7. Do you use version control for your scripts? Yes, almost always. I’ve found this a lot easier since I started using Git – to start using version control with Git simply requires running "git init" – whereas with SVN you had to configure a new repository and do all sorts of admin work before […]
I recently read the article Don’t be a technical masochist on John D. Cook’s blog, and it struck a chord with me about the way that I see people choosing software and programming tools in my field. John states "Sometimes tech choices are that easy: if something is too hard, stop doing it. A great […]
This is the second in my series of posts examining how well I fulfil each of the items on the Philip Test. The first part, with an explanation of exactly what this is, is available here, this time we’re moving on to the next three items in the list: 4. Are your scripts, data sets […]
For a while now I’ve been frustrated by an error that I get whenever I’m using git on Windows. When I try and run certain git commands – such as git log or git diff – I get the following message: The error message “WARNING: terminal not fully functional” appears, but if you press return […]
Summary: Rackspace are great: easy-to-use control panel, helpful support, fast servers and I got it all for free to host my open-source projects! Upgrading servers isn’t as easy as it could be, but that’s a very minor problem overall. After thinking about it for a while, I took advantage of Jesse Noller’s offer that I found […]
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 […]