Google Chrome
If you've been living on another planet for the last 24 hours then you might just have missed Google's typically understated announcement that they are releasing a new web browser called Chrome, designed to meet the deficiences in Firefox, IE and Opera....
posted on: Tue, 02 Sep | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Getting things done...
I've been an advocate of the Getting Things Done (GTD) for a number of years now. In a management era that seems to be defined by self-organization manuals, this one stands out from the crowd by its relatively simple explanation of why things don't get done and how to go about rectifying the situation....
posted on: Mon, 25 Aug | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
TagCrowd
Came acrossTagCrowd today which is an interesting service that analyses a piece of text and provides a visual cue as to the types of words and their frequency....
posted on: Thu, 07 Aug | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Mobile broadband speeds
For those that have taken advantage of the tumbling subscription rates for mobile broadband through the likes of 3, T-Mobile etc (as cheap as £5 per month), the different data rates might prove a little confusing....
posted on: Thu, 17 Jul | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Firefox 3 and addons
I've finally taken the plunge and upgraded to Firefox 3, although through the portableapps.com route....
posted on: Tue, 15 Jul | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Bibliographies and referencing
Referencing is a bit of a black art in universities and something we try to drum in from the first year....
posted on: Sun, 08 Jun | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Extracting images from MS Office documents
For quite a while image handling in MS Office has bugged me. Its never been particularly great for two reasons:
1....
posted on: Mon, 02 Jun | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Foxit PDF Read 2.3
A new version of Foxit PDF Reader has been released and whilst on the face of it it only appears to be an incremental update, the big news is that it now offers full audio/video support for PDFs....
posted on: Fri, 16 May | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Opera Mini 4 and McDonalds
I've been using Opera Mini 4 on my Palm TX for a while now and it is very slick at viewing websites. Its not a "one-size-fits-all" product but for certain niches its excellent....
posted on: Sun, 30 Mar | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
SD Cards and beyond
SD cards are all the same right? You stick them in your camera, PDA, laptop etc and they just work? Well have a look at the above article and you'll quickly realise that this isn't the case....
posted on: Sat, 23 Feb | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Animated GIFs and Powerpoint
I wanted to put an animated GIF in to Powerpoint recently and, when imported, it simply showed a blank square. A little bit of Googling later and it would appear that, from Powerpoint2000 onwards, animated GIFs can be viewed (fully animated) in presentation mode only. When in editing mode, they simply show the first frame. Useful to know...
posted on: Tue, 13 Nov | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Free your mind
I have been a fan of "mind mapping" for a number of years, a technique for brainstorming, organising and structuring data first developed by Tony Buzan....
posted on: Wed, 31 Oct | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Concatenating in Windows
I was recently sent some LiDAR data x,y,z triples (i.e. x coordinate, y coordinate and elevation); actually, it also had intensity so quadruples I guess. Anyway, the data were extracted for a 1km2 area from multiple flight lines which meant I had multiple x,y,z values. Before importing these as a LiDAR LAS file I wanted to concatenate them. Easy to do in Linux but I couldn't remember how to do it in Windows. A quick Google later led me to this useful article over at Lockergnome. And for those too lazy to click, this for loop will do the work for you:
for %f in (*.log) do type "%f" >> aggregate.txt
posted on: Wed, 03 Oct | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Latex and change tracking
If you've read any of my blog entries over the last year, then you will realise that I'm a regular LaTeX user, primarily for typesetting at the Journal of Maps....
posted on: Wed, 19 Sep | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Converting Word 2007 Files
Now that Office 2007 is fully upon us, expect to be receiving the DOCX (and equivalent PPTX and XLSX) files from colleagues....
posted on: Sat, 25 Aug | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Creating ISOs
One of the nice things in virtual machines is that you can mount real, or fake, CDs on to the VM. So if you load a CD in to your own system, the VM can access it....
posted on: Fri, 24 Aug | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Virtual Box
Well the world of virtualisation doesn't stay still for long and I have now switched over to Virtual Box. Whilst not open source, the main product is free to use and is lighter and fast than Virtual Server (it also runs on Linux). More importantly, it runs both xubuntu and Fedora Core without any hitches at all. I'm using the former for playing around with GRASS, whilst the latter has been necessitated by using Pulsar for some radar image processing. Virtual Box is very easy to use which is nice. However, the more memory the better and if you have less than 500Mb things will be much slower.
posted on: Thu, 23 Aug | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Barratts Shoes and data collection
I was shopping in Barratts shoes recently and paid with my chip and pin card. Interestingly, in this age where everyone is paranoid about card skimming, the sales assistant asked to swipe the card on the POS to complete the transaction. I can only assume that Barratts have installed the new chip and pin system, but their legacy tills still require a card swipe to complete a transaction. This is really very poor and does nothing to assuage customer worries. Of course, the best course of action is to vote with your feet and purchase elsewhere.
posted on: Tue, 21 Aug | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Google Gears
I've just been tinkering with Google Gears. OK, so it's old (ish) news (a month is a long time in IT), but I've had other things to do....
posted on: Sat, 14 Jul | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Installing GRASS
In fact installing GRASS isn't that difficult, but for those not having used Linux before it is, on the one hand, intuitive and much better than Windows, whilst on the other, if you don't know how to do it, it won't work!...
posted on: Mon, 11 Jun | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Ubuntu and GRASS
I have played around with various Linux distros over the years (and remember installing BeOS at one point!)...
posted on: Sat, 09 Jun | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
CLEO... Ahh, Nicole??
