Tinkering with Google App Engine
Google announced Google App Engine, their long-awaited answer to web services offered by Amazon and others. Google took a different approach to their competitors by including a full application stack for developers. This made App Engine less flexible, by forcing developers to use the programming tools and libraries that Google supplied, but it…
Tutorial: Backups with Launchd for Mac
The other day at work someone asked me if there was some way to have OS X run an rsync command to an external drive whenever it was plugged in. Well, given that we were talking about Mac OS 10.4, it was easy to answer. Of course you can do…
Contribute to OpenMacGrid
Contributing your Mac’s idle processing power to the OpenMacGrid is very easy. However, before you do so, please make sure that your Mac has at least: 256 MB of Memory,1 GB of available hard disk space,G4 or better CPU andRunning Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) or Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard). Simply…
GDL .. a free IDL
Many among us, in the Mac scientific community, use IDL, a sophisticated data visualisation and analysis platform by ITT Visual Information Solutions (formerly, Research Systems Inc.). It is particularly popular in astronomy/astrophysics and also biophysics/medicine. IDL is commercial software and is amongst the most expensively licensed packages, I have ever used. There is…
Bibdesk: A free bibliography management application
For all of us who had one day to write a report or even better a thesis, managing the references is always more or less a nightmare. Of course, expensive software like Endnote of Reference Manager can do it. However these applications are only dynamically linked to Microsoft Word. As…
EndNote X1 Patch Restores CWYW Functionality to Word 2008
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…
Cocoa for Scientists (Part XXVII): Getting Closure with Objective-C
Last week, Chris Lattner — who manages the Clang, LLVM, and GCC groups at Apple — announced that work was well underway to bring ‘blocks’ to the GCC and Clang compilers. ‘So what?’, I hear you ask, ‘My kid has been using blocks since he was 9 months old.’ Fair point, but…
Aperture For Scientific Data Organization
Before the holidays I was asked to look at Apple’s Aperture from my perspective as a scientist to see how it could be used in a scientific setting. Now that the post holiday catch-up is over I’ve finally had time to sit down with Aperture and evaluate some of the…
Cocoa for Scientists (XXXIII): 10 Uses for Blocks in C/Objective-C
Snow Leopard brought with it blocks (closures) for the C and Objective-C languages. Blocks at first seem to be nothing more than anonymous, inline functions, but that is only partially true, because they are also a lot like objects, carrying about their context data with them. Once you start playing…
Interview: Joe Wolf – Intel Security Compiler Group
Joe Wolf has worked with compilers for high-performance computing for the past twenty years. He developed optimizing/parallelizing Ada and Fortran compilers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Cray Security Research, Inc. before joining Intel in 1996. Since then, he has focused on helping customers in all industries adopt and use…
Stay connected