MacResearch

By Drew McCormack

Like most scientific developers, I've used statically-typed programming languages like Fortran and C++ for most of my professional life. But the last few years I have moved more and more of my coding to dynamic languages like Python and Objective-C, and I have come to prefer dynamic typing to static typing. I am by no means alone in this, with a trend to languages like Ruby and Python in fields as varied as web applications development and scientific data mining.

The reason for this post is that I have been reading the new Pragmatic Programmer's book Code in the Cloud by Mark C. Chu-Carroll, which provides an introduction to cloud computing with Google App Engine. On the whole, it's not a bad introductory text, but one aspect of it riles me: it denigrates Python, and dynamically-typed languages, in general. In 2010, I find this position quaint to say the least. In 1998, it would have been the status quo, but to find an author who still thinks like this about web development is surprising, especially given that Google App Engine is a poster child for dynamic scripting languages in the cloud.

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, 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.

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.

Parallel computing seems to be the technology upcoming these days..The 2 technologies CUDA , which is an architecture introduced by NVIDIA and OpenCL which was initially proposed by Apple now standardised by the Khronos group are the competing ones.

PeepCode is a small company dedicated to making high quality screencasts for the latest technologies in software. A lot of what they do centers on the web — lots of Ruby on Rails and Javascript — but they also cover some topics of interest to non-web developers, and even scientists. For example, they have just released a screencast covering the version control system Mercurial, which is used on Google Code and is steadily gaining traction. Other topics for which screencasts are available include MacRuby, how to screencast, controlling your email Inbox, Emacs, productivity for programmers, and the version control system Git.
The screencasts each cost $9, which is a very reasonable price, and for that you get around an hour of video in a variety of formats, including ones that will play on an iPod.

Today I came across the RoamBi App for iPhone and was admittedly impressed with its visualization capabilities. Apparently you can upload spreadsheet-based data to their web application and visualize it in a remote, interactive manner using the iPhone application. I had never heard of RoamBi before the iPhone app came on to my radar, but it appears they are primarily targeting their product to business users.

Although I haven't come across any scientific examples on the RoamBi site, it's not hard to imagine at least a few simple uses for such a service in science. For example, I often find myself referencing data from papers I previously published and often find myself trying to recreate the chart in the air using odd gesticulations, or through back-of-the-napkin scribbles. I think it would be great if I could upload barcharts and other data from previous papers that I could display and interact with on my iPhone on-demand. Can you think of any other scientific utility for a RoamBi like visualization application for iPhone.

Version 1.30 of Vibration, the vibration spectrum analyzer for the iPhone was just released on the iTunes App Store. Version 1.30 contains a number of new features which greatly increase the functionality of the application.

Hi, all,

I am looking for a convenient way to compile Fortran codes in Mac OS X for a long time, especially with Xcode. What I need is an environment to maintain my codes and easy to compile and debug them. Could Xcode provide native supports for Fortran? I believe many people will gain benefit from them.

DONG Li

There seems to have been an explosion in the number of social networking sites, this list of active sites on wikipedia would suggest many people use these tools. These range from the business oriented to others catering for music, movies, students etc. but which do you use most often?

Please use the Poll widget at the bottom right of this page to enter your answer!