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 […]
Summary: When you use the Pixel Locator or Cursor Location/Value tool in ENVI, the latitude and longitude co-ordinates given are based on the datum that the image is in, not necessarily WGS-84. This may be obvious to some people, but it wasn’t to me – and I thought that if I got confused then some other […]
As part of my PhD I wanted to use a simple model which would give me an estimation of the atmospheric ozone amount given a location and time of year. A simple model to do this was created by van Heuklon in 1979, and was described in a delightfully simple paper (unfortunately not freely available […]
Another one of the things that came out of the Collaborations Workshop 2013 was the importance of licensing any software or code that you release. The whole point of releasing code is so that other people can use it – but no-one can use it properly unless you tell them what license you have released […]
This is a first of a number of posts based upon discussions I had while at the Collaborations Workshop 2013 (#CollabW13 on twitter) in Oxford, UK. During one of the sessions I described a simple technique that I try and use to increase the sustainability, reproducibility and releasability of code that I write, data I […]