After years of using Linux as my main system both at work and home, I got used to being able to drag windows by holding a keyboard combination and dragging with the left mouse button. The one disadvantage of the otherwise fantastic OS X is that despite being unix based, it did not have this feature. Having to drag a window by the very top bar got a little tedious, and resizing with the lower right handle was sometimes difficult.

Quite often at work I have to generate colour maps of certain things, which are generally not sampled evenly in coordinate space. I am also a huge fan of Python, so I thought to myself: can I combine these things? Well until now I didnt think you could. Matplotlibs contour plots require evenly spaced x and y points with z points to match. This is until I found a way

IT++ (or itpp) is a library of Matlab-like functions. I was trying to install this as it contains a nice FastICA algorithm, but was having trouble compiling it on my laptop. I tried googling and found this, but it didn’t work for me. 

My issue was that it was not linking to the ATLAS library, which I required for fast computation. IT++ installed without it, but I wanted these features, so after wading through many options, I managed to root out the problem.

Wow I never thought this day would come! Posting to the internet from a phone.

My first phone was a nice brick as was typical at the time. I only turned it on to ring in emergencies, and probably never sent a text with it. After I started going out with my first girlfriend, I felt the need to get a slightly fancier phone, a Nokia 3210.

A true classic, mostly due to the game snake which was all the rage at my school. I couldn’t be left out so I did get a 3210, but as per usual I got to the game late so about two years after everyone else I finally had the greatest phone game of all time: snake!

Update: For the most part, I want to tunnel from the server to the local machine. This only works with the localhostname set to localhost, for example to tunnel a mysql server to the current machine port 10101:

ssh -L 10101:localhost:3306 user@remoteserver.com -N

The localhost is important, and in this case the mysql client (on the local machine) has to have the hostname set to 127.0.0.1 (for some reason localhost doesnt work).  Ive been trying to access my works MySQL database from outside the universities firewall and was having issues. Im still having issues but thats another story: Ill get to that. Some definitions: the local machine is my machine accessing the server from outside the firewall, and the server machine is the one running the server and is behind the firewall. My initial test was to run a rails server (which runs on port 3000) on the server machine. It serves a basic test page just to show it works.  To set up a tunnel, I used the following command:

I’ve been looking into graphics engines recently, though this can only be a part time hobby for me since I should be doing my PhD work. I’ve mostly been looking at two in particular:

• Ogre
• Irrlicht

Both of these seem to have some pros and cons, which I will be detailing in a second. I cannot decide which one I prefer though so maybe you can help me out? Comments are welcome.

Just joined tumblr to see what the fuss is about, mostly because of Notchs blog. Am getting bored of Wordpress as its interface is a little clunky (though powerful) so im giving this a go! Lets see how this goes!

Edit: Sat 16 Feb 2013 17:53:46 GMT - this is obviously not the case at the moment, now I’m statically hosting this blog

I’m constantly opening an iPython interpreter and having to import my common modules (for me pyfits mostly).

The easiest way to import modules on iPython startup is to look in your

~/.ipython/ipy_user_conf.py

file which is a nice easy way to add python code into your ipython startup (as opposed to the ipythonrc file which is about colours etc.).

In the main function, just add a line such as

ip.ex("import pyfits")

This will allow custom code to be run at startup. In this case, iPython loads the pyfits module.

Update: Wed 27 Feb 2013, since I’m updating this blog, chrome and firefox and safari all support this feature.

Google Chrome has¹ one, Firefox has one but Safari does not… until now!

For me, having a manual “load flash only when I tell you to” button in a web browser is a must. This reduces CPU usage on my mac which increases battery life and stops it getting too hot. These are nice things to have!

Ever selected the “do not show at startup” on the Xcode startup panel and wish you could get it back? Simple. Go to ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Xcode.plist and set the XCShowSplashScreen to True.

credit: here