Philip Guo, who writes a wonderful blog on his views and experiences of academia – including a lot of interesting programming stuff – came up with a research programming version of The Joel Test last summer, and since then I’ve been thinking of writing a series commenting on how well I fulfil each of the items on […]
Today I got sent a file by a colleague in OSM format. I’d never come across the format before, but I did a quick check and found that OGR could read it (like pretty much every vector GIS format under the sun). So, I ran a quick OGR command: ogr2ogr -f “ESRI Shapefile” Villages.shp Villages.osm […]
I’ve spent a long time over the last few days struggling with a problem with a Flask webapp that I’ve been developing. The app worked fine on my local computer, but when I tried to deploy it to my web server and run it via WSGI it seemed to ‘just hang’. That is – when […]
As a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute I’m always trying to make my software more sustainable – and one element of this is ensuring that my software works correctly. Although crashes might annoy users (which generally isn’t a good plan if you want your software to be well-used), a far worse problem is your […]
This is just a quick Public Service Announcement, to let you know that my two main pieces of software have got fancy new websites. Py6S (my Python interface to the 6S Radiative Transfer Model) and RTWTools (my set of extensions for ENVI) are now hosted at: www.py6s.rtwilson.com www.rtwtools.rtwilson.com For those of you interested in the […]
When dealing with some of the alterations to a journal article today I had the need to batch convert some PDF files to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript). After quite a bit of Googling I came to the conclusion that the only way to do this was to write some Javascript using the Adobe Acrobat API – […]
Over the last few months I’ve helped a number of people setup academic websites, and various other people have asked me whether it’s worth a PhD student, Early Career Researcher or other academic creating a website, especially given that it does take a bit of time to do it well. My unequivocal answer is YES! In […]
As academics, we’re always told to do a literature review at the beginning of a research project (indeed, a literature review for a PhD may take many months) – but what about doing a data review? Whether you write it up formally (like a literature review) or not, I think it is important to sit down […]
I must say that I’m not a huge fan of much of the ArcGIS interface – and I particularly dislike the many levels of nested dialog that you have to use to change various options while creating printed maps. Some of the worst of these are the dialogs for inserting, styling and configuring legends – […]
Summary: Put a plaintext file named CITATION in the root directory of your code, and put information in it about how to cite your software. Go on, do it now – it’ll only take two minutes! Software is very important in science – but good software takes time and effort that could be used to do […]