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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta name="author" content="Andy Gibb">
<meta name="description" content="Andy G. Gibb's home page on the WWW">
<meta name="keywords" content="Andy Gibb, aggibb, hiking, Vancouver, backpacking, snowshoeing, photography, astronomy, star formation, radio astronomy, submillimetre, interferometry, SCUBA-2, data reduction, programming, Perl, whisky, Linux">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/bootstrap.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/agg.css">
<link rel="icon" href="agg.ico" type="image/x-icon">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="agg.ico" type="image/x-icon">
<title>Computing hardware and software</title>
</head>
<body>
<nav class="navbar navbar-default">
<div class="container">
<!-- Brand and toggle get grouped for better mobile display -->
<div class="navbar-header">
<button type="button" class="navbar-toggle collapsed" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#bs-example-navbar-collapse-1" aria-expanded="false">
<span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span>
<span class="icon-bar"></span>
<span class="icon-bar"></span>
<span class="icon-bar"></span>
</button>
<a class="navbar-brand" href="index.html">Home</a>
</div>
<!-- Collect the nav links, forms, and other content for toggling -->
<div class="collapse navbar-collapse" id="bs-example-navbar-collapse-1">
<ul class="nav navbar-nav">
<li><a href="hiking.html">Hiking</a></li>
<li><a href="photography.html">Photography</a></li>
<li class="active" ><a href="comp.html">Computing</a></li>
<li><a href="whisky.html">Whisky</a></li>
<li class="dropdown">
<a href="#" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown" role="button" aria-haspopup="true" aria-expanded="false">Astronomy <span class="caret"></span></a>
<ul class="dropdown-menu">
<li class="dropdown-header">My former life:</li>
<li><a href="astropages.html">Astronomer info</a></li>
<li><a href="research.html">Research</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="agg.html">About</a></li>
</ul>
</div><!-- /.navbar-collapse -->
</div><!-- /.container-fluid -->
</nav>
<div class="container">
<div class="page-header">
<h1>Computers etc</h1>
</div>
<div class="row">
<p>Well, it's official: I'm no longer an astronomer. Instead I get paid to write computer programs. Here's a laundry list of useful and/or interesting links related to my day-to-day computing.</p>
</div>
<div class="row">
<h2>Linux</h2>
<ul>
<li>I am Linux user <a href="https://linuxcounter.net/user/180140.html">#180140</a> at <a href="https://linuxcounter.net/">the Linux Counter</a>. I first installed Linux in May 1996, which makes it now twenty years of using Linux :-) My work machine at the time was a Pentium 133 with 32 MB of RAM and a 1 GB HDD. I think it ran Slackware, but I may have switched to Red Hat at some point.</li>
<li>My (former) UBC workstation runs <a href="https://getfedora.org/">Fedora 20</a>; at home I'm running Ubuntu <a href="http://releases.ubuntu.com/12.04/">12.04 LTS, Precise Pangolin</a> though I'll be upgrading to <a href="http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.04/">16.04 (Xenial Xerus)</a> soon.
<li>The <a href="http://www.fedoraforum.org/">Fedora Forum</a> and <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/">Ubuntu Forums</a> are useful places for help, info and advice.</li>
<li><a href="http://lwn.net/">Linux Weekly News</a> remains the best place for news; <a href="http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home">Phoronix</a> for hardware-related stuff.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="row">
<h2>Hardware</h2>
<h4>Linux</h4>
<p>My Linux box is an 8-year old dual-core AMD64 running at 2.2 GHz with a mere 4 GB of RAM running <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu</a> as a server and sometime development machine. The system drive is a 64 GB SSD with a 2- and a 3-TB data drive which are used to back up all of our photos.</p>
<h4>macOS</h4>
<p>In late 2012 I took the plunge and bought a Mac, a neat little 13-inch Macbook Air with a 128 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM, which has been phenomenal - the best laptop I've ever owned by far. I even didn't hate OS X (now macOS) as much as I expected :-) and I could almost say I now like it, though I miss some of the GNU versions of utilities. It's up to date with macOS Sierra, which seems fine to me. My only real complaint is the screen — it's not good enough for accurate colour work when processing photos.</p>
<p>Which is why, after three years, I bought a nice little 15" Retina Macbook Pro with 16 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD :-) Oh, that screen... It's nice to have such a powerful machine for a laptop, but man does it get hot on my lap.</p>
<h4>Windows</h4>
<p>Of course, everyone has to have Windows machine somewhere in their closet. It's reasonably specced with an Intel quad-core CPU running at 3.1 GHz, 8 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD as the system drive. The 3 TB data drive is filling up fast thanks to shooting raw files with <a href="photography.html">3 cameras</a>. The monitor is a decent Dell 2209WA, which I trust for colour, plus it's a 16:10 ratio (which is better for me since I have a TV for watching movies!). The graphics card is a puny Radeon 5450 but it's fanless which I value more than performance. It's up to date with Windows 10, which seems OK apart from a couple of irritating quirks (I'm looking at you, auto-updater... :-/).</p>
<h4>Mobile</h4>
<p>Mobile computing is handled by Android: a Nexus 7 tablet and a Moto G phone. I quite like the Nexus 7 form-factor, though it's a pity Google has decided it won't qualify for upgrades to Nougat. The Moto G was an experiment as my first foray into smartphones. Safe to say I've outgrown it (plus it really does have a terrible camera) but I don't feel like spending the money to replace it yet, even though Motorola/Lenovo has decided on a terrible security update policy. My next phone will definitely not be a Motorola thanks to that silliness.</p>
</div>
<div class="row">
<h2>Java</h2>
<p>Yup - had to happen eventually, but I've quite taken to Java especially when coupled with Spring Boot. It's almost - well - fun (something I never thought I'd say about Java).</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://spring.io/">The Spring project at Pivotal</a>. Lots of good stuff there, including tutorial and quickstart guides.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.eclipse.org/">Eclipse</a> is fine (as is the <a href="https://spring.io/tools">Spring Tool Suite</a>) but <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/">IntelliJ IDEA</a> is better (albeit for a not-insignificant price...).</li>
<li>Learning Java taught me about <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3735293-clean-code">Clean Code</a>. (Summary of Clean Code <a href="https://blog.goyello.com/2013/01/21/top-9-principles-clean-code/">principles</a>.)</li>
<li>Some Java <a href="http://www.javapractices.com/">best practices</a>.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="row">
<h2>Python</h2>
<p>Perl was my first love, but Python has its charm.
