The title of this post is a quote from a programming course I’m taking at the moment that really made me think about things differently. In this course we’ve been doing fairly low-level programming in C, which is quite different from most of the programming I’ve been doing recently. One of my biggest lessons from […]
Recently I took a while to try and simplify and consolidate my online presence. I thought it was an appropriate time to do this, as I had just bought a domain name (rtwilson.com), where I was hosting my academic website (www.rtwilson.com/academic) and my blog (which is what you’re reading now!). I thought it’d be useful […]
Summary: Great book – clear explanations, useful example code and a friendly, easy-going writing style. One of my favourite academic books ever! Reference: Marsland, S., 2009, Machine learning: An Algorithmic Perspective, Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, Florida, 390pp Machine Learning can be a difficult topic – as I found out when taking a Masters-level machine […]
Just a quick post this time, as I’m currently enjoying a nice holiday (well, holiday combined with work) in France. I had to post this because I’ve just realised that one of my biggest gripes with ArcGIS has been fixed in version 10! Hooray! I suspect a lot of other people have been frustrated by […]
I remember, fairly early on in my programming career, reading Joel Spolsky’s article about interviewing for programmers. At the time I thought I might want to get a job as a programmer (in fact, I’ve now got a job in academia – albeit in a field that involves a fair amount of programming), so I […]
Summary: I’d recommend this for people interested in adding Matplotlib functionality to GUI and web applications, and for those who need a bit more information on how to do advanced plotting with Matplotlib. Most general users will be able to get the information they need from the Matplotlib website. Reference: Tosi, S., 2009, Matplotlib for […]
Since I started my PhD I have forced myself to use LaTeX for all of the documents that I write (yes, absolutely everything), and this has really helped me get to grips with how to do things in LaTeX. Overall I have been very impressed – my documents now look really professional, and LaTeX actually […]
Every so often, on my travels around the internet, I come across a piece of software which is so great that I wonder why on earth I haven’t heard of it before. The software listed below falls into this category, and hopefully by posting the list here I will allow more people to find them. […]
I’ve always heard how source control should be used for every project, including those which you think are just going to be throwaway code. However, I’ve often not got around to doing this – if I write a piece of code in ten minutes, but it takes five minutes to set up a new subversion […]
I’ve recently realised something. The best place to write code isn’t in front of your computer, with your compiler, IDE and tools. The best place to write code is far, far away from any of these tools – somewhere where you can think properly. For a language with which you are fairly familiar, the mechanics […]