Blogs

A year ago I transitioned from my background in Chemical R&D to a role within the IT function - a significant leap for me. I was quickly introduced to the world of continuous learning within the realm of IT and the well defined certification paths - something, I believe, is lacking within the chemical space. The need to adapt and keep up with ever-evolving technologies was evident and I realized the importance of certifications in validating my knowledge....

Motivation Having recently moved from Chemical R&D to take up a role within the IT function I have been exposed to some thinking regarding career development outside what I am used to. I am most impressed with the almost universal need to keep learning new technologies within the IT space - something I am taking to heart. I am also very impressed with the want to solidify learning with certifications....

Introduction As technology continues to advance, it has become easier for people to create fake blogs and pass them off as legitimate sources of information. One tool that is being used to create these fake blogs is chatgpt, a machine learning algorithm that can generate text in a conversational style. While chatgpt has many legitimate uses, it is also being used to create fake blogs that are designed to manipulate readers and spread false information....

Emacs as a Daemon This guide will get emacs running as a server on Linux systems. This means that each time you load a file emacs is ready and doesn’t need to load. On some systems emacs start up times can be several seconds so having emacs there and ready to go can save you some real time and improve your workflows. I always forget how to do this so this guide is for me more than anyone else!...

So after dodging the bullet for over two year, both myself and my Partner came down with Covid. We had just returned from visiting family in Spain and, after a day of feeling a little strange, I woke up with a fever and the lateral test to prove it. While initially not to bad at around day four my fatigue and sore throat were almost unbearable. I was struggling to swallow water and unable to recall what drugs I had taken last....

Late last week my publication on the use of emacs within chemical R&D came out of early access. The full article can be found here. I wanted to use this space to address some of the comments I’ve seen posted about the early access version that went up in October. First of all - it has been great to see the positive reception this has had. This has been picked up by a few people, many of whom I follow - including John Kitchen and Irreal....

Why bother? Static websites are great - tools like Jekyll make building, deploying and editing sites a cinch! So easy in fact it is easy to have sites for multiple projects all running off one server. This is great but can cause issues as manually serving each site on server reboots takes time. Below is an example script that will create a screen, move to the website directory and launch it....

Home is just like work after all It is a shameful reality of the current industrial complex that surrounds science that you cannot always get to your data. This may seem like a silly gripe but it has massive implications to those working everyday on data collection. If I collect some information on a chemical system I want to, more often than not, pull that data out and manipulate, transform or plot that data how I want....

Background It has become clear over the last year of constant emacs use for almost all my work - that this workflow is key to my long term sustainable productivity. Emacs allows for complex tasks to be completed effortlessly with planning, content production and publishing handled without any issues. Importantly customizability is key and baked in. It has also became clear that learning the language of emacs - elisp - is going to be a super useful tool that will allow me the flexibility to continue using this tool indefinably with the agility that I need....

The Use of YASnippet to Super Charge Science Workflows Emacs (specifically the Spacemacs distro) has become my go to tool for almost all my scientific work. Writing and producing documents, organising my day and all data analysis and plotting is now done within emacs. The move away from GUI based applications to a more keyboard orientated workflows has allowed me to create at the speed I think. One of the key tools for that is YASnippet....