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 [...]
Read Full Post »
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. [...]
Read Full Post »
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 | 3 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.
Read Full Post »
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 [...]
Read Full Post »
Posted in computing, mac tips & tricks, open source software, tagged animate, c++, codec, divx, mac, perian, png on December 4, 2007 | 3 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 [...]
Read Full Post »
To continue the series on using C++ to replace MATLAB, here are some details about using the pngwriter library. Included below is a function that I use in various places to write a 2D array to a png file. This can be left in a header somewhere and used in a similar way to MATLAB’s [...]
Read Full Post »
Inspired by a recent post by Sujit Datta, I decided to start a series covering my favorite Mac applications. These are generally physics-type applications but should be useful to a wide range of people in any field of science.
Read Full Post »
There is a lot to like about the BibDesk citation manager. First off, it works with BibTeX (in fact it’s file structure is BibTeX). There have been a lot of reviews, most of them positive of course… what’s not to like about open-source native cocoa applications that “do the right thing”? I wanted to post [...]
Read Full Post »
It’s been around for a bit, but I figured I should post about a little side project I’ve been working on. As a physicist, I spend a lot of time tracking down citations; and typically they are in a handful of journals. Rather than bookmarking the journal homepage or search box, I realized that reverse-engineering [...]
Read Full Post »
There are certainly some programs that interrupt you before you do something stupid “Are you sure you want to quit?” but typically these dialogs simply slow down your workflow. I love it when I find one that is really keeps me from doing something stupid. Case in point: select 40 or so e-mail messages in [...]
Read Full Post »
