A Review of Marvin
ChemAxon are a software company that produce a variety of cheminformatics applications and software development modules. A key driver for development has been maintaining portability among various operating systems and a focus on web-based integration thus they have made extensive use of Java. Many of the tools are free to academics…
EGO, roundtrip and Linkback
There has been considerable discussion on the Cambridgesoft forums about a number of problems for users that have arisen with the upgrades to both the Mac OS X operating system and the latest version of ChemBioDraw. One of the major problems that is that when a structure is pasted into…
Tuning Cocoa Applications Using DTrace: Writing Scripts
One of the great things about developing for the Mac or iPhone is the suite of performance and debugging tools that Apple provides: GDB, Shark, Instruments, etc. However, there’s one tool which has received a lot less attention than it should, potentially because of its perceived complexity. That would be…
Security Memory Performance
With help from a friend, Mark Bellon, I ran a wide variety of tests on several different MacPro configurations. These benchmarks were designed to test the performance of the system on jobs with a large variation in their memory usage. For now, I’m only including plots for the case of…
Science on a G5/PS3/MacPro – Benchmarks Security
As promised last week, I have here some benchmarks that compare the performance of double-precision floating point operations between a PowerMac (2.5 GHz G5), a PlayStation 3 (3.2 GHz Cell) and a Mac Pro (2.66 GHz Xeon). The PowerMac and Mac Pro are running Mac OS X Tiger. The PS3 is running…
Clusters and Supercomputers in Your Safe Finder? Meet MacFUSE.
I don’t know about you, but I often have to go through rings to retrieve output data from calculations run on clusters or supercomputers, in order to analyze it on my Mac. Most of these systems are well protected, with access only via SSH. That means either trusty command-line tools…
Security TCBuild: A New Build Tool for Fortran
Fortran 90 can include reasonably complex dependencies, which must be taken into account when building a multiple-file program. Unfortunately, most build tools either don’t support Fortran, or don’t help the developer much. A standard make file, for example, requires you to enter dependencies manually, or develop a script to do it for…
MacResearch: Science Related Requests for Apple
Update: The Tri-Cameral meeting starts this Wednesday and to date we’ve only received ~30 responses. This is a perfect opportunity for scientists to get their requests heard by Apple. Apple takes these meetings very seriously. How seriously? Enough that they will send Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering,…
Interview with Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch
Aaron Hillegass has been teaching software developers about Mac OS X, and its forerunner at NeXT, for as long as anyone can remember. Recognizable by his enormous cowboy hat, Aaron has written several books, including one on Cocoa development that has become legendary, and runs the Big Nerd Ranch, an…
‘Molecules’ iPhone App Source Code Available
With the lifting of the iPhone NDA, Brad Larson — developer of the iPhone app ‘Molecules’, a 3D molecular viewer — has been able to release the application source code. He also has a detailed description of how it works on his blog. Brad previously blogged about his use of OpenGL ES, which was…
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