Social Media Services and Tools

Nowadays it is common to categorize goods and services, like website hosting for example, under the labels of "recognized leaders" and "low cost alternatives". In our field of NMR software, where every product does its best (and its worst too) to differentiate itself from the rest, any form of categorization is arduous. For a certain period, it was true that some products were updated irregularly, and they could be inscribed into a "low cost" category. The release of Jeol Delta as freeware seemed to break the barrier once and forever. It was a major name, it was the same program used to drive the spectrometers, and it came for free. The public, or at least most of it, ignored Delta, for a reason. It is too much different from what most of us have been used to, difficult to use and impossible to learn. The reaction of public has demonstrated that neither the brand nor the free availability are a guarantee of success. There are no recipes, there is no known...

If you have no idea how much is a program for NMR, this list is for you. In one of my next articles I will explain that, in this field, there is little relation between the price and the quality. iNMR (Mac) MestreNova NMRnotebook NPNMR (Windows, Linux) NMRView (Java) Nuts (Windows, Mac) NMR analyst (Windows, Linux) LCModel (Linux) NMRPipe (Unix) Cyana (Unix + Fortran) Discovering the price of the other programs can't be easier. Just contact their sales representatives.

When I wrote my last post, I hadn't tried iNMR 3 on a new computer yet. While the performance on 6-years old machines is praiseworthy for all kinds of reasons, I can't believe my eyes when iNMR 3 runs on a modern machine. 2D processing is almost instantaneous, up to the point that I am asking myself: "Where is the trick?". iNMR 3 is still under development. The beta version is publicly available and is highly stable, certainly usable for all purposes. A dedicated page on the web is packed with detailed info. Don't panic, there's nothing technical, everything is extremely readable. What else can be said? It's the fastest NMR application I have ever seen, and I am convinced it will remain the no. 1 for a long time. Do you know anything faster?

I like sports, I like the olympic games, but I don't care at all about records. The competition and the gestures make the show, the records mainly remind me of Ben Johnson, doping, etc.. I like speed and the speed of computers can thrill me. It's a safe case of speed, with no doping, no danger for the health. We are rarely allowed to appreciate the real speed of our computers, because most of their potential is wasted or not exploited. When surfing the internet, I can hear the fan of my computer reaching new records of decibels. It's my CPU that is employed for a Java animation into a background window: the perfect waste! Other times, it's Acrobat Reader that activates the fan. I don't know what it's doing. I know that Acrobat Reader is an application that does a single thing, and takes 100 Mb of my hard disc for doing that single thing. I understand it wastes disc space, CPU cycles and quite likely my RAM too. The best way to appreciate the real speed of your c...

There are other topics to write about, as promised at the beginning of this series. Being that keeping a blog takes time and soon becomes a boring activity, I have decided to give you links instead of new pages. All the articles in the list below have been written by myself over the last couple of years. I could reorganize them into a more organic and readable form, but the concepts are already clear enough. Manual Corrections Automatic Baseline Correction Automatic Integration Perfect-Looking Integrals Visual Weighting 2D Phase Correction Further Hints for 2D Phase Correction 1D Phase Correction Automatic Phase Correction Non Linear Methods I'll continue the blog when I find something new to say. I thank you all that have been reading me daily during the last month. Yesterday the blog received 84 visits, which was the July record.

My most popular post, in two years of activity, has been the infamous "TopSpin NMR Free Download". That single (short) post has received as many comments as the rest of blog (sob!). People were so prompt to fix their anger in words but nobody was touched by the idea of starting a discussion. Unless you call discussion an exchange of flames. I have learned the lesson, in my own way. This time I have chosen a more explicit title, so nobody can say he arrived here with pure and saint intentions. I myself haven't changed my mind. Year after year, a lot of money is spent to acquire/upgrade NMR instrumentation and software. Attending a conference is not cheap and renting a booth there is really expensive. The number of computers sold keeps increasing year after year. How is it possible that there is so much money in circulation and, at the same time, people cry because they can't pay an NMR program (but could nonetheless find the money to buy a new computer...) ? Our societ...

Take a column of the processed 2D plot (column = indirect dimension). Use a mapping algorithm to identify the transparent regions (not containing peaks). In the following I'll call them the "noisy regions". The idea is to delete these region. Setting all their points to zero would be too drastic and unrealistic. What you do, instead, is to calculate the average value in this region. More exactly, the average of the absolute values. At the end you have a positive number which is a measure of the noise along that column. Repeat for all the columns. At the end you have the values of noise for each column