Entries Categorized as 'Method'

Electronic Notebook Revisit: TiddlyWiki, meet Git

Date September 7, 2009

This past week, I got my SMU-provided desktop PC. The first thing I did was to install VirtualBox and then install a virtual Ubuntu 9.04 system inside VirtualBox. The default desktop installation was Scientific Linux 5. While this is an excellent platform for research, it’s terrible for the  desktop. This machine will be my primary [...]

Posted in Method Comments No Comments »

sshfs – remote access for the terminal

Date May 28, 2009

In the world of modern HEP computing, your data analysis location may be on a computer far removed from your office. What if your analysis produces a bunch of plots that you want to be able to just look at without constantly transferring them to your local machine? What if you need to edit code [...]

Posted in Method Comments No Comments »

Surviving with “screen”

Date May 3, 2008

How does a physicist survive in a world where computing resources are spread across the globe? In big ways, we as a community try to address this question every day. In small ways – at the level of a single physicist – there are little tips and tricks that can make survival possible.
One of my [...]

Posted in Method Comments No Comments »

ROOT Tip: Creating New and Complicated Variables

Date December 12, 2007

When presented with a ROOT file, we are often annoyed that the simple variables are present, but the hard-to-compute ones are not. For instance, as might be popular in my experiment, BaBar, perhaps the reconstructed B momentum and the center-of-mass (CM) energy are provided, but not the energy-substituted mass (mES). In this tip, I’ll show [...]

Posted in Method Comments No Comments »

ROOT Tip of the Week: Weight and Plot your Data

Date December 5, 2007

ROOT is an object-oriented data-analysis framework, written by the physics community in C++ and freely available. We all love it, we all hate it. It’s like Windows – ubiquitous, a big target for ire, and necessary. There are lots of pretty neat things you can do in ROOT, but some of the most useful are [...]

Posted in Method Comments No Comments »