Archive for October, 2007

Software Migration List

October 17, 2007 at 4:58 pm · Filed under windows

In no time, I’ll be leaving my crappy IT support job and taking a scientific role with a government agency. Hooray!

It’s time to make a list of all the software and add-ons I will need to bring with me to the new workstation. I am hoping it will be a linux workstation, or that I will at least have the option of dual-booting, or at the very least of connecting my laptop to the network.

Failing that, I’ll need my list of useful apps:

  • TeXnicCenter – best windows Latex IDE I’ve found so far
  • Amaya – because Dreamweaver is overkill, and not free
  • Thunderbird – hopefully they let me connect to Optus mail server from behind the firewall
  • Octave – the recent release for windows seems a little flakey, but I can live with it
  • Google desktop – again, if firewall restrictions will let gmail in, this lets me see when I have new mail asap.
  • Trillian – sure maybe I should move to Jabber, or another OS chat client. Trillian just works, and works well enough for my needs.
  • Gnuplot – what else is there for graphics?
  • Open office – actually, I think MS Office is better. Excel does better charts (*way* better), word has more features. Still, I’m using Open Office at home, and I like consistency
  • Firefox – of course. Zotero and Foxmarks are required. Greasemonkey, Tiddlysnip, View Source Chart, Minimap Sidebar Extension, Gears and Pearl Crescent Saver Basic are also neat add-ons
  • Sync Toy – nothing has made keeping my flash drive up to date easier
  • Putty and Winscp – for when I need to log on to a real computer
  • Picasa – mostly for the image browsing

Comments (1)

A python convert

October 3, 2007 at 2:58 pm · Filed under python

Last week I met with my research supervisor. I told him I was toying with the idea of writing a script to automatically extract the data from my results folder, but I think it will take too long to develop.

So, back to the spreadsheet I went. Cut, paste, cut, paste. Damn, I thought. There are biologists who can script better than you!

I’ve looked at Python briefly on many occasions, but on Saturday I had one of those eureka coding sessions where everything just works.

Automated report on a directory full of folders full of results? No problem. Extract program parameters from text files – easier done than said. Spit out HTML – are you kidding? The only question is whether to use a featured HTML object creation module, or just print the text.

Not only has python been easy to get into, it’s clear that there is a lot of depth – this is my kind of scripting language.

Leave a Comment