productivity

Seminar Calendars

by Kelle June 23, 2010

Every department seems to do their seminar calendar in a slightly different way, but it looks like most places are still using an old-fashioned HTML table. While that works, it can be done so much better! With the HTML table, everybody needs to actually visit the webpage in order to get the information. In this [...]

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Automatically Create a Webpage of Articles for Astro-ph Discussion with PHP and Python.

by Kelle February 15, 2010

Here is a guest post by Ian Crossfield, a third-year graduate student at UCLA working on the infrared characterization of exoplanet atmospheres, and Nate Ross, a first-year graduate student working on various projects relating to the history of star formation in the universe. Like many astro groups, UCLA has had an informal astro-coffee discussion for [...]

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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 [...]

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Tips for a Successful Writing Retreat

by Kelle December 7, 2009

I recently spent four days on a writing retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii with three of my closest friends/collaborators. A writing retreat is basically where you abscond from your office to some resort-like place for a several days (or weeks) to concentrate on a specific task, ideally a paper. I think it’s particularly [...]

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Join PDF files

by Jane Rigby November 18, 2009

This is a tip that sounds stupid, until you really need it. Say you’re applying for a job, and have several PDF files:  a CV, a research statement, a cover letter.   Files are supposed to be emailed to an office assistant.   You can send separate files, but they may get confused, lost, only some get [...]

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Preventing the AAS Ick

by Jane Rigby October 2, 2009

I’ve been to 4 winter AAS meetings.  Twice, I came back with the “AAS Ick”, a nasty cold that lingered and certainly did NOT make my Astro Better. It’s understandable: the big meeting is right after the holidays — children are home from daycare & school, relatives have traveled from afar, and germs are zinging [...]

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Professional Development Workshops at AAS 215 in January

by Kelle September 21, 2009

UPDATE (Oct 18): The capacity limit for the writing workshop has been raised. If want to attend the workshop but have already registered, complete and fax the Workshop form: http://aas.org/files/AAS215_Workshop_Form.pdf In the spirit of doing astronomy better, I have helped to expand the professional development offerings at the upcoming meeting of the American Astronomical Society. [...]

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myADS arXiv RSS Feeds: Now with Abstracts!

by Kelle August 26, 2009

A while back, I wrote a primer on RSS feeds for astronomers. In my opinion, RSS is ideal for browsing and managing the daily astro-ph listings and is far superior to the one big daily email most people get. In particular, I like the feed provided by myADS because it sorts the articles based on [...]

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Keeping track of your PDF papers with Papers

by Jane Rigby July 31, 2009

The New York Times (of all places) wrote about the chore of keeping track of all the scientific papers on your desktop:  all those PDF files cryptically named 1998A+A__338_781M.pdf and fulltext.pdf .  Or worse, 0903(4).3037v1, because it’s faster to re-download the PDF each time you need it, than to find it in your download folder. [...]

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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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