MacResearch

WebGL has been quickly progressing, and we have been hard at work building our 3D ChemDoodle Web Components. I present the release of ChemDoodle Web Components 3.0, which contain the alpha development versions of the 3D ChemDoodle Web Components. I also discuss some of the programmatic details involved with WebGL and how to obtain the development browsers required to use WebGL technologies. Lastly, I give a brief review of the current events releated to HTML5/Canvas technology since my last article.

In 'Showcase' reviews, the reviewer is the developer. No claim of objectivity is made, but it’s a chance for the developer to show off his/her app. Here, Daniel Alm discusses the new visualization package, PocketCAS.

Author: Daniel Alm
Position: Developer
Affiliation: Thomas Osthege and Daniel Alm Software

On the occasion of its recent 2.0 release, I'd like to present my application PocketCAS, a computer algebra system (CAS) for the iPhone and iPod touch, in this article.

Just a quick note. Some of you may find Intego's report on Mac/iPhone security interesting. From their analysis, it seems like jailbroken iPhones are particularly susceptible. There were a few proof-of-concept trojans, as well as real world exploits on Mac OS X. Many of the exploits seem to be geared toward taking advantage of user behavior and actions.

Common sense computing practices would address most, if not all, of the known exploits reported here. Although there doesn't seem to be an abundance of common sense these days*. I kid...sort of. And keep in mind that Intego is a software security product manufacturer (but that doesn't mean that what they are saying is necessarily invalid).

Intego 2009 Report (PDF)

Both Apple and the NSA provide documentation on securing Mac OS X based computers and servers. I could only find documentation up to 10.5:

Mac OS X Security Guidance (NSA)
Mac OS X Server Security Configuration 10.5 (Apple)

Apple also provides a set of Common Criteria Tools (again up through version 10.5 of the operating system) and a configuration guide. Common Criteria are a set of internationally approved security standards:

Common Criteria Tools (Apple)

An interesting wiki page on MacShadows KB I came across recently, also describes some additional ways to secure your system and understanding common attack vectors. There is even a section of ideas for the "Truly Paranoid" :)

Hardening Mac OS X - MacShadows KB Article

If someone knows of newer documentation or additional resources, please feel free to post some links in the comments.

*Perhaps it should be referred to as uncommon sense?

In 'Showcase' reviews, the reviewer is the developer. No claim of objectivity is made, but it’s a chance for the developer to show off his/her app. Here, software developer Pierre-Henri Jondot talks about his plotting/graphing application TouchPlot for iPhone and iPod touch.

Just a note. The developer has posted that there is a new version of touchplot out (Version 4.0) and he's created a Youtube channel to show some of the features.

TouchPlot is a grapher application for the iPhone and iPod touch, which can be bought at the appstore since late july. As the developer of TouchPlot, my intention in this review is to give an idea of what can be done with TouchPlot, as well as to explain some of the design decisions I've made while developing this application.

In case some of you missed it, I am presenting a 6 hour workshop on concurrency at both the UK and US NSConference meetings in the coming months. The workshop will cover Snow Leopard technologies like Grand Central and OpenCL, and touch on other options for parallel computing. I'm just finishing the preparation now, and it should be a fun and educational gathering for performance geeks.

Ticket sales for the US conference, which is to be held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta from February 22nd until February 24th, are well underway, but I am pretty sure there is still room.

If you want more than just a hand waving introduction to GCD and OpenCL, this might be a good meeting for you.

There are still a few places left, register today! Deadline for registration has been extended and closes Jan 31.

EMBO Practical Course : Scientific Programming and Data Visualisation for Structural Biology

We are pleased to announce our practical course " Scientific Programming and Data Visualisation for Structural Biology " offered at the newly constructed Advanced Training Center, EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany from May 5-7, 2010.

The course is designed primarily for structural biologists (scientists from other disciplines are welcomed to apply). The goals of the course is to allow students to learn and master computational skills that are frequently required in less routine projects, and to learn methods of data visualization. Our very own mekentosj will provide a track on Cocoa programming tools on OSX for Mac and iPhone.

The hugely successful Stanford iPhone programming course is running again.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/

As many of you are heading back to campus to start a new quarter or semester, I thought it would be timely to post a link to Mashable's guide to Mac Apps for Productivity. I'm happy to see that some of my favorite productivity apps, such as Things and Dropbox, made the list. If you know of any science-oriented productivity apps (e.g. lab notebooks) that didn't make Mashable's list, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Our sister organizations MacEnterprise.org and MacLearning.org will each be presenting webcasts that may be of interest to the MacResearch.org community.

On January 19 MacEnterprise.org will be presenting - Snow Leopard Server Setup: Under the Hood. The description follows:

We make use of the OpenCL framework to accelerate a gravitational physics numerical modeling application using the hardware accelerators -- Cell BE and Tesla CUDA GPU.