• Question: How do you record you information (using what tools and in what format is it recorded)?

    Asked by NAV to Jonny, Alison on 23 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      When I perform the experiments, shooting protein crystals with X-rays, I get a series of images like the one at the bottom of my profile page here: /lutetiumj15-zone/profile/jonnybrooksbartlett/

      These are stored and files with some text and an image. They are called Crystallographic Binary Files (CBF) files. We get hundreds or thousands of these in one experiment and it’s one file per image. So I store them on my computer on a hard drive that I bought.

      Since they are on a computer I use various programming languages to sort and analyse the data. I probably use some of the same ones as Alison.

      I need fast programming languages to do tedious jobs like looping through images and checking where the spots are. These languages include C, C++ and Java (out of teh 3, I’m best at Java). Recently I’ve started using a language called Julia. This is currently my favourite programming language. You can see some of my Julia code here. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it: https://github.com/JonnyCBB/StructureFactorCorrelations/blob/master/ReciprocalSpace.jl

      Then I sometimes use slower, but easier languages to analyse my data. these include Python and Matlab.

      I hope this answers your question 🙂

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