<ul>
<li><a href="https://docs.python.org/2/contents.html">Official Python documentation</a></li>
<li><a href="https://docs.python.org/2/library/index.html">Python standard library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/">Coding style guide</a></li>
<li>Since I liked IntelliJ for Java, I thought I'd try <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/">PyCharm</a> for python development (although <a href="https://atom.io/">Atom</a> works well enough for simple stuff).</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="row">
<h2>Perl</h2>
<ul>
<li> All things <a href="http://www.perl.com/">Perl</a>.</li>
<li> Actually, the real source of Perl's power, <a href="http://www.cpan.org/">CPAN</a>.</li>
<li> Perl documentation at <a href="http://perldoc.org/">perldoc.org</a>.</li>
<li> Learning the wonder that is <a href="https://www.manning.com/books/object-oriented-perl">Object-Oriented Perl</a>?</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="row">
<h2>Astronomical software</h2>
<ul>
<li>My former day job: <a href="http://www.eaobservatory.org/jcmt/instrumentation/continuum/scuba-2/">SCUBA-2 data reduction</a> software. Progress and updates can be found on the <a href="http://pipelinesandarchives.blogspot.com/">Pipelines and Archives</a> blog.</li>
<li>The UK <a href="http://www.starlink.ac.uk/">Starlink</a> project (now disbanded). Starlink software can be obtained from the <a href="http://starlink.eao.hawaii.edu/starlink">JAC Starlink page</a>.</li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.oracdr.org/oracdr">ORAC-DR</a> data reduction pipeline and its post-processing relative <a href="http://www.oracdr.org/oracdr/PICARD">PICARD</a>.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="row">
<h2>Other software</h2>
<ul>
<li> The <i>real</i> way to make web pages look good: the <a href="https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/">W3</a> site for CSS, and <a href="http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/">Eric Meyer's page on CSS</a>. </li>
<li> The <i>real</i> way to make your printed page look good: <a href="http://www.latex-project.org/">L<sup>A</sup>T<sub>E</sub>X</a>. Unbeatable for maths typesetting.</li>
<li> OK if you must use an office suite, then consider <a href="http://www.documentfoundation.org/">LibreOffice</a>. It comes with its own PDF writer, so there's no excuse for sending Word documents by email (of course, there's rarely an excuse to send Word documents by email...). Plus it supports the <a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office">Open Document Format</a>.</li>
<li> But nothing beats <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html">Emacs</a> for doing everything else :-)</li>
<li> My must-have apps on Linux are (in no particular order):
<ul>
<li>Firefox and/or Google Chrome for the web</li>
<li>Thunderbird for email</li>
<li>Emacs for editing anything</li>
<li>Xfig for graphics</li>
<li>TeX/LaTeX for documentation (+dvips/dvipdf)</li>
<li>gv for viewing PostScript files</li>
<li>The Gimp for photos etc</li>
<li>Geeqie and Gwenview for image viewing</li>
<li>LibreOffice comes in handy for the odd Word doc, making posters and presentations for conferences (though to be honest, I find Google Docs is good enough for basic documents these days)</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="row">
<h2>Computing news and views</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://blog.codinghorror.com/">Jeff Atwood's blog</a></li>
<li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/">Ars Technica</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.silentpcreview.com/">Silent PC Review</a></li>
<li><a href="https://hackernoon.com/">Hacker Noon</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="row">
<h3>About these pages</h3>
<p>These pages are all hand-coded, mostly using <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/">Emacs</a> (with a sprinking of <a href="http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html">Bluefish</a> in the early days) and, more recently, <a href="https://atom.io/">Atom</a>. I can be a stickler for details, so I originally wrote strict XHTML - I've recently updated to HTML5, and you may notice that I've used <a href="http://getbootstrap.com/">Bootstrap</a> for layout and styling.</p>
</div>
</div>
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<footer class="copyright row">
<hr>All content copyright the author 1997–2017. All rights reserved.
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<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
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