As an avid Firefox user I have a whole load of extensions I've installed for various purposes. I've blogged on some of then, including Sage and AllPeers amongst several....
posted on: Tue, 01 May | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
PDAs: a dying breed?
Two interesting posts on Palm Info Center got me pondering the future of PDAs. The first concerned an announcement by Dell, stating they were axing the Axim PDA range and so exiting the PDA market....
posted on: Wed, 11 Apr | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Deeply Touched
I run a Synology DiskStation DS-101j on my network principally for backups. Its a nice bit of kit with lots of goodies on board; printer server, web server (Apache, PHP, MySQL), photo server, ftp server....
posted on: Wed, 04 Apr | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Editing audio
I regularly record either lectures I give in the university or at conferences (see my homepage), as well as by guest speakers....
posted on: Fri, 02 Mar | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Blosxom: the zen of blogging!
Those interest in the IT side of blogging will have noticed I use Blosxom for my blog. This is a remarkably lightweight (in size)...
posted on: Mon, 12 Feb | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
CD Ripping
I have been extending my mp3 collection of late by ripping some more of my 400 odd CDs. I should say that I buy all the music I am interested in as albums (CDs) and subsequently rip them for listening too; I'm not a fan of illegal copying (or, for that matter, Orwellian DRM schemes dreampt up by money grabbing music executives....
posted on: Mon, 05 Feb | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
LaTeX: Code Editor
In my earlier blog on LaTeX I mentioned that at the Journal of Maps we use MikTex. As with any other LaTeX distribution, MikTeX just processes the LaTeX code, typesets it and produces (if you use pdftex) into a PDF....
posted on: Mon, 01 Jan | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Converting old word processor files
A while back I had occasion to look at some old files I had created as part of my MSc Thesis. These were generated in WordPerfect 5....
posted on: Wed, 27 Dec | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Firefox 2
I've held off upgrading to Firefox 2 for a while now simply due to lack of time and the availability of Portable Firefox....
posted on: Sun, 24 Dec | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Fingerprint of Error
I bought a rather snatty Sony Vaio TX3XP laptop recently. Not only is it small (20x25cm) and light (1.25kg; its made from carbon fibre), but it also has a incredible battery life (~10 hours). Anyway, one of the features introduced on this model is fingerprint scanning to log on. It really works rather well and is a damn site easier than typing in a user name and password. That was, until I had a bath. Afterwards the skin on my fingers shrivelled slightly and I was refused access to the laptop!!
posted on: Fri, 08 Dec | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Online Backup
I blogged last week about having a reliable backup routine for data on a PC. In this I mentioned that I have five copies of my data, including archives and offsite backup....
posted on: Fri, 24 Nov | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Exporting References from Endote
I was putting together a relational database recently that needed to contain a table of references. The references themselves were sat in Endnote so I thought it would be straightforward to export them into something like a CSV or Tab-delimited file....
posted on: Fri, 17 Nov | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Backup your data ;)
Ontrack Data Recovery have a rather amusing selection of "Top 10 Data Loss Disasters" from 2006. They include the usual dropped from helicopter, run over and packed in wash bag they seem to crop up regularly....
posted on: Wed, 15 Nov | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
LaTeX: LaTable
One of the other bits of LaTeX "support" software I've come across in recent weeks is LaTable. Laying out tables, to quote Robbie Coltrane from "Nuns on the Run" when explaining the holy trinity, is "it's a bit of a bugger"....
posted on: Mon, 13 Nov | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
Palm Opera
Whilst I'm on the theme of playing with my Palm, I saw the recent release of Opera Mini for the Palm (and this interested me because WebPro that shipped with my Palm is not great)....
posted on: Sat, 28 Oct | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
LaTeX: Abiword
LaTeX is a mark-up "language" that users learn in order to write LaTeX documents. If you have ever done any HTML by hand then it is similar....
posted on: Mon, 23 Oct | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
LaTeX Musings
Before I get in to this blog, I should note that this will form one of several entries on LaTeX.
When we first started the Journal of Maps we decided to typeset the material ourselves and pondered for quite a while about which software to use....
posted on: Fri, 20 Oct | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
U3 Program Launcher
I've been looking for a program menu to go with my external USB hard drive for a while now. I've blogged before about running portable (U3) apps from an external device....
posted on: Wed, 20 Sep | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
New Mobile!
Well I have to eat a little bit of humble pie and say I have actually bought a new mobile phone. Shock, horror! Whilst I was away in China a borrowed a Nokia 1101 and liked it so much that I bought one. Whilst it doesn't do anything more than the old T180 could (texting and phone), I have to say that not only is it much smaller andlighter, but it also is much more refined. And of course at £20 it stays within my remit of cheap and functional!
posted on: Sat, 02 Sep | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry
|
