MacResearch

Google announced yesterday that it is open-sourcing a technology that they use internally called Protocol Buffers. The idea is this: parsing and dumping structured, hierarchical data is slow. XML might be nice to read, but performance is in the gutter. One solution is to adopt a language specific approach to serialization, such as Python's pickle module. Problem with that is, you end up being stuck with a particular programming language, and passing data between programs becomes an issue.

Vincent Noel has a post on his blog about the release — in beta form — of the Enthought Python Distribution. Like the SAGE distribution, which we covered recently, Enthought's distribution is an all-options-included installation of Python for scientists.

Noel describes the differences between the two packages in his post:

EPD is smaller than SAGE in size and also includes tons of good science stuff. There’s some overlap between the two distributions (for instance, both include the NumPy/SciPy/Matplotlib triad as well as IPython), but EPD is more geared towards observation data analysis and visualization.

Both SAGE and Enthought's package are welcome additions to the arsenal of Mac scientists.

I just came across this site and thought I'd pass it along. TopicDesk is a web site that hosts tutorials on managing and upgrading components that ship as part of Mac OS X Server. I ran across it while looking for information on adding GD Library support to PHP5 in Leopard Server. According to the about page for the site:

Apple’s OS X Server is a powerful tool for businesses of any size. OS X Server puts UNIX into the reach of non-UNIX experts. We wanted to build a site that helped non-UNIX experts make the most of OS X Server. So we created a site that offers tools and information for beginners and seasoned professionals that extend the stock functionality of Apple’s Server software.

The tutorials I've read so far are very clear and well written (and provided in PDF format for offline viewing).

OS X TopicDesk

Andrew Keller has just completed his work on an updated version of his Xgrid Batch Editor, that now includes suport for the Agent Ranking Tool feature that was added to Xgrid in Leopard. If you are new to Xgrid, this is a great tool to learn how the different options for batch job submission work (see also the tutorial). If you are a veteran user, you might appreciate that all the nitty-gritty of your job formatting are taken care of. Best of all, Xgrid Batch Editor is free!

With the release of the latest version of Firefox now is perhaps a good time to gauge web browser usage.

The new poll simply asks which is your preferred web browser, if you want to give reasons why please feel free to add comments.

Users of EndNote X1 for Mac OS X can now download a patch directly from Thomson Reuters to restore CWYW functionality to Word 2008. The lack of EndNote integration has been a deal-breaker for many Scientists wishing to switch to the Intel-native version of Word. As an added bonus, CWYW functionality is now noticeably "snappier".

The patch can be downloaded from here:

The Apple Developer Connection (ADC) has just published an article that I wrote on using NSOperation to improve the performance of Cocoa apps on multi-core Macs. It includes source code for two simple applications that use NSOperation to perform simultaneous downloads. The article goes into quite a bit more depth than some of the reviews I have seen, with discussion of dependencies and the NSInvocationOperation class.

Note that I also wrote a tutorial on NSOperation here on MacResearch, which includes source code for an app that performs linear algebra operations in place of downloads.

At the risk of getting accused of becoming a dedicated Google reporter I wanted to point to the just published online videos of the recently held GoogleIO conference. GoogleIO is described as a "two days of in-depth, technical sessions on how to build next generation of web applications with Google and open technologies", including the ones we previously reported about here, here, here, and here. And that Google takes the word "Open" very serious is apparent from the fact that you can view all the recorded sessions for free. Way to go Google!

The chemical drawing package Marvin from Chemaxon has recently been updated, and I just noticed there was a new release of Chemdoodle from iChemLabs last month. iChemLabs have also developed a number of interesting spectroscopic tools.

Since 1996, there has been a MacStats webpage for information on statistical analysis and charting. Now there is a revitalized MacStats webpage available at MacStats.org. The site includes lists of Mac software for statistical and scientific data analysis and some mini-reviews. Content updates are provided by users.