I have just set up a new home server (a review of which will be coming soon) and have been installing various programs that I want to run on it. A number of these are servers, such as sshd, apache, samba etc. All of these have fairly easy installs under Debian and will automatically run […]
Summary: Very useful for reference while producing graphs, and very comprehensive (including heat-maps, 3D graphs and maps). Reference: Mittal, H. V., 2011, R Graph Cookbook, Packt Publishing, Birmingham, UK, 272 pages, Publisher’s Website As a scientist I often need to plot graphs of my data, so I am keen to learn more about how to […]
I’ve recently moved in to a new flat, and have bought lots of bookcases to store all of my books. Of course, I had the terrible decision to make of how to arrange all of my science books. I mean I could categorise them fairly easily (maths, physics, biology etc), but what order do I […]
Summary: Great book – both for GIS concepts and for teaching Python libraries. Lives up to the boast on the front cover – you really will learn to create complete mapping applications, learning a lot of useful tools and techniques on the way. Reference: Westra, E., 2010, Python Geospatial Development, Packt Publishing, Birmingham, UK, 508 […]
I spent part of today struggling with an undergraduate student to get our university-provided ArcGIS dongle licenses to work. In the spirit of sharing our hard work with the rest of the world, the solution below may be of use to people. The error that we got which were fixed by this solution are listed […]
Summary: Very interesting, and great fun for a geek like me! Now I just need to find the time/money to visit these places… Reference: Graham-Cumming, J., 2009, The Geek Atlas, O’Reilly, 544 pages O’Reilly Link I’m a great fan of John Graham Cumming’s blog, so when the chance came to review his book, The Geek […]
I’ve spent the last couple of months getting used to my new MacBook Pro, and I must say that overall I’m really liking it. Continuing my previous posts about my mac, here are my favourite three pieces of OS X software: Preview This is the built-in image and PDF viewer that comes with OS X. […]
Git is my favourite version control system (see Why is Git better than X for some good comparisons with other tools, and my GitHub repositories to see what I’ve been doing with it lately). I now use it for all of my programming projects, and many of my writing projects (as I’m now using LaTeX […]
Summary: Very comprehensive and very useful, but not good for a beginner. Great book though – definitely has a place on my bookshelf. Reference: Adler, J., 2010, R in a Nutshell, O’Reilly, Sebastopol, CA, 611 pagesO’Reilly Link After reviewing a book about R designed for beginners (see my previous post) I thought I’d step up […]
My fiancee is studying in Lille, France at the moment, and I spent last week with her in Lille, including a two-day trip to Paris. During my time I noticed a number of interesting (or at least semi-interesting) things about life in France: Pedestrian crossings are scary! When the green man is shown it does not […]