Eli

iTerm2: The successor to the terminal on OSX

by Eli April 27, 2011

In the Linux environment we have the terminal program that comes packed with loads of features. For example, if you were in /home/name/to/directory and created a tab, that new tab would be in the same directory. Most Linux users would say “so what?” OSX’s terminal does not have that capability and can be quite tedious [...]

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Category: applications, OS X Tags: , ,

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PiCloud: Advantages of running python in the cloud

by Eli December 28, 2010

When we go to conferences, observing runs, collaborations and other travels the first thing that comes to mind for packing is our laptop (or iPad). The laptop is steadfast, resolute and is always there when we need to work or relax. But there’s one slight problem; when we need to do work on the run, [...]

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Category: python Tags: , ,

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Do you Homebrew? Does it outdo MacPorts and Fink?

by Eli October 18, 2010

An open source social network program called Diaspora has been posted on Github for the public to try out and I decided to give it a whirl. Diaspora has many UNIX application dependencies since it’s currently in development/alpha mode. Not wanting to spend much time on installing the dependencies I looked at several howtos and [...]

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Mendeley: The future to managing science papers?

by Eli March 22, 2010

This is another guest post by Sarah Kendrew (blog, Twitter) a postdoc in infrared astronomy at Leiden Observatory working on instrumentation for the European Extremely Large Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. She’s also contributed an article about Evernote. Staying on top of the literature, even in a narrow field, is one of the [...]

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Category: applications Tags: , , , , , , ,

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Google Wave Notifiers

by Eli December 28, 2009

Google Wave is a promising platform for online collaborations. It’s currently in a alpha/beta state and its growing pains are evident: slow and lack of notifications. I have been using Wave for two months and think it’s a great tool despite the drawbacks. It has proven to be incredibly useful for large scale collaborations where [...]

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.astronomy

by Eli November 29, 2009

The .astronomy (dot astronomy) conference will begin tomorrow in Leiden at the Lorentz Center. There are fifty attendants and we’ll be covering outreach, web-based research, citizen science, and visualization in astronomy. Tonight about twenty of the attendees got together and went out for dinner at a delectable pizza restaurant. Throughout the evening we introduced ourselves [...]

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Category: public outreach

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Let Snow Leopard Roar

by Eli October 29, 2009

For those who use Snow Leopard you have probably noticed how much snappier the OS is than its predecessor. Much of the optimizations in Snow Leopard is thanks to several new and emerging tools called LLVM, Clang, and OpenCL. What’s more is that we can use these tools to speed up some of our basic [...]

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Category: OS X Tags: , ,

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Hungry for Plots? Get some APLpy!

by Eli July 20, 2009

Today APLpy 0.9.3 is out! It is a Python plotting package made to generate publication-quality plots in multiple formats such as EPS, PDF, PS, PNG, and SVG. APLpy was created by Thomas Robitaille and Eli Bressert, who come from a Fortran and IDL background. With Python’s ease of use, portability, and programming they decided to [...]

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Category: figures, python Tags: , ,

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Devtools In Chromium

by Eli July 8, 2009

Since the Chromium project started releasing builds of their browser I have been testing it from time to time. The latest build for OS X, 20223, has significant improvements from just a month ago. After using it for a day I found some nifty features and the one that really caught my eye is devtools. [...]

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Category: applications, productivity

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