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 […]
This is the second in my series of posts examining how well I fulfil each of the items on the Philip Test. The first part, with an explanation of exactly what this is, is available here, this time we’re moving on to the next three items in the list: 4. Are your scripts, data sets […]
Philip Guo, who writes a wonderful blog on his views and experiences of academia – including a lot of interesting programming stuff – came up with a research programming version of The Joel Test last summer, and since then I’ve been thinking of writing a series commenting on how well I fulfil each of the items on […]
Today I got sent a file by a colleague in OSM format. I’d never come across the format before, but I did a quick check and found that OGR could read it (like pretty much every vector GIS format under the sun). So, I ran a quick OGR command: ogr2ogr -f “ESRI Shapefile” Villages.shp Villages.osm […]
I’ve spent a long time over the last few days struggling with a problem with a Flask webapp that I’ve been developing. The app worked fine on my local computer, but when I tried to deploy it to my web server and run it via WSGI it seemed to ‘just hang’. That is – when […]
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 […]
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 […]
Another one of the things that came out of the Collaborations Workshop 2013 was the importance of licensing any software or code that you release. The whole point of releasing code is so that other people can use it – but no-one can use it properly unless you tell them what license you have released […]