What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Ahhh love. Juliet speaks lovely poetry but we learn, as the story unfolds, that names and the identification they impart are in fact extremely important. This is no less true in data management where country names are anything but standardized.
01 Mar 2010 Jonathan Callahan 0 comments
On the left we have zero, our integer measure of nothingness. On the right we have missing value, aka N/A, aka NA, our signal that the value of a datapoint is unknown. Everyone who deals with data has to deal with this important distinction. And far too often people get it wrong.
25 Feb 2010 Jonathan Callahan 0 comments
The great thing about putting data files up on a public web site is that data consumers can download the data with a point and a click. Unfortunately, when lots of individual data files are involved, the consumer of data must point and click … and then point and click again … then point and click … and point and click … and point … and … and … and …
This post describes how 11 lines of python code can take the human eyes and fingers out of the equation and speed things up a bit.
06 Jan 2010 Jonathan Callahan 0 comments
For the last three years our desktop work environment has consisted of a 14″ IBM ThinkPad running Ubuntu Linux. We loved the mobility, reliability and no-nonsense work ethic of this combination. Sadly, we realized that things had to change when we began contemplating our first purchase of reading glasses.
We’re pleased to inform you that we managed to postpone the reading glasses by purchasing a brand new 27″ iMac instead. However, we can’t imagine working without access to a real Unix/Linux system and this post will cover the simple steps needed to run the latest Ubuntu release as a virtual machine on your Mac.
15 Dec 2009 Jonathan Callahan 0 comments
We’re keeping an eye on the Plone content management system (CMS) as a tool for science and recently attended the 2009 Plone conference in Budapest. Here is a short report on how some companies are using Plone in support of science.
14 Dec 2009 Jonathan Callahan 1 comment