Archive for the Linux Category
stack overflow on strike
Posted in Linux, University life with tags chatbots, ChatGPT, Stack Exchange, strike on June 7, 2023 by xi'an
keep thunderbird alive!
Posted in Books, Linux, University life with tags email, free software, privacy, Thunderbird on March 2, 2023 by xi'an
banned from the Linux kernel
Posted in Linux, University life with tags debugging, ethics, Linux, Linux kernel, Minnesota, open source, The Linux Foundation, University of Minnesota on May 8, 2021 by xi'an
ten computer codes that transformed science
Posted in Books, Linux, R, Statistics, University life with tags Apple II, arXiv, C, Fortran, Fourier transform, John Tukey, Linux, Monte Carlo algorithm, Nature, Pascal, PCI, PCI Math Comp Biol, Peer Community, Project Jupyter, R, Rmarkdown, S-plus, SAS, sweave, unix on April 23, 2021 by xi'an
In a “Feature” article of 21 January 2021, Nature goes over a poll on “software tools that have had a big impact on the world of science”. Among those,
the Fortran compiler (1957), which is one of the first symbolic languages, developed by IBM. This is the first computer language I learned (in 1982) and one of the two (with SAS) I ever coded on punch cards for the massive computers of INSEE. I quickly and enthusiastically switched to Pascal (and the Apple IIe) the year after and despite an attempt at moving to C, I alas kept the Pascal programming style in my subsequent C codes (until I gave up in the early 2000’s!). Moving to R full time, even though I had been using Splus since a Unix version was produced. Interestingly, a later survey of Nature readers put R at the top of the list of what should have been included!, incidentally including Monte Carlo algorithms into the list (and I did not vote in that poll!),
the fast Fourier transform (1965), co-introduced by John Tukey, but which I never ever used (or at least knowingly!),
arXiv (1991), which was started as an emailed preprint list by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos, getting the current name by 1998, and where I only started publishing (or arXiving) in 2007, perhaps because it then sounded difficult to submit a preprint there, perhaps because having a worldwide preprint server sounded more like bother (esp. since we had then to publish our preprints on the local servers) than revolution, perhaps because of a vague worry of being overtaken by others… Anyway, I now see arXiv as the primary outlet for publishing papers, with the possible added features of arXiv-backed journals and Peer Community validations,
the IPython Notebook (2011), by Fernando Pérez, which started by 259 lines of Python code, and turned into Jupyter in 2014. I know nothing about this, but I can relate to the relevance of the project when thinking about Rmarkdown, which I find more and more to be a great way to work on collaborative projects and to teach. And for producing reproducible research. (I do remember writing once a paper in Sweave, but not which one…!)
platform fatigue
Posted in Kids, Linux, University life with tags calendar, COVID-19, Firefox, la vie au bureau, Microsoft, platform, Skype, Teams, Thunderbird, Zoom on March 1, 2021 by xi'an
With the myriad of platforms used to counteract the absence of most direct interactions at work, I start to suffer from platform fatigue, constantly switching to a different interface and wasting a lot of time on retrieving links from old emails and reentering passwords… Even a single platform like Teams requires permanent juggling between Dauphine and Warwick (obviously linked with Microsoft constraints), plus repeated updates that clash more often than enough with Firefox. Not to mention collaborative systems like Overleaf, Wikimath, Git, and others. Same thing for regular Zoom meetings which fail to reopen from one week to the next. And calendars that cannot keep track of everything or even anything! The only interface that keeps working (for me) across accounts is my Thunderbird email interface, except for the sharp increase in the email volume (and the fact that many now bypass emails for chats on Teams, Slack, and another myriad of platforms).
