Posts by Itay Zandbank
Editing Ancient Scrolls on Modern Tablets
In the world of Digital Humanities, there are few projects that provide a better opportunity for using bring up-to-the-minute technology to study ancient artifacts than a project involving the digitization of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We’ve recently started consulting with the team working on the Scripta Qumranica Electronica, which is creating a digital scholarly edition…
Read MoreAn Eventful Week
This week has been eventful! After a few stressed days we have managed to fix long standing problems in several projects. We are satisfied. In the Scripta Qumranica Project we have managed to clean up the frontend quite a bit. Various rotation and scaling transformations were interfering with each other. After refactoring, tidying up and…
Read MoreAn Online Database for Less Than The Cost of A Cup of Coffee
So let’s say you are a researcher with some data that you’ve gathered as part of your research that you want to display online. In other words, an online database. There are many ways to do that, many software packages, or programs that will help you. Here are The Research Software Company, we’ve just created…
Read MoreAdding 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
One of the things I love most about life at The Research Software Company is the incredible variety of projects we see. We handle projects from all fields of research, including living and physical sciences, digital humanities, and even the intimidating sounding computational chemistry and bioinformatics. To meet our clients’ diverse needs, we use a…
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…
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