Posts by Itay Zandbank
Adding Jmol to an Angular Application
We recently starting working on an educational website for chemistry students. The site we’re creating will let users choose a molecule and perform calculations on it. We want to graphically display the selected molecule, and to do this we have decided to use Jmol. If you’re unfamiliar with Jmol, its worth getting to know. Originally…
Read MoreJmol and Angular Part 1 – adding Jmol to your project
(This is the first in a series of posts about adding Jmol to an Angular web application) Adding Jmol to your Angular project is a bit untraditional. Jmol does not have an npm package. Since Jmol dynamically loads Javascript files based on user actions, creating an npm package for it is not trivial. Importing Jmol…
Read MoreMapping Docker volumes on Windows with Links
We use Docker whenever possible. You should, too, it’s really awesome. Recently I’ve installed Docker on a new computer, and noticed all our containers stopped working properly there. They couldn’t map any of the volumes we were mapping. After careful investigation we’ve realized the problem was Windows links. All of our office computers have a…
Read MoreNetLogo
What I love most about The Research Software Company is the incredible variety of projects we see. We handle projects from all fields of research, including living and physical science, digital humanities, etc, and use a wide range of technologies to meet researchers needs. Every once in a while, though, a new project comes in…
Read MoreThe Archaeologist Who Went Serverless (and why you should too…)
There’s a lot of hype now about ‘serverless’. Almost every day we read about new serverless application frameworks, serverless cloud providers and, of-course, serverless t-shirts. First, a little background, in case you’ve been living in a log cabin in the woods and are unfamiliar with the world of serverless. (And actually, we’d be ok with…
Read MoreScientific Programming “Don’ts” – Badly Named Variables
I once knew a software engineer who gave birth to identical triplets. Since no one could tell the babies apart, she named them all X and planned to assign a string to each one later. For various reasons, she never did. Since she and her husband never did learn to tell them apart, they continued…
Read MoreScientific Programming “Don’ts” – Don’t leave confusing code undocumented
Sometimes your code does something not trivial to fix a problem that isn’t obvious. For example, in one place someone was having some rounding issues, so we found this gem in the code: double *pf = &f; (*(long long *)pf) += 8; The only comment there was “solve rounding issues”. We’ve encountered this code when…
Read MoreScientific Programming “Don’ts” – Not Using Source Code Repositories
Scientific Programming “Don’ts” – is the first in a series of blog posts created from the nightmares of the The Research Software Company’s top developers. We encourage you to heed our warnings! As developers, we are often called upon to consult only after something has gone horribly wrong. For example, sometimes we are handed code…
Read MoreNew version of pyexistdb released
We have released a new version of pyexistdb, the Python interface to the eXist-db database. This is a minor update containing the following additions: Tells requests to ignore the `charset` property of the content-type field, and use the encoding passed to the `ExistDB` constructor. This is used to circumvent the bug described here. eXist-db version…
Read MoreeXist-db, UTF-8 and a bug
Here at the Research Software Company, we currently have a big corpus of TEI-encoded Hebrew songs we are working with. (If you have Hava Nagila playing in your head now, we apologize, but we promise Hebrew music is much richer and more complex than that tired Bar Mitzvah standard. But I digress.) Since we don’t…
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