Some notes on linux, software development, and other things - also available as Atom Feed.
German umlaute on an US keyboard
For programmers, the US keyboard layout is much more comfortable than the German, because keys such as
square and curly brackets are better accessible. To easily type German Umlaute,
I modified the otherwise useless Caps_Lock key.
Formatting of significant figures
For tables or numbers in plots it best practice to only give significant figures. These python functions can do the job automatically given a value and its uncertainty.
Read more ...Lazy data cache for python to speed up plot development
To create a new plot, I usually execute the
plotting-script repeatedly using execfile('plot.py') in ipython. When the
plot contains a large amount of data or some non trivial preprocessing this can
take sometimes an inconveniant amount of time, as the calculations are redone
and the data is reloaded even if only e.g. the axis labels are changed. To
speed up the turnaround I developed a lazy data cache.
Software installations as user
Frequently, research software as e.g. several different versions of Monte Carlo generators, experiment frameworks or e.g. CERN Root is installed best as user, requiring of course management of the individual environments. This can provide some headache, that is reduced with the following shell functions.
Read more ...