This is the first Autumn in five years that I’m not job-hunting. So here is some unsolicited advice from 30,000 feet. Your mileage may vary. 1. Seek out new mentors. It’s possible that your usual mentors aren’t prepared or willing to help much with a job search. It may be a long time since they [...]
Is It Time You Were Reliably Unreliable? | ProfHacker I stopped being the person who tried to please everyone and instead became someone who kept my responsibilities but was not always everyone’s good boy. It actually took some effort on my part. There were times I would say out loud, “Wait. Not now. It’s not your responsibility.” Be a [...]
Apple Outsider has a good piece on Java on Mac OS X. If you haven’t heard, Apple has announced that the current version of Java has been deprecated. This means that Apple is not going to keep creating their own Java VM for OS X. Apple is relying on Oracle/Sun to make a VM for [...]
Converting astronomical data taken in multiple filters into representative-color RGB images often provides one of the most visually appealing (and informative) views of a target. This can be done in ds9 very easily; however, if you want a little more control, then python/matplotlib can be used in a very similar fashion. I also note that [...]
Luisa Rebull is a Research Scientist at the Spitzer Science Center at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at Caltech. She is the Archive Scientist for Spitzer, and has been working on the development of the Spitzer Heritage Achive. Since early in the Spitzer mission, the Spitzer software Leopard has been how most people [...]
For awhile, I’ve been looking for a keyboard shortcut to switch between multiple windows of one application. I’d even been trying out Switché, but really couldn’t get used to it. I prefer the native Application Switcher. The one thing I liked about it was command-‘ to switch between windows of the current application. Suddenly, I [...]
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 [...]
Publish your computer code: it is good enough | Nature NewsCompelling call for cultural change regarding releasing the scripts used to arrive at published results. What would be the best tool for us (astronomers) to use to for a code repository for static code? Ideally, the tool should allow the code to be tagged with [...]
Keyboard Shortcut for “Save as PDF…” in OS X | MacSparkyWalk through for setting up pressing cmd-P twice to print to a PDF. (via Michael Cushing.)
In a previous post, we talked about how to install latex. (It would be really great if someone could synthesize and transfer the information in that post to the LaTeX wiki page.) Tom also recently gave us a rundown the various text editors for OS X. Here, I’m going to go through the details of [...]