Konrad Hinsen's blog

Yesterday a blog post by Cyrille Rossant entitled "Moving away from HDF5" caught my eye.

A recurrent theme in computational science (and elsewhere) is the need to combine machine-readable information (which in the following I will call "facts" for simplicity) with a narrative for the benefit of human readers.

Welcome to the last post on this WordPress blog.

Like all information with a complex structure, scientific knowledge evolves over time.

We all know that software deployment in a research environment can be a pain, but knowing this as a fact is not quite the same as experiencing it in reality.

Yesterday I participated (as a visitor) in the kickoff meeting for OpenDreamKit, where one recurrent topic of discussion was notebooks, both Jupyter and Sage, including the question if they could be brought together.

SciPy 2015 is over, meaning that many non-participants like myself are now busy catching up with what happened by watching the videos.

Three years ago, I first looked at the then-very-new language Julia.

Now that the birch pollen season is definitely over, I can draw some conclusions from a two-year experiment with the impressive sample size of one - myself.

In a recent blog post, Titus Brown asks if software is a primary product of science, and basically says "no" (but do read the post for the details).

While reading the final report of the reproducibility workshop at XSEDE14, I noticed a statement that I encounter frequently in discussions about reproducible research: "One general consensus was that bitwise reproducibility is often an unrealistic expect…

A recent paper in PLOS One made some noise in my twittersphere over the Christmas days.

The release of NumPy 1.9 a few days ago was a bit of a revelation for me.

The importance of reproducibility in computational science is being more and more recognized, which I think is a good sign.

Most scientists have found out by now that a lot has been going wrong with scientific publishing over the years.

Over the last few months I have been exploring the Racket language for its potential as a language for computational science, and it's time to summarize my first impressions.

Why do people write computer programs?

The other day I was looking at the release notes for the recently published release 1.8 of NumPy, the library that is the basis for most of the Scientific Python ecosystem.

Today I have published the first release of ActivePapers for Python, available on PyPI or directly from the Mercurial repository on Bitbucket.

This post was motivated by Ian Gent's recomputation manifesto and his blog post about it.

About two years ago I wrote a post about why and how I abandoned Apple's iCal for my agenda management and moved to Emacs org-mode instead.

Altmetrics is one of the hotly debated topics in the Open Science movement today.

A while ago I was chatting with two users of my Molecular Modelling Toolkit (MMTK), a library for molecular simulations written in Python.

This morning I read C.

Calculators are among the most popular applications for smartphones, and therefore it is not surprising that the Google Play Store has more than 1000 calculators for the Android platform.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the Nix package management system as a candidate for ensuring reproducibility in computational science.

When the Greek philosopher Heraclitus pronounced his famous "πάντα ῥεῖ" (everything flows), he most probably was not thinking about software.

New programming languages are probably invented every day, and even those that get developed and published are too numerous to mention.

A two-hour train journey provided the opportunity to watch the video recording of the Panel with Guido van Rossum at the recent PyData Workshop.

The recent announcement of clojure-py made some noise in the Clojure community, but not, as far as I can tell, in the Python community.

Every time I teach a class on parallel computing with Python using the multiprocessing module, I wonder if multiprocessing is really mature enough that I should recommend using it.

A while ago I described why migrated my agendas from iCal to orgmode.

Another EuroSciPy conference is over, and like last year it was very interesting.

The last two days I participated in the "Executable Papers workshop" at this year's ICCS conference.

I have been using mobile (pocket size) computers for about 15 years, starting with the Palm Pilot.

I have been using Macintosh computers since 2003, and overall I have been happy with the personal information management (PIM) tools provided by Apple: AddressBook, Mail, Safari (for bookmark management).

I have received a number of questions and remarks about my keynote talk at EuroSciPy 2010, ranging from questions about technical details to an inquiry about the release date of Python 4.0!

This weekend I attended the EuroSciPy 2010 conference in Paris, dedicated to scientific applications of the programming language Python.

The question if living beings, in particular those of our own species, possess "free will", and how it works if it exists, has recently become fashionable again.

A few months ago I decided to take a closer look at Eclipse, since several people I know seemed to be quite fond of it.

Programmers, scientific and otherwise, spend a lot of time discussing which programming languages, libraries, and development tools to use.

One of the books I read during my summer vacation is the recently published second edition of Rupert Sheldrake's "A New Science of Life".

With the increasing importance of parallel computers, ranging from multi-core desktop machines to massively parallel machines such as IBM's BlueGene, functional programming could well become an important technique for scientific software development, as it

Among the many characteristics that distinguish programming languages, static vs. dynamic typing is one of the most debated ones.

One of my hobby projects over the last months has been the exploration of monads.