Programming

This year, my elder son graduated from Cub Scouts to Scouts (time flies very fast!) and I signed up to be a counselor for Programming (and Public Health) in his troop. Today, February 1st, 2020, was Merit Badge Day and I taught 6 scouts what is programming and the basics of programming in Python (and Scratch - but they all knew that already) (and nobody chose Public Health …). I am now sharing my presentation and a few tips and tricks. Feel free to re-use, improve and give me any feedback to make it better. ...

If you are using Matlab on a MS-Windows PC with MS-Excel installed, there is no problem reading and writing data to Excel (in case your users/customers only understand this software but you still want to do the computations in Matlab). Here is the code to read (1st line) and write (2nd line): [sourcecode language=“matlab”] inputs = xlsread(‘inputfile.xls’, ‘inData’, ‘A1:B3’); [writeStatus, writeMsg] = xlswrite(‘outputfile.xls’, myMatrix, ‘outData’, ‘A1’); [/sourcecode] Now, there are several reasons why you may not be able to read and write directly to an Excel file: you have Matlab but ...

The October 14th, 2010 issue of Nature is obviously a good one. It had to be a good one! I usually advocate Open Access but it is always nice to reading complimentary issues of Nature which is Closed Access but is also publishing very good articles about science at the same time. In this issue, I was interested in various topics … First, there is a serie of articles about the US midterm elections and what (US) scientists feel about two years of Obama administration. Obama promised total transparency in American science, a new era of integrity and more freedom for scientists. From what I read, this isn’t the case yet. ...

Sometimes, even if you mainly develop on Unix/Linux boxes, you are stuck with MS-Windows on your desktop. Moreover, although your are a developer (i.e. someone who is supposed to know how to run a computer), you have no administrator rights so you can’t install the right tools that can improve your productivity and enhance your code stability/security. This is for the sad part. Fortunately, Free Software are there and most of them can even be run without being installed on your machine, just copy the software and use it! Here is a list of some of the software I’m using. Feel free to promote your favourite application in the comments. ...