A recent article on AstroBetter reviews some of the available tools for collaborative writing with an eye to writing proposals. I wanted to give my perspective on these tools since I have used all of the tools they discuss in the article: ScribTeX (as well as the similar ShareLaTeX), Google Docs, Dropbox, and version control systems, e.g., Subversion or git.

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 server^[1].

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 deadline^[2].

I will be at the The Westin in Pasadena, CA for the Earth Science Technology Forum (ESTF) this week, Tuesday evening to Thursday afternoon (June 21-23). I have a talk in Session A8 “Remote Data Exploration with IDL” (I’ll post slides later). Let me know if you are in the area and want to meet up!

UPDATE: Here are the slides.

The site will be down for routine maintenance this evening, July 1, around 10 pm MDT for approximately 6 hours.

Here are the most popular posts of 2009:

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.

I have always been amazed at how fast a new Mac OS X update is adopted by the community, so I have been checking the statistics for visitors to this site (all statistics quoted here are for the month of September). Among Mac users, Snow Leopard has passed Leopard (it happened over a week ago, but hasn’t changed much since then):

• 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.

I have recently finished some projects at work, so should have some time to write. Look for new articles soon.

I’m in Seattle for the rest of this week and part of next week. See you next Wednesday!

I’ll be at NASA Goddard on the evening of Feb. 13 and during the day on the 14th. Drop me a line if you want to meet up in Greenbelt.

I can’t help but point out yet another hilarious comic by the excellent xkcd. So is there an IDL mode for butterflies?