Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

homeR: an R package for building physics

For the past few weeks we’ve been very busy here at Neurobat with the analysis of field tests results. In the process of doing that, we had to implement several functions in R that relate to building physics. We thought it might be useful for the community to have access to those functions, so we [...]

Git and Scientific Reproducibility

I firmly believe that scientists and engineers—particularly scientists, by the way—should learn about, and use, version control systems (VCS) for their work. Here is why. I’ve been a user of free VCSs for a while now, beginning with my first exposure to CVS at CERN in 2002, through my discovery of Subversion during my doctoral [...]

Installing ESP-r on Ubuntu 9.10

ESP-r, is an integrated modelling tool for the simulation of the thermal, visual and acoustic performance of buildings and the assessment of the energy use and gaseous emissions associated with the environmental control systems and constructional materials, in the words of its official website. In other words, it’s a computer program for modeling a building’s [...]

Why I’m disabling MathML for now

In a previous post I described how I tweaked my WordPress installation to support the display of MathML markup, for displaying mathematical equations. One of the steps involved changing the content-type from application/html to application/xhtml+xml. That step was necessary, or else Firefox would simply not render the MathML markup properly. Unfortunately, application/xhtml+xml is simply not [...]

How to include MathML in a WordPress blog

UPDATE I’ve decided to disable direct MathML support on this blog due to the many browser incompatibilities it introduces. You can read the original version of this post on this blog’s former home

WordPress shortcode for syntax highlighting

There’s a nice feature in WordPress for including source code in your blog posts, but the Codex is not crystal-clear on how to activate it. According to this article, for example, all you have to do is to insert a [sourcecode] shortcode tag and anything that goes inside that tag will be automatically formatted. But [...]

Canonical data formats, middleware and GCC

These days I’m working on a middleware application that bridges a company’s ERP and its warehouses. The ERP posts messages in a given XML schema, our application reads these messages, transforms them into the schema understood by the warehouse management system, and uploads onthem on the warehouse’s FTP server. We use XSLT to transform messages [...]

Remotely editing files as root with Emacs

I often need to edit files on remote machines or on embedded devices, that is, machines without a monitor and on which a proper editor might not necessarily be installed. In the past that has always left me with the rather painful choice between vi and nano. Now I have never invested enough time in [...]

Schema validation with LXML on Ubuntu Hardy

LXML is an amazing Python module that picks up where the standard xml.dom(.minidom) left off. It’s basically a set of wrapper code around the libxml2 and libxslt libraries, and provides functionality missing in Python’s standard library, including XML validation and XPaths. On a project I’m currently working on I needed a good XML library for [...]

Low energy, low cost linux box

There’s a great discussion on StackOverflow going on, when someone asked for suggestions for a low power, low cost and high availability linux box. Exactly the kind of hardware we need for home automation.

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