Tools

I don't think people talk enough about the tools they use to accomplish their work. I primarily use the Mac platform and run Ubuntu on a VMWare Fusion virtual machine on occasion. Text editor of choice is Vim. I use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard with a slightly modified Dvorak mapping.

For most quick writing I use text files, markdown, and pandoc. When things become more involved, I switch over to LaTeX for papers and Beamer for presentations. My lecture slides for classes are written in markdown and converted with Pandoc.

I use the python/scipy platform for technical computing and make frequent use of the ipython notebook for exploration and communication of data. I use Dexy to create my syllabi which allows me to automatically update the syllabus when I (inevitably) change the spreadsheet of topics and assignments. To keep this document available for students, I place my Dropbox link in our campus CMS, Moodle.

For this website and for my blog, I use the Pelican platform for static site generation. I'm using pelican-ipynb to add ipython notebooks to the blog.