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 […]
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 […]
While processing some data at work today I had an issue where I had a raster dataset in ArcGIS, where all cells with invalid data had been set to 9999. Of course, this caused a lot of issues for the statistics on the dataset – basically they were all nonsense – so I needed to […]
When you try and reproject a dataset in ArcGIS (for example, by using the Project Raster tool) you will see a dialog a bit like the one below: The highlighted field wants you to specific a Geographic Tranformation. Although it says that it is optional, it often isn’t (I think the optionality depends on the type […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Sometimes you may find that your Mac OS X installation has an old URL for the software update service in its preferences, which may mean that you can’t successfully run the Software Update tool under the Apple menu. In my case, I got my Mac from my university and the update server was set to some internal […]