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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 MoreOne 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 MoreI’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 MoreIn 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 MoreThis 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 MoreSo 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 MoreWe 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 MoreOne 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 MoreIn Part I of this blog series we introduced you to our project CSM: Continuous Symmetry Measure. If you missed it, you can catch up here. Here in Part II, we’ll begin to explain the programming decisions we made, including the rationale behind our decision to switch the coding language from C++ to Python. If you’ve read…
Read MorePart I – Introduction Several years ago, we were approached by a research lab at The Institute of Chemistry at Hebrew University with a request to help with a project called the Continuous Symmetry Measure (CSM). Like many projects on which we are asked to consult, the code had been written and maintained by a…
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