Private Eye, a UK satirical/current affairs magazine comes out twice a month with quite a bit of investigative journalism and lots of things you don't read any where else. They website contains hardly any of their content and they still have quite a few subscribers.
If you find matplotlib hard, try my Veusz python plotting package. It has a GUI you can build plots within. It is scriptable in python, and even the saved file format is a python script to generate the plot. It can read a variety of data formats.
Don't go to Maplin - they are very expensive. It's best to go to BitsBox - personal service, cheap delivery, good prices, and a reasonable range of stuff beginners would need.
It's fine to give code to referees who want to see it under peer review. I have no problems with that.
If you release code more generally, you need to support it. You will get questions. If you don't answer them, your work will be brought into question. What's this thing about "working as advertised"? Scientific code is quite often written to be used for a short time on specific inputs on a specific computer system. It won't "work as advertised" without a lot of support and hand-holding.
By assumptions, I mean things such as filename standards, format of data, and so on. These aren't scientific assumptions, but assumptions of the code itself, so are different things.
And keeping code private isn't to stop people reproducing what you did, but to not allow others an advantage in an area you are working on.
Reproduction of results is about independent verification anyway, so they probably should be starting with the raw data and not working with an existing code.
Fortunately my code isn't doing much - it's mostly simple scripts to automate various other software and a few basic models. I have released some of my more complex software and do an OSS project in my spare time.
The main problems with releasing code is having to support it. It takes a lot of time. Code often contains hard coded paths, assumptions and so on, which would need to be documented before it was safe for others to use. That just takes too much time for the average researcher. Also for code working in interesting areas, you need some time to have the code to yourself to exploit that area of research and not give others advantage.
You're being unrealistic. As a scientist I'm payed to produce papers, not polish code. If the code does what I want it to do, and I'm satisfied that it is sufficiently unlikely to be problems with it on on the data I am putting into it, that is enough.
If you want me to write perfect code, you should pay me to do so, and hire people for scientific research on the basis of their code. Being hired as a scientist is based on results, not on how well documented the code is or checking every possible input. I'd love to have more time to do every possible test, but I cannot do that and have a career.
BTW, I have produced some code for others to use from my research, and it takes much longer to get it into a usable and documented state than the usual run of the mill script I write.
Pretty convincing. It appears to show any of the information or photos I can see about myself or my friends.Presumably a very popular facebook app could harvest data on pretty well everyone in facebook, no matter their privacy settings.
How about adding word wrapping when displaying? My local emacs expert wasn't even able to do that, but MS Notepad can do it. It's really useful for editing latex documents where your want a paragraph on a single line (that makes it much easier to search for phrases).
What sort of plotting do you do? Can you give me some idea of what the most useful plots missing from Veusz are? I know it doesn't do 3D plots, but I don't find them generally useful (except for volume renderings, etc.).
Veusz, my scientific plotting package, is up to revision 1009, and I'm virtually the single author and a volunteer. It has been in development since 2003. The output, IMHO, looks quite a bit nicer than PLPlot.
Our 8TB raid system would get trashed after copying data onto it (group descriptor checksums on fsck). It looks like it was an ext4 bug. They fixed it about a week or two ago, here. Maybe it will get in your kernel soon. I'm not going to start ext4 on any production system for at least 6 months I think now.
I got a fast lens for my Sony a200 - a Minolta 50mm f1.7. It has really improved my low light level photography as it lets much more light in than a standard zoom lens. That's the advantage of SLR - you can get a better lens to do a proper job.
ext3 can take several hours to fsck. We have a few TB filesystem full of hard-links (a versioned rsync backup). It does take endless hours to fsck, so you have to switch off the automatic check. Hopefully ext4 should fix this (or btrfs later).
We did - we applied the heatsink several times, when we moved the CPU between different motherboards. Proper thermal transfer compound was used. The temperature of the CPU was fine.
I always thought that CPUs could never be broken. We had an Athlon 64 processor 4600+, it was never overclocked and always used with a standard fan/heatsink, in a well ventilated case. After a year of work, it then started randomly crashing every few weeks. Replacing all the components except the CPU didn't fix the problem (different motherboard, memory, etc). Replacing the CPU did fix the problem. They can die randomly but it is very rare.
Slashdot Mirror
Private Eye, a UK satirical/current affairs magazine comes out twice a month with quite a bit of investigative journalism and lots of things you don't read any where else. They website contains hardly any of their content and they still have quite a few subscribers.
Here it is
If you find matplotlib hard, try my Veusz python plotting package. It has a GUI you can build plots within. It is scriptable in python, and even the saved file format is a python script to generate the plot. It can read a variety of data formats.
Don't go to Maplin - they are very expensive. It's best to go to BitsBox - personal service, cheap delivery, good prices, and a reasonable range of stuff beginners would need.
