Gnuplot is a great software. Very useful for easily plotting datapoints without fuss and complicated interface. However, the default accepted format is a table defined by space-separated values. If you have comma separated values, then you have to change the delimiter. But how? This command set datafile separator “,” will do the trick.
February 27, 2009 – 2:18 pm
Sometimes it happens to me that my hard drive starts being accessed in a very aggressive and noisy way. I found a couple of commands to see who is responsible: sudo fs_usage -f filesys and also sudo iotop In the last one, you could get error messages like dtrace: error on enabled probe ID …. [...]
February 22, 2009 – 1:03 am
I found this interesting question in the referral logs on ForTheScience. Why is most science programming done in Fortran (77 or 95)? After some thought, I can fill the following reasons: Fortran is simple to understand. Not the code itself maybe, but the style. The learning curve for doing something in Fortran is very low, [...]
February 13, 2009 – 8:41 pm
Python is a fascinating language. It makes you think. Sometimes it can destroy your beliefs. My background is in statically typed languages. I came from C++, camped there for a while, then moved to python. I also explored Java recently. I would like to present my case by remembering the three pillars of object oriented [...]
February 2, 2009 – 12:27 am
Yesterday I was adding a small feature to GenomeAtlas when suddenly something strange happened: in the php script, images are generated dynamically using the gd extension, and saved into a cache. For some reason, suddenly some images were corrupted. At first, I blamed the Apache installation or the php interpreter, because none of the modifications [...]
January 2, 2009 – 3:44 pm
I am negatively astonished (and I am not alone) by a new diffuse practice of many networking websites: during the registration process, they ask your Gmail (or other webmail’s) personal username and password, so to login on your behalf and import your address book contacts. What? Giving your personal password to another website allows them [...]
December 9, 2008 – 11:20 pm
It is some sort of well known pattern, the “http://” stuff. It is so frequently used that browsers just fill it in automatically by default. But what does exactly mean? What’s behind it? In reality, behind a so called URI, there’s more than meets the eye. What is an URI? First of all, we need [...]
November 8, 2008 – 3:54 pm
I got an error while using mysqldump mysqldump: Got error: 1044: Access denied for user x@y to database z when using LOCK TABLES To solve this problem, either ask you administrator to grant you the lock privileges, or use the following command instead. mysqldump -u username -p database –single-transaction >dump.sql This is the help entry [...]
September 2, 2008 – 10:20 pm
I just released a program I developed: Chestnut Package Manager, a utility to handle executables and resource files in a transparent, platform independent and relocatable way. Its concept is similar to Apple bundles and Java archives. It is implemented in Python. I also provide a nice tutorial about how to use it and how to [...]
I am using SVN to manage my current development repository. As the project grew, the operations became slower and slower. Things like updating or committing could require minutes. I ran some strace, and apparently SVN takes a lot of time in walking through the repository tree, probably checking for differences between the previous copy (in [...]