10 May 2010
I've had my 3G iPad for about a week now, and it's becoming clear to me how I'll use this device.
by Steven Holland
Thoughts on programming, science, nature, and growth through willful change. Oh, and pop-tarts.
by Steven Holland
Thoughts on programming, science, nature, and growth through willful change. Oh, and pop-tarts.
10 May 2010
I've had my 3G iPad for about a week now, and it's becoming clear to me how I'll use this device.
Scientists and user interfaces
16 October 2009
Scientists are by nature do-it-yourselfers. Whether in the field or the lab, they solve problems for which there is often no ready-made fix. They build new equipment, develop novel algorithms, and find fresh solutions.
22 August 2009
There is a great set of tools for development on OS X and the iPhone. Many of my favorites are by small developers. I want to give all of these tools a shout-out for making things so much easier.
17 June 2009
Over the years, various friends have made short pithy comments that have stuck with me. Here’s some of their wisdom, including one of my own nuggets.
McShea on science
"Science is the art of substituting the question that is interesting with the question we can answer."
16 February 2009
It seems like every day raises new reasons to be concerned about Facebook and the security of your personal information. Just two weeks ago, I was about to send out my reply to “25 things you may not know about me”. Fortunately, I had the good sense to balk. My list contained 25 personal facts, but certainly no deep, dark secrets. Even so, they were 25 things I wouldn’t mind sharing with good friends and family, but with long-distant acquaintances and former students? I don’t think so.
10 February 2009
Although ssh is far more secure than telnet, it is also subject to exploits. Even so, it can be made more secure than it is in it’s default distribution. Here’s what I do to make ssh for Mac OS X less subject to being hacked. Much of this is based on an article originally published at oreilly.com. The instructions are involved, but you’ll just need to set this up once and then you’ll be running secured.
3 December 2008
I released Diversity for beta testing today. This is huge for me - this was the first big application I planned after the Cocoa Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch. I had nothing but praise for Aaron Hillegass’ course after I took it, and the more I program in Cocoa, the more I think Aaron is an extraordinarily gifted teacher.
1 December 2008
Most of the programs I distribute at the UGA Stratigraphy Lab are simple tools for doing some calculation that cannot be done easily in a spreadsheet. All of the programs are tools that I developed for my own research problems and that I thought might be useful for a larger audience. Some turned about to be more useful than others (and some I’m sure have never been used by anyone but me!). What’s common to all of them is that they’re tools, not applications. The data is assumed to be in some text file, in some specific format, often in some specific location with some specific file name. The program reads that file, does some calculations, and churns out another text file with the results, with some specific ... you get the picture. If the input file isn’t in the right place, or doesn’t have the right name, or doesn’t have the right format, the program fails. Usually, the user has no idea what happened and they have to email me.
20 November 2008
About a year ago, I realized it was time for new challenges. I’m a professor in geology and I study the effects of climate and sea-level change on ancient marine ecosystems (but that’s a different story). As part of my research, I’ve written programs for scientific analyses and have distributed some of them on my university website. I’ve programmed for over twenty years, writing some BASIC, FORTRAN, Hypercard, and then I switched to C about 15 years ago. The software I released was written for Mac OS 7-9, and I made the switch to Carbon once it came out. Although I made a couple of half-hearted attempts at learning Cocoa, it seemed that the demands on my time never allowed me to really take it on. I’d read about Aaron Hillegass’ highly regarded Cocoa Bootcamp, but finances always seemed a barrier.