January 10, 2012

VirtualBox and HRD/JT65

One of the semi-frustrating aspects of the state of computing and ham radio is the unavailability of some software packages on OSX. In particular, I’ve been interested in experimenting with JT65 and also wanted to use my Yaesu FT-857d’s CAT cable to program memories and also try out HRD. (I should add–I’ve tried the JT65 stuff and some Yaesu memory programmers, but wasn’t satisfied with the Linux setup for those. I’ll probably look into getting them working more later, but for now, this article.

September 9, 2011

tcjblog.py

I’ve now (for the most part) finished a working version of some software I’ve wanted to tackle for a while. I call it tcjblog.py. It’s a blog platform built using jemdoc.py to format simple text files into nice looking HTML. What’re the benefits of this, and features of tcjblog.py in general? Simple, text file management of blog posts. (I control these with git.) Ability to include LaTeX markup.

September 4, 2011

Five Critical Textbooks for (Applied!) Math & Physics Students

In the course of working through my first year at grad school, I’ve come up with five favorites for the basics of an undergrad understanding of the essential topics for applied math and physics. Without ado and in the order I’d take them off my shelf: Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences - ML Boas. This is my favorite, because it contains almost every technique you need, and it has a ton and a half of problems(over 3400).

May 27, 2010

Getting GnuPlot to compile on OSX

I misunderstood an officemate’s question yesterday and set out to compile gnuplot. Stock GNUPlot will fail to compile on OSX due to an incompatibility in the readline library. So when you compile, let GNUPlot know to use the one included: > tar xzvf gnuplot* > cd gnuplot-4.2.39 > ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-readline=builtin > make > sudo make install

May 25, 2010

Pylab PDF

I’m in the process of kicking the MATLAB habit and replacing it with Python. Pylab is a reasonable approximation to the 2D plotting capabilities of MATLAB, but by default Pylab doesn’t run on headless(ie, non-GUI) boxes. So on my macbook, where I’m often running things interactively, I have backend : macosx and on the faster core2quad machine I send off longer-running jobs to, I used backend : PDF in the .

May 25, 2010

Spaces setup

My workflow is probably pretty specific, but I figured I’d document it for people looking for ideas on how to set it up. This one seems to work pretty well for me. . Terminal: for running stuff on my and other computers. . Textmate: writing mathematics, programming code, etc . Mathematica, MATLAB, and Papers . Mail and Adium . Firefox, Chrome, Safari . iTunes and VLC I have this arranged in a 3×2 grid, such that Textmate is top center.

May 25, 2010

ZSH and scp/rsync globbing

I finally got annoyed at typing tjohnson> scp tcj:*txt . zsh: no matches found: tcj:*txt I’d always fixed this by the up-CTRL-A-over-over-over-over-quote-CTRL-E-over-over-quote method, ie tjohnson> scp "tcj:*txt" . but the more proper and less annoying version is tjohnson> scp tcj:\*txt . However, in the spirit of inspired overkill, there are a couple other options. You can define some new aliases with alias scp='noglob scp' but that hardly counts as overkill, so instead I edited my .

January 11, 2010

Why We Know Less About the World than Ever

In a short break from studying for tomorrow’s preliminary exam, I came across a TED talk about Why We Know Less About the World Than Ever. I’ve spent quite a lot of energy thinking about the main question Alisa Miller brings up, which is: how did we get news get so focused on things like Anna Nichole Smith’s death while ignoring North Korean nuclear disarmament, the IPCC’s global warming report, and other arguably more important news stories?

December 13, 2009

Tunes U and Essential Mathematica

In a similar vein to the TED talks in the previous post, I’ve also been watching a lot of lectures from iTunes U lately. Mostly to get ready for preliminary exams, but also for their sheer awesomeness of the teaching and material. I’ve been most surprised how many people haven’t heard of this yet: Nearly everyone seems surprised when they hear about it. Anyways, here’s my list of favorites so far:

November 26, 2009

TED Talks

I’ve been downloading a lot from iTunes recently, both in the form of TED talks and iTunes U videos. I’ll post about iTunes U later. TED talks, for the uninitiated, are 5-20 minute lectures on something that someone(usually a researcher or philanthropist) has been working on to make the world a better or cooler place. I’ve been watching them the last few days, and they’re really great for hearing an opinion you might not, otherwise.