackVQ, a module for vector quantization;

QccPackAVQ, a module for adaptive vector quantization;

QccPackIMG, a module for image processing and manipulation; and

QccPackWAV, a module for working with wavelets.

Source and binary RPM versions are available. Documentation is included in the distribution in the form of man pages.
[http://beaujolais.ece.msstate.edu/~fowler/QccPack/]
QCDMPI: A simulation code for pure QCD (quantum chromodynamics) Monte Carlo simulations using the MPI message passing library. The code is written in Fortran 77.
[http://murodoh.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/QCDMPI/]
Qddb: This is a database suite that allows for the creation of relations, adding tuples, modifying tuples, deleting tuples, and searching for tuples in a fast and flexible way. It supports various search techniques like regular expressions, words and word ranges, numbers and number ranges, and dates and date ranges, and approximate matching is a planned addition. It can use Tcl/Tk as a configuration language, allowing the development of custom built interfaces, and also has a generic interface. The first draft of a manual (as of 1/96) is also available at the site. An article about Qddb can be found in the February 1998 issue of the Linux Journal.
[ftp://ftp.hsdi.com/pub/qddb/sources/]
[http://www.hsdi.com/qddb/]
QHacc: A personal accounting or bookkeepping package written using the Qt 2.0 toolkit. The features include:

single- or double-entry bookkeepping;

type-ahead text boxes;

a reconciliation window; and

a mildly configurable interface.

This is available under the GPL.
[http://www.ostrich-emulators.cx/~ryan/qhacc/]
Qist: This software, formerly called IDEA and Vinea, is an SGML document engineering utility for X11. It is written using Tcl/Tk and features a graphical user interface for manipulating SGML documents. Vinea provides a common framework for using three SGML tools: sgmls, the QUERTZ DTD, and the format toolkit. The parts of these tools needed for Vinea to function are provided with the distribution. The use of Vinea also requires that your system has TeX, LaTeX, Ghostview, xdvi and Emacs already installed, although these are pretty much standard features of most Linux distributions. Note: this URL currently (10/98) gives a message indicating no permission for access. I've looked for it elsewhere to no avail. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
[http://www.sci.fi/~ssl/qist/]
QLAY: An emulator for the Sinclar QL computer. Versions are available for Win95, DOS, and Linux.
[http://web.inter.NL.net/hcc/A.Jaw.Venema/]
QLinux: A Linux kernel enhanced with quality of service (QoS) algorithms. The features of QLinux include:

a Hierarchical Start Time Fair Queueing (H-SFQ) CPU scheduler that enables hierarchical scheduling of applications by fairly allocating CPU bandwidth to individual applications and application classes;

a Hierarchical Start Time Fair Queueing (H-SFQ) network packet scheduler that provides rate guarantees and fair allocation of bandwidth to packets from individual flows as well as flow aggregates, i.e. classes;

a lazy receiver processing (LRP) network subsystem that enables accurate charging of TCP/UDP protocol processing overhead to the appropriate process; and

a Cella disk scheduling algorithm that supports multiple application classes such as interactive best-effort, throughput-intensive best effort, and soft real-time as well as fairly allocating disk bandwidth to these classes.

These features replace the standard schedulers available in Linux, and any combination thereof can be compiled into a kernel. The current (6/99) version is based on the 2.2.0 kernel. Documentation includes a set of man pages as well as several technical reports available in PostScript format. See Goyal et al. (1996a), Goyal et al. (1996b), Druschel and Banga (1996) and Shenoy and Vin (1998).
[http://www.cs.umass.edu/~lass/software/qlinux]
qmail: A secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent meant as a replacement for the sendmail/binmail system on typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts. Qmail was designed to plug the security holes in sendmail and other mail transfer agents (MTA), and its straight-paper-path philosophy guarantees that a message will never be lost once it is accepted into the system. It also supports maildir, a new and reliable user mailbox format which won't be corrupted if a system crashes during delivery. Additionally, a user can not only safely read his mail over NFS but any number of NFS clients can deliver mail to him at the same time.
Qmail is also very efficient in that it can handle enormous volumes of incoming e-mail, with the capability of overlapping 20 simultaneous deliveries by default so it can move quickly through mailing lists. It is much smaller than any other Internet MTA since: it has one simple forwarding mechanism which lets users handle their own mailing lists (instead of separate mechanisms for forwarding, aliasing and mailing lists); only one delivery mode, i.e. fast+queued, rather than a spectrum of delivery modes since the send mechanism is instantly triggered by new items in the queue; and a design that inherently limits the machine load which makes extras (e.g. a specialized version of inetd that watches the load average) unnecessary so it can run safely from the system inetd.
The mailing list management features Qmail include:

each user handles his own mailing lists;

it is easy to set up mailing list owners;

support for VERPs which permit reliable bounce handling;

speed that is an order of magnitude faster than sendmail;

automatic prevention of mailing list loops, even across hosts;

no limits other than hardware on mailing list size;

handling of aliasing and forward with a simple mechanism; and

support for the ezmlm mailing list manager.

Other features of Qmail include:

security features such as minimization of setuid and root code, five-way trust partitioning, and optional logging of one-way hashes, entire contents, etc.;

message construction features such as full support for address groups, a sendmail hook for compatibility with current user agents, host and user masquerading, etc.;

SMTP service features include 8-bit clean, relay control to stop unauthorized relaying by outsiders, automatic recognition of local IP addresses, hop counting, etc.;

queue management features such as instant handling of messages, a split queue directory so there is no slowdown with big queues, independent message retry schedules, automatic safe queueing, automatic per-recipient checkpointing, automatic queue cleanups, queue viewing, etc.;

local delivery features include a user-controlled address hierarchy, mbox delivery, reliable NFS delivery, user-controlled program delivery, optional new mail notification, conditional filtering, etc.;

routing by domain features include any number of names for the local host, any number of virtual domains, domain wildcards, a UUCP hook, etc.

