Cocoa for Scientists (XXIV): Core Animation First Steps
Arguably the most important change in Leopard was not a user feature, but a developer one: Core Animation. Over the coming years, the way applications look and react to user interaction will change dramatically, and that will be largely due to the ease with which interfaces can be animated with…
Tutorial: Mixed C and Fortran…and some LAPACK
A recent question in one of the discussion forum led to the general question of using some of the performance libraries in Mac OS X with a specific emphasis on mixing C and Fortran, as well as implied data types in LAPACK. In this mini-tutorial I’m going to cover some…
NFS exports on Leopard
If you have several “unixy” workstations on your network that need to talk to your Mac, you’ll likely want to use NFS. In my case, I have a few Linux machines around and also an old SGI O2, that I keep around mainly for nostalgia reasons (I sat at one throughout my grad school…
What’s New on the Leopard Command Line?
Each new release of Mac OS X brings with it a range of new command-line tools, many of which go unnoticed. Not only are these tools useful, they also tell the story of the evolution of the OS. Leopard is no exception, so armed with a couple of old and…
Tutorial: Intro to Core Animation
Core Animation, you’ve been hearing about how great it is, how it makes animation easier and how cool it is. Well you’re about to find out first hand that all of the things you’ve heard are TRUE. We’ll cover a little background first and then jump into a simple Cocoa…
Multicore Eroding Moore’s Law
Do you seek ever increasing speed from your computers? Do you think multicore chips are a sign of a healthy chip industry? In major trade journals, most articles on the subject seem to uncritically accept multicore as the processor solution moving forward, without suggesting any viable alternative. Meanwhile, the chipmaker giants,…
HOWTO start lots of matlab sessions on various Linux clusters comfortably from your Mac
*) Need to evaluate lots of day-lasting computations IN PARALLEL on different data sets (eg prediction features on EEG of different epileptic patients) *) A basic Linux scripting knowledge? *) Want to have a script-based “three-click-Apple interface” which distributes your ever evolving matlab code, quickly changing control scripts, which is…
Statistics Supercomputing on a Mac with R and LAM/MPI
Introduction R is a venerable, free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It has a large user community and an impressive number of available add-on packages. Notable among these is the Bioconductor family of packages, which constitute a comprehensive statistical computing environment for bioinformatics (with a focus on microarray data). Fortunately R…
Slides WWDC07 Scicomp@cam talk
Two weeks ago I was invited to give a talk at the first meeting of the SciComp@Cambridge group. On my website I have posted the slides of this talk, in which I gave an overview on what was newly introduced for developers at the WWDC07 Security Event (for as far as could be…
A Few Command-Line Party Tricks
It never ceases to amaze me how much I still have to learn about the innards of Mac OS X. It seems like I am always coming across new tools that I never knew existed, many of which have been in the system for many years. So I thought I…
Xcode/gFortran Plugin Update
A while back we introduced an Xcode/gFortran plugin and various installers that resulted from one of our contests. We’ve now updated the plugin to work with the latest gfortran from fellow MacResearcher Gaurav Khanna’s site (August 2007 build). The installer includes: * gFortran PPC (August 2007)* gFortran Intel (August 2007)* gFortran Plugin for…
Dealing With a Broken MySQL Startup in Leopard
I’m sure that many of you keep all sorts of important research data locked away in a local MySQL installation. If you had installed MySQL on Tiger using the official MySQL installation package and upgraded your system to Leopard, you’ll find that your MySQL Preferences Pane can no longer be…
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