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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Summary: A useful guide to automating ArcGIS using Python, which is fully up-to-date with the latest version of ArcGIS. Definitely provides "quick answers to common problems", but it may take more effort to get a deep understanding of the methods used. Good breadth of coverage – but notably lacks raster examples – and well explained […]
I recently did a presentation entitled Sustainable Software and Reproducible Research in Remote Sensing at the Wavelength 2013 conference. The slides are available at SpeakerDeck, and shown below. https://speakerdeck.com/robintw/software-sustainability-and-reproducible-research-in-remote-sensing The rest of this page is a rather rough categorised list of various links and resources that may be useful to you after seeing the presentation (either […]