There are a few free tools that I want to plug. They are not scientific tools per se, but I find them very useful in my day-to-day operations, and I’m sure others will too. Two of the tools I use when I want to free up…

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…

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...

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…

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…

At MacResearch we have some big plans for Xgrid in the coming months. Stay tuned for announcements. But to warm you up, we have a real coup: Charles Parnot, creator of one of the largest Xgrids on the planet, has agreed to write a series of tutorials…

Can’t get gnuplot to have aquaterm support.. I’ve installed the developer tools, downloaded the AquaTerm dmg and installed it, and compiled the gnuplot source with./configure –with-readline=bsdmakesudo make install ./configure reports:…aqua terminal (MacOS X): yes… however..gnuplot> set term aqua^unknown or ambiguous terminal type; type just ‘set…

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….

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…

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of Charles’ introduction to Xgrid. If you are inspired by what you read, don’t forget that we have a prime resource for running your Xgrid jobs right here: OpenMacGrid. First of all, I want to apologize for the long…