Posts by Itay Zandbank
Planning for Sustainable Software
Software is like milk, if you let it sit out too long, it expires. Sure, your users might keep using a software package that is a little past its freshness date, but it will be a sour experience. Think of how much the environment running the software changes over time – the OS gets updated,…
Read MoreResearch Software Sustainability
One issue that is bothering a lot of participants in the DH 2019 conference in Utrecht, from which we’ve just returned, is “Software Sustainability.” They want the software they write now to work in the future as well, after they finish the project. This is a very reasonable concern – you want to know than…
Read MoreA Digital Humanities Workshop in Utrecht
I’ve just returned from the Digital Humanities conference in Utrecht, and very excited to share details of some of the workshops with those who were unfortunate enough to miss it. One workshop I went to was called “I am the one building the tool“. It was quite interesting. Around the table sat software engineers from…
Read MoreEditing 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 More