I agree with most of their strengths/weaknesses lists for the tools, although I’m not sure why they say version control systems like Subversion or git are “intolerant of simultaneous edits”. Merging is quite good in these system unless two people edit the exact same line of a file. Usually collaborators have different areas of responsibility in the document and conflicts would only occur occasionally if people are doing global actions like proof-reading the entire document at the same time. Even then, the conflicts are detected by the system and can be manually corrected by the later committer.

I favor a Subversion/git repo for doing any serious work (although I do highly recommend Dropbox for sharing/syncing files, just not for collaborative writing). I use Subversion repos for all my proposals, although I am beginning experiments with git for certain internal proposals, papers, and other writing. I used a Subversion repo for Modern IDL. It’s flexible enough to handle your writing output (not the best for a single monolithic Word file, but great for any text based system like LaTeX), while also handling other related assets like code, images, diagrams, slides, etc. well. Data is stored locally, but also backed up on a server¹.

I have reservations about providing proprietary/sensitive/private data to a third-party service. Also, relying on a cloud service (especially like relative newcomers like ScribTeX and ShareLaTeX) might be disastrous if there was an outage just before a proposal deadline².

UPDATE: Here are the slides.

1. Apple Keynote templates for posters
2. Overview of flow visualization in IDL
3. Path management
4. IDL roadmap
5. Google Earth user function for ENVI
6. 1RM: Mac OS X Dashboard widget
7. Processing with Javascript
8. Regular expressions
9. Response to Why IDL Sucks
10. A simple 3D object graphics example

Only one of these was actually posted in 2009, 4 in 2006, 4 in 2008, and 1 “page”. So maybe this is like Star Trek movies, where only the even numbered years are good? Good thing we are in 2010 then!

Here are some (corny) science jokes for those who ended up working this week.

Link via BoingBoing.

10.6 Snow Leopard  47.0%
10.5 Leopard       44.2%
10.4 Tiger          7.3%
Other               1.5%

While looking through the stats, I thought it would be interesting to share some other information about our rather unique demographic.

Browser popularity is upside down with Firefox the most popular and Internet Explorer in 3rd place:

Firefox            50.9%
Safari             24.9%
Internet Explorer  17.2%
Chrome              1.0%
Other               6.0%

Mac users are closing in on Windows users, with a strong showing from Linux users (but basically nothing else, most of the “Other” was “not set” and a small part being iPhone):

Windows            44.4%
Mac                40.3%
Linux              14.2%
Other               1.1%

Geographic location shows a long tail distribution (with 62 countries appearing):

United States      48.8%
Germany             6.9%
United Kingdom      6.5%
China               5.5%
Canada              3.9%
Australia           3.7%
France              2.6%
Italy               2.5%
Brazil              2.4%
Netherlands         2.0%
Japan               1.8%
Spain               1.6%
Other              11.8%

I need to remember that over 50% of readers are not from the US.

Twitter is kind of like RSS for instant messaging. I’ve add my Twitter messages to the sidebar. They’re not very visible right now, but I’m planning to re-organize the site soon to make them a bit more prominent. Of course, if you use Twitter, just check me out there.

Especially if you were my student back when I was teaching IDL or have otherwise worked with me, I have a LinkedIn profile.

Also, check out the project sites for IDLdoc and mgunit. There is a user mailing list for IDLdoc.

Feel free to introduce yourself!

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

This post is motivated by the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon.

There are many applications, known as aggregators, which will watch an RSS feed and list all the content available from each site. Popular aggregators are NetNewsWire, SharpReader, and Straw. Even modern browsers such as Safari and Firefox can handle RSS feeds (at least to some extent).

An alternative to downloading a dedicated aggregator application is to use a web-based news reader such as Bloglines or Google Reader.

The O’Reilly Network has a nice description of RSS.

Here are the article RSS feed and comments RSS feed (they are always found in the column on the right too).