I have been interested in GNU Octave for a while, although never bothered to play much since I had access to recent Matlab releases while I was at Duke. Now that I am managing my own software budget, and trying to keep it to $0, I have a new found appreciation for Open Source Software. [...]
Archive for the ‘computing’ Category
Octave on Mac
Posted in college, computing, links, matlab, open source software, physics, teaching on October 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Teaching with Arduino
Posted in computing, open source software, physics, teaching, try this at home, tagged arduino, demo, teaching on April 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve decided to use the Arduino in my electronics class this fall. The Arduino is an “open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.” Even from the description it sounds like just what an electronics course needs. I finally had some time to tinker with it today, and after a few minutes [...]
PDFkit in Firefox
Posted in computing, mac tips & tricks, open source software, tagged mac, mac tips & tricks, PDF on March 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
There was one reason I used Safari rather than Firefox, and it has recently evaporated. I read a lot of PDF files (>20 per day browsing papers etc) so I was tired of the extra files accumulating in my download folder. You may know that Safari uses Appe’s PDFkit to display PDF files in [...]
acrobat.com
Posted in computing, try this at home, tagged document, online, share, web 2.0 on October 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Now, finally some sweet looking competition for Google Documents. Of course, I have nothing against Google Docs, I used them all the time. But, I’m also a big fan of nice typefaces, PDF files, and screen sharing… all of which are features of the tools now available via acrobat.com. A free service (at least for [...]
EPD for OS X: public beta available
Posted in computing, mac tips & tricks, open source software, physics, tagged python enthought visualization on July 2, 2008 | 1 Comment »
My knack for checking for software releases on the release day shines again today. Several months ago I had heard a rumor about the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD) being developed for the Mac. Between writing my dissertation and packing up my family for our upcoming move, I hadn’t thought about it again… until today. And [...]
Subversion and mac bundles
Posted in computing, latex, mac tips & tricks, open source software, tagged svn latex iwork on July 1, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I wrote earlier about using SVN and LaTeX for document management. While this has continued to work well for me, I did discover an issue with some document files generated by mac apps. It has become common to save documents as “bundles,” which from the filesystem perspective are directories but look like documents in Finder. [...]
SVN and LaTeX
Posted in computing, mac tips & tricks, open source software, physics, try this at home, tagged google code, latex, subversion, svn, thesis on April 26, 2008 | 7 Comments »
For anyone curious about the process of managing a LaTeX document with the Subversion (SVN) version control system, I have to highly recommend it. Now that my dissertation is officially finished, I have a bit of time to explain the process I used to back-up, archive, and otherwise manage the beast.
Why I love python
Posted in computing, open source software, physics on March 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
As you can imagine, during the depths of my thesis-writing experience, I don’t have a whole lot of time for anything except… well, writing my thesis. Sometimes, especially in the sciences, as you are writing the paper, the data is still coming in and ideally still getting better. Lucky for me that was the case [...]
DataGraph gets LaTeX
Posted in computing, latex, mac tips & tricks, tagged datagraph, latex, mac, plotting on December 5, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
In a previous post, I listed DataGraph as one of my most-used mac apps. Its status as most-used just got a major boost with the addition of LaTeX functionality in the text label fields. To see this feature it action, you’ll have to download the latest beta from the DataGraph website. I’ve posted some screenshots [...]
Animating PNG files
Posted in computing, mac tips & tricks, open source software, tagged animate, c++, codec, divx, mac, perian, png on December 4, 2007 | 7 Comments »
I have struggled with optimizing the process of animating PNG files. I have code that generates a PNG image based on an array of data, which, in my case is the intensity of an optical beam, but it can be anything. I have found various options ranging from quick-and-dirty to fairly robust. MEncoder plays a [...]
