Intel Mac Mini cluster
The IA lab where I’m doing the PhD is evaluating the possibility of buying some Mac Mini intel-based to create a cluster. We would like to run GNU/Debian on those machines, a queueing system like Sun Grid Engine and a parallel file system… Does anybody of you have suggestions or…
Tutorial: Applescript for Scientists (Part I)
This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of tutorials on Apple’s own scripting language Applescript. I should perhaps begin with a confession, “I’m not a programmer”, by training I’m a chemist and I spent the majority of my career as a Medicinal Chemist. This might actually…
The Dynamics of Scrolling
There has been quite a bit of discussion the last few days about the momentum-based scrolling that Apple uses on the iPhone. The discussion has largely been fanned by John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog. He has been arguing for some time that one of the reasons web apps feel inferior on the…
OpenMacGrid For Mac used for analyzing MRI signals from iron rich brain tissues
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems are capable of safely generating detailed images of the human brain with a rich assortment of intrinsic tissue contrast mechanisms, making MRI machines powerful diagnostic and research tools. Iron accumulation in midbrain structures such as the substantia nigra (SN) and red nucleus is associated with the normal aging process,…
The Realities of Writing Technical Books for Mac
Around 3 years ago, I co-authored the book Beginning Mac OS X Programming with Mike Trent. It takes a broad look at developing software on the Mac, covering as much ground as possible, from Carbon to Cocoa, and even AppleScript. As far as I know, it is the only book for the…
The business models for iPhone applications
[Note: many of the links in this story will open the page for an app in the iTunes Store. I realize it can be annoying. I have thus made sure that hovering on the link will clearly indicate in the title if it is a link to iTunes.] The iTunes…
Dual Quad-Core Mac Pro’s Just Around the Corner?
Hardware hacker extraordinaire Anand Lal Shimpi from AnandTech is so influential that Intel sends him engineering samples of their upcoming processors. Anand recently acquired an engineering sample of a quad-core Intel core 2 Xeon CPU, code-name “Cloverton”. The quad-core Cloverton is pin-compatible with the LGA-771 CPU sockets shipping in the current Mac…
New RubyCocoa Release & BridgeSupport
More interesting for MacResearch members may be the new BridgeSupport project, which appears designed to provide better support for scripting bridges to Objective-C, like RubyCocoa and PyObjC, although the project is independent of any scripting language. BridgeSupport files are XML files that describe the API symbols of frameworks or libraries that cannot be…
Matlab benches for Mac
As I posted a few days ago, I would like to generate a small enquiry about MATLAB performance under Mac OS X. Here I post the data from the bench command on my iBook G4 12′ 1.2 Ghz, 1.25 GB RAM. Some of the currently available benchmarks are below. So perhaps those…
Vvidget: Chart and Graphing System for Mac OS X
Often when I’m trying to analyze data access patterns in code I’m optimizing, I find it useful to plot the locations of the data points on 2D (or ideally 3D) grids. A few days ago I was analyzing a complex data access routine and found my normal methods of doing…
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