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 – […]
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 […]
Recently I was shocked to find that there didn’t seem to be a simple tool which would convert BibTeX files to COINS metadata span tags – so I wrote one! That sentence probably made no sense to you – so lets go through it in a bit more depth. I use LaTeX to write all […]
Sphinx is a great tool for documenting Python programs (and lots of other things – I recently saw a lecturer who had done all of his lecture notes using Sphinx!) and I’ve used it for my new project (which will be announced on this blog in the next few days). Now that the project is […]
In a project recently I was struggling to find a way to parse strings that contain a date range, for example: 27th-29th June 2010 Tuesday 29 May -> Sat 2 June 2012 From 27th to 29th March 1999 None of the Python modules I investigated (including parsedatetime) seemed to be able to cope with the […]
This problem is known by various names such as: Ctrl-Space doesn’t do anything in Eclipse! Why can’t I get auto-complete to work properly in Eclipse? I’ve just set up a new University computer and things don’t work like they do on my laptop (maybe that one’s just me…) It’s actually very simple to solve, but […]
I’ve just discovered something that I feel I must share here – partly to make more people aware of it, and partly so I don’t forget it. In the IDL programming language you will sometimes find your program interrupted by a line saying something like: % Program caused arithmetic error: Floating divide by 0 Sometimes […]
As part of my research I do a fair amount of data collection in the field. Some of the instruments I use are very modern and connect to a computer via USB, interacting with custom-written client software which allows such luxuries as timed logging, triggered logging and local calibration. However, a number of the instruments […]
This post has become quite popular – so I’ve updated it with a bit more detail, plus some people’s experiences from the comments. If you find it useful then please leave a comment – or, even better, if I’ve saved you time and money then donate a bit to cover my hosting costs. You may […]
The first piece of software in my series of essential OS X software is a very handy tool which reminds you when you haven’t attached a file in an email when you intended to. How does it do this? Well, it searches for key words in the email and reminds you if, for example, you […]