themodernscientist

data scientist, biophysicist, mac-unix zealot, pythonista

Throwing the Book at Your Data

You may have noticed all has been quiet on the blog front from me lately. There are several reasons for this,1 but I can assure you it isn't for lack of things to write about. Today, I'm happy to share with you one of the projects that has been …

Secure Password Use in Scripts

NOTE: If you're using passwords in shell scripts, see Daniel Jalkut's reply below about using OS X's built-in security command instead of his AppleScript library.

One of my goals for the new year1 is to be more security minded in my use of technology. This is a broad statement …

Torrential File Synchronization

My research requires that I work in multiple locations: in the lab, at a multi-institution shared instrument facility, and sometimes in my fuzzy slippers at home. Having my data and processing scripts updated on whatever computer I happen to be using is critical to my ability to get work done …

Easy Syntax Highlighting With Pygments

As a scientist who splits her time between both wet lab and computational work, I have learned the importance of saving code snippets for future reference. These snippets are handy when I later can't recall a clever Pandas indexing trick or when I want to share code with a colleague …