A key – but challenging – part of learning to program is moving from writing technically-correct code ‘that works’ to writing high-quality code that is sensibly decomposed into functions, generically-applicable and generally ‘good’. Indeed, you could say that this is exactly what Software Carpentry is about – taking you from someone bodging together a few […]
My PhD was done through a Doctoral Training Centre, and as part of this I had a taught year at the beginning of my PhD. During the summer of this year I had to do a ‘Summer Project’, which was basically a MSc thesis. My thesis was called "Can a single cloud spoil the view?": modelling […]
When looking through my profile on Github recently, I realised that I had over fifty repositories – and a number of these weren’t really used much by me anymore, but probably contained useful code that no-one really knows about! So, I’m going to write a series of posts giving brief descriptions of the code and […]
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 […]
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 […]
If you are creating maps then for goodness sake Use sensible colours! I was helping some undergraduates with some work the other day, and they decided to use the following colour scheme for representing river depth: Deep water: Red Medium-depth water: Bright green Shallow water: Pink Why did they do this? Well, either they were […]
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 […]