Tom

Astropy website/logo design competition

by Tom February 6, 2012

Last Monday, I wrote about the Astropy project, and mentioned various ways of contributing to the project code and documentation. We’ve now launched a competition to design the website and logo for Astropy, with a prize for the winning entry, so if you’re looking for a fun way to contribute to Astropy, this is your [...]

{ 0 comments }

Category: python Tags: ,

Read more →

The Astropy Project: A core Python package for Astronomy

by Tom January 30, 2012

In June 2011, the announcement of a new Python package for Astronomy on the astropy mailing list prompted a long thread that started as a criticism of the proliferation of independently-developed Astronomy Python packages but quickly became the start of a common effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy. Many hundreds of emails, [...]

{ 7 comments }

Category: programming, python Tags: ,

Read more →

Python Tutorial for Astronomers

by Tom May 25, 2011

On Monday, a group of CfA astronomers (Tom Aldcroft, Brian Refsdal, Gus Muench, and myself) announced the availability of a web tutorial aimed at teaching Python to astronomers through a series of interactive workshops: http://python4astronomers.github.com/ Practical Python for Astronomers is a series of hands-on workshops to explore the Python language and the analysis tools it [...]

{ 6 comments }

Category: python Tags: ,

Read more →

Mute noisy conversations in GMail

by Tom February 14, 2011

I occasionally get added to endless email conversations which I have no time to read and/or contribute to. If I archive the message, it will pop back into the inbox every time someone replies and sets off the GMail notifier. However, I recently discovered that GMail has a nice ‘mute’ feature, which archives the message [...]

{ 1 comment }

Category: productivity Tags: ,

Read more →

Version Control Demystified, Part 3: Git and Mercurial

by Tom December 20, 2010

This post is the third in a series devoted to version control. In Part 1, I talked about version control features that are already integrated into everyday tools, such as Dropbox or Google Docs. In Part 2, I gave an introduction to Subversion, which is a ‘traditional’ command-line version control system. In this post, I [...]

{ 8 comments }

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

Read more →

Version Control Demystified, Part 2: A Subversion Primer

by Tom November 29, 2010

Introduction A couple of weeks ago, I outlined how version control, which I defined as the management of changes to documents, code, or information is both something you should care about, and something that you may already have been using or can easily use with Time Machine, Dropbox, Pages.app, etc. One of the areas where [...]

{ 18 comments }

Category: productivity Tags: , ,

Read more →

Version Control Demystified, Part 1: Version Control in Apps you already use

by Tom November 15, 2010

Have you heard about ‘version control’ but don’t know what it is, don’t see the point, don’t want to invest time finding out about it, or think that it is only accessible to the tech-savvy? Think again! This is the first in a series of posts devoted to demystifying version control. By ‘version control’, what [...]

{ 5 comments }

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

Read more →

How to easily create, read, write and manipulate tables and databases in Python with ATpy and asciitable

by Tom September 6, 2010

With the release of ATpy 0.9.4 and asciitable 0.2.4, it’s about time we told our readers how incredibly easy it is to create, read, write, and manipulate tables and databases of data in Python!   Most, if not all of us have to manage tabular data at one point or another, and it is safe [...]

{ 10 comments }

Category: python Tags: , , , ,

Read more →

Code and text editors on MacOS X

by Tom June 21, 2010

One of the things we spend the most time doing as astronomers is writing text and/or code, whether to develop a pipeline to reduce/plot data, write papers/proposals, or write simulation codes. Choosing a good text editor is just as important as having a good chair to sit on, and can have a big impact on [...]

{ 9 comments }

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

Read more →

MarcoPolo – Context-aware computing for Mac

by Tom January 11, 2010

MarcoPolo is a very cool (free) application for MacOS X that uses information about the current state of your computer, or evidence, to automatically perform actions. For example, one can use MarcoPolo to automatically change the Network Location if an ethernet cable is plugged in or a specific Wi-Fi network is present (useful if you [...]

{ 2 comments }

Category: applications, productivity Tags:

Read more →

← Previous Entries