Obsidian

 I have been searching for a note taking/management tool for some time. From a book, I encountered Roam, which looks exactly what I need. After some research, I realized that is is a proprietary software using proprietary data storage format, and store all data on a remote cloud server. This, along with its not so modest price tag, raises a red flag. 

Then I discovered Obsidian, which is itself proprietary (as opposed to open source) but it works on local, plain text (including Markdown) files, which can be opened and modified by any text editors. For now, it looks really promising!

Nimble

Just discovered this little package for Bayesian analysis. I think it is on the right direction. I hope it handle discrete parameters better than Stan.

JetBrains development tools are free for academic users

This is definitely a good news. I have been using the free community version of the python development tool and now they have a new tool for C++.

JASP

JASP is an interesting project. It is based on R with additional facilities and functions such as automatic table generation. There appears to be an R package that provide that functions directly to R users. Very worth checking out.

New Zealand abolished software patents

Here are some discussions.

R, ADMB, and SAS

This (and all the follow-ups) is the most interesting live discussion about software comparison recently. I read Zhang et al. paper some time ago but did not find it very interesting. But this ongoing discussion that triggered by that paper is really interesting.

Browser problem on Mint Debian

Neither Chrome nor Opera works flawlessly on the new Mint Debian: sometimes they crashed, sometimes they took a long time to load, and sometimes they stopped responding. This is not a show stopper, but it is a weird problem.

Lotus Symphony 3

A new version of Lotus Symphony is out. Interesting that IBM does not provide a 64-bit build for Linux.

MIGRATE-N

This looks interesting.

Theory without code

As a demographer, I would not pay much attention to statistical methodological papers that do not describe how to implement their methodology either using existing software or using their own code. The reason is simple: I don't have the time and patience to gain a understanding of the methodology deep enough to be able to implement it myself; after all, it is the substantive research questions in demography that interest me most!

Open source statistical platform such as R, WinBUGS, and JAGS have made it so easy for statisticians to code their ideas into readily usable software, so the question is: why not?

Inkscape is a handy tool

Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/) is a free software package for graphics. It reads a large number of graphics formats including eps and pdf, and allows one to modify them and output to a large number of different graphics formats.

Maple 13

I just realized that CUNY has site license of Maple 13. Good choice, CUNY!

Ubuntuzilla

Ubuntuzilla, works like a charm: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ubuntuzilla/

Useful Ubuntu tools

http://blog.ibeentoubuntu.com/2009/03/extra-repositories-for-ubuntu-810-you.html

NoteExpress, again

The NoteExpress developer graciously offered me a free license in exchange for suggestions for further improvements. I will prepare a rather detailed report of the kind of problems I encountered in the process preparing my latest manuscript.

NoteExpress

A good bibliography software. As far as I can tell, it has all the functions of Endnote with only a fraction of its price: http://www.reflib.org/

It still has some rough edges (the journal templates do not work as expected, for example), but looks promising.

PyRoom

This is an interesting toy: http://pyroom.org/index.html

SuperMix

A reincarnation of the old mixed-effect programs: http://www.ssicentral.com/supermix/index.html

Will be interesting to find out more about it, especially what it can do while others (Stata, aML, Mplus, etc.) cannot.

Xmind

Finally, an open-source cross-platform and easy-to-use mind mapping software: http://share.xmind.net/

Text summarizer

This looks interesting: http://libots.sourceforge.net/