Performance Tutorial (Part I): Introducing Accelerate
In this series of articles and tutorials I’ll be discussing some of the various technologies and strategies available for increasing the performance of science-related applications. Some of the items that will be discussed are Mac Only (e.g. Accelerate framework) while others will be generally applicable (e.g. OpenMP). Most of the…
Cocoa for Scientists (XXXII): The Physics of Sumos (A Flirtation with iPhone Game Development)
I’ve spent most of my developer life solving scientific problems and developing tools to make people more productive in one way or another. A field of software development with which I have had very little involvement is games development. To be honest, I am not even much of a game player, let alone developer….
Quick Link: VBA Scripting to Return to Office for Mac
For those of you who rely on macro’s in the Office suite of applications, news from the Microsoft BU released today, mentions that VBA support will be added back in when the next version of Office for Mac is released. There is no mention of a date, so it could…
Computing Grid in a Box with an 8-core Mac Pro
Of course an 8-core Mac Pro is nice for “mine is bigger than yours” taunts, however if you’re going to spend the money to buy a machine with 8-cores and 16 GB of RAM you better figure out how you are going to use all that horsepower. In a previous article I…
The Xgrid Tutorials (Part III): Running Batch Jobs
In the first installment of this Xgrid tutorial series, I introduced Xgrid and told you when to use it and how to use it. We used the Terminal to feed Xgrid, one job at a time, and ask the results back, one job at a time. In the second installment, I introduced GridStuffer, a graphical…
3D ChemDoodle Web Components
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…
ChemDoodle Web Components For Mac
Protein Data Bank Demo and Canvas Technology Analysis In this article, I provide some background and analysis of the javascript/Canvas technology along with future prospects followed by a step-by-step walkthrough on how to quickly put together a rich web application with the ChemDoodle Web Components. In the walkthrough, I produce a small…
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…
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