varoquaux@normalesupScience and computers: science with computers or the science of computers
A bag of tricks with computers
Having done physics studies, I have never really been taught computing engineering techniques. Yet I spend so much time using a computer, sometimes doing things that are not that easy. I have learned through trial and errors.
This is the page where I try to gather advices for the not to technical user. Of course most of the advice given here target a research type workflow. Most of the pages try to address standard lab problems, in a language understandable by most. Some are more technical, sorry. If you have questions on these do not hesitate to send me a mail.
Working with a computer
Do you work a lot with a computer ? Do you know what version control is ? Do you make automated backups ? These pages introduce basic tools used by IT professionals to keep track of their work. These pages are easy to read.
svnautcommit
This page describe how to setup your computer to be able do automatic backup of your files with mutliple undo. This solution is recommended for windows users.
bazaar
This page give an introduction to the bazaar version control software. It is recommended for users who want to keep track of changes made to a project they work on.
Python and science
Python is both a programming language and a huge set of utilities. Think of it as MatLab, but general purpose, not specialized towards data processing, and without the heavy UI. Python comes with great modules for data processing or numerical simulations, and it is my tool of choice for day-to-day work in the lab when I have to use a computer.
python advanced techniques
This pages tries to introduce software development techniques and patterns to help write better code. It is intended for the casual programmer, and certainly not an advanced developer.
pyreport
This is an utility I wrote to generate report from python scripts. I use this a lot to print out nice pdfs from the calculations I make using python. It is great for interacting with colleagues and keeping track of my work.
traitsUI
Building a interactive graphical application is hard. The traitsUI python module brings a excellent solution to this problem. This is a tutorial to building your first traitsUI application.
Publishing and authoring
Making posters
Some advice on making posters for scientific conferences.
My PhD Thesis latex style
The main files of my phd thesis, to give an example of the LaTeX code used
Simple LaTeX example
A very simple example to start with LaTeX
Garamond fonts
Garamond font for LaTeX. Garamond fonts are very nice old facion font (used for instance in classical books). Here is a version of Garamond fonts and install instructions for pdfLaTeX.
This website
Some info on how I create and manage this website.
misc.
ssh multisync
This page describe how to sync 2 PIM applications such as evolution through multisync and an ssh connection
Real time computing
Some rambling about real-time computing, to put in the perspective of the computer-control of an experiment
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