The distribution includes the source code, written in C, and man pages in troff and HTML format. Quite a few ancillary packages that work with qmail have been written and are described at the site.
[http://www.qmail.org/]
[ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/qmail.html]
[http://Web.InfoAve.Net/~dsill/lwq.html]
[http://qmail-docs.surfdirect.com.au/]

ezmlm

A high-speed and easy to use mailing list manager for Qmail whose features include:

letting users set up their own mailing lists within Qmail's address hierarchy,

automatically processing subscribe and unsubscribe requests,

automatically archiving new messages,

reliably determining the recipient address and message number for every incoming bounce message,

making it easy for users to control mailing lists,

reliably stopping forwarding loops,

reliablity even during system crashes, and

handling huge mailing lists.

[ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/ezmlm.html]

Install-Qmail

A script for installing Qmail along with the ancillary programs required for it to operate correctly.
[http://members.xoom.com/xeer/]

qmailanalog

A collection of tools for analyzing Qmail activity records. The functionality includes:

finding the total number of messages, recipients, attempts, etc.;

finding out when a given percentage of messages were delivered;

determining the best order of recipients for mailing lists;

finding who's getting mail as well as the number of bytes, messages and attempts;

finding successes, failures and deferrals; and

finding senders, suids and messages.

[ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/qmailanalog.html]

serialmail

A collection of tools for passing mail across slow serial links that works with Qmail. The latter delivers messages to a directory, at which point serialmail delivers them to another destination. This is designed to handle three types of mail delivery:

delivery to an ISP, i.e. a dialup computer sends all outgoing mail to the ISP;

autoturn delivery from the ISP, i.e. the dialup computer automatically receives an SMTP connection back from the ISP upon dialup if new mail is available; and

user-controlled delivery from the ISP, e.g. a user with a shell account can switch from qmail-pop3d to serialmail without annoying the sysadmin.

This also requires ucspi-tcp.
[ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/serialmail.html]
QMG: A package for geometric modeling and mesh generation in two and three dimensions. It contains two different mesh generators: a quadtree/octree algorithm and a 2D Delaunay algorithm. QMG consists of approximately 60 separate functions which are invoked through a console interface written in either Tcl/Tk or Matlab. A simple finite element solver is also included with the package.
The features of QMG include:

a fully automatic mesh generator that needs to human intervention once the domain has been constructed with the modeler;

a mesh generator that handles complex topology, i.e. the domain can have holes and quite complex internal boundaries and can also be disconnected; and

certain theoretical guarantees are provided by the mesh generator.

QMG is available either as source code or in binary format for Windows NT. The source code is written in C++ and will compile using gcc. The finite element solver is written in Matlab, so it is only essential to have Matlab if you wish to use that. A Tcl/Tk user interface can be used on UNIX systems.
[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/vavasis/qmg-home.html]
QMH: The Queue Mail Handler is a set of programs designed to manage messages in a so-called trouble queue, e.g. messages sent by users to report problems. It is based on MH with commands similar to those found in that system. QMH is designed to alleviate problems that may arise when problems are worked on by one or more staff members who exchange further messages on the topic until it is resolved. The goals as such are:

to eliminate the duplication of effort caused by multiple staff members working on the same problem with no coordination;

to eliminate accidental lost and forgotten messages caused by everyone thinking that someone else solved the problem;

to provide a mechanism to keep the current and past status of the problem with the problem report rather than a person;

to provide a mechanism for keeping additional information provided by the user associated with the original message; and

to keep an archive of resolved problems for future reference.

The QMH system consists of seven shell scripts and a handful of MH configuration files. The scripts are:

qscan, to obtain a list of items in the queue;

qshow, to display a message in the queue;

qnext, to display the next message in the queue;

qprev, to display the previous message in the queue;

qstatus, to assign a status to a problem;

qrepl, to update the information on a problem and send a copy to the original complaining user; and

qedit, to just update the information on a problem.

A source code distribution of QMH is available. It is documented in a troff file that can be processed with the ms macro.
[http://www.ers.ibm.com/~davy/software/qmh.html]
QML: The Quick Markup Language is a small and quick language for web site development. The features of QML include:

a format that encourages modular web site design;

easy writing and processing of forms;

simple personalization of web sites with cookies;

template pages using QML variables;

a library of macros;

adding Perl and JavaScript to pages;

intermixing of QML, HTML and XML;

works with the Apache server; and

interfaces to PostgreSQL and MySQL.

A source code distribution is available. It is written in Perl and requires version 5.
[http://www.qml.org/index.qml]
QMRPACK: A library of Fortran routines which implement both the three-term recurrence and the coupled two-term recurrence variants of the look-ahead Lanczos algorithm which is used to compute eigenvalue approximations. It can also be used to solve linear systems with the quasi-minimal residual method. The package also contains programs without look-ahead, some example driver programs, support for an example data format, and some preconditioners for the linear systems solver.
A source code distribution of QMRPACK is available. It is written in Fortran 77 and single and double precision versions of most routines are included. The package also requires some subroutines from the BLAS, EISPACK, LAPACK, and LINPACK libraries, although the needed programs are included in the distribution. It is documented in user's manual in ASCII format. See Freund et al. (1993) and Freund and Nachtigal (1991).
[http://www.netlib.org/linalg/]

Next: Qn-Qz Up: Linux Software Encyclopedia Previous: Pn-Pz Contents

Manbreaker Crag 2001-03-08