It's fine to give code to referees who want to see it under peer review. I have no problems with that.
If you release code more generally, you need to support it. You will get questions. If you don't answer them, your work will be brought into question. What's this thing about "working as advertised"? Scientific code is quite often written to be used for a short time on specific inputs on a specific computer system. It won't "work as advertised" without a lot of support and hand-holding.
By assumptions, I mean things such as filename standards, format of data, and so on. These aren't scientific assumptions, but assumptions of the code itself, so are different things.
And keeping code private isn't to stop people reproducing what you did, but to not allow others an advantage in an area you are working on.
Reproduction of results is about independent verification anyway, so they probably should be starting with the raw data and not working with an existing code.
Fortunately my code isn't doing much - it's mostly simple scripts to automate various other software and a few basic models. I have released some of my more complex software and do an OSS project in my spare time.
The main problems with releasing code is having to support it. It takes a lot of time. Code often contains hard coded paths, assumptions and so on, which would need to be documented before it was safe for others to use. That just takes too much time for the average researcher. Also for code working in interesting areas, you need some time to have the code to yourself to exploit that area of research and not give others advantage.
You're being unrealistic. As a scientist I'm payed to produce papers, not polish code. If the code does what I want it to do, and I'm satisfied that it is sufficiently unlikely to be problems with it on on the data I am putting into it, that is enough.
If you want me to write perfect code, you should pay me to do so, and hire people for scientific research on the basis of their code. Being hired as a scientist is based on results, not on how well documented the code is or checking every possible input. I'd love to have more time to do every possible test, but I cannot do that and have a career.
BTW, I have produced some code for others to use from my research, and it takes much longer to get it into a usable and documented state than the usual run of the mill script I write.
If he's missed the opportunity, can I plug my software instead? :-) Hey, great scientific plotting package, Veusz!!! Get it while it's hot.
Bifferboard - 1W power consumption, USB and ethernet - only 29 GBP. Runs standard x86 distributions.
1. It relies on kernel layer of software RAID -- very bad idea.
Not true: See here
Pretty convincing. It appears to show any of the information or photos I can see about myself or my friends.Presumably a very popular facebook app could harvest data on pretty well everyone in facebook, no matter their privacy settings.
That sounds great. This must be new in emacs 23 - I can't see it in 22.2.1 I have here.
How about adding word wrapping when displaying? My local emacs expert wasn't even able to do that, but MS Notepad can do it. It's really useful for editing latex documents where your want a paragraph on a single line (that makes it much easier to search for phrases).
It does do curve fitting (fitting functions to data). It doesn't do enough statistical analysis however.
You can call python code to do it, though it should have a UI for doing it.
Thanks for your comments.
What sort of plotting do you do? Can you give me some idea of what the most useful plots missing from Veusz are? I know it doesn't do 3D plots, but I don't find them generally useful (except for volume renderings, etc.).
Veusz, my scientific plotting package, is up to revision 1009, and I'm virtually the single author and a volunteer. It has been in development since 2003. The output, IMHO, looks quite a bit nicer than PLPlot.
Our 8TB raid system would get trashed after copying data onto it (group descriptor checksums on fsck). It looks like it was an ext4 bug. They fixed it about a week or two ago, here. Maybe it will get in your kernel soon. I'm not going to start ext4 on any production system for at least 6 months I think now.
Modal dialog boxes interrupt workflow. We need to make most dialog boxes modeless and dockable.
At least I hope we'll have Culture overlords... drug glands, body manipulation and uploading to a Mind, at least.
I got a fast lens for my Sony a200 - a Minolta 50mm f1.7. It has really improved my low light level photography as it lets much more light in than a standard zoom lens. That's the advantage of SLR - you can get a better lens to do a proper job.
"If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore."
Is that referring to Bill Gates?
Veusz is a nice GUI/scripted scientific plotting program:
http://home.gna.org/veusz/
It works on Unix, Windows and Mac OS X
ext3 can take several hours to fsck. We have a few TB filesystem full of hard-links (a versioned rsync backup). It does take endless hours to fsck, so you have to switch off the automatic check. Hopefully ext4 should fix this (or btrfs later).
We did - we applied the heatsink several times, when we moved the CPU between different motherboards. Proper thermal transfer compound was used. The temperature of the CPU was fine.
I always thought that CPUs could never be broken. We had an Athlon 64 processor 4600+, it was never overclocked and always used with a standard fan/heatsink, in a well ventilated case. After a year of work, it then started randomly crashing every few weeks. Replacing all the components except the CPU didn't fix the problem (different motherboard, memory, etc). Replacing the CPU did fix the problem. They can die randomly but it is very rare.