Hi All,

There is a new program in the distribution called xmat_tool.py.
It is used used to investigate issues with X-matrices (get
condition numbers, show warnings for the correlation and cosine
matrices, etc.), as well as to fit against a 1D time series.

Part of the program's features are the same as Ziad's R program,
ExamineXmat.R .

While it relies on some modern python libraries, the libraries
are applied only when necessary (meaning the program will do
what it can with the libraries that exist). The minimum python
library is Numpy, which is quite common and easy to get. That
is enough to get the most important information, the correlation
matrix warnings.

Libraries can be tested via 'xmat_tool.py -test_libs', which
shows details about any missing libraries, including how one
might consider installing them. Note that the 'wx' library is
not currently available on OS X 10.4. Installing the libraries
on a modern Linux system is easy (via yum).

Please see 'xmat_tool.py -help' for details, or simply run the GUI.

The release version 1.0 should be part of the current distribution.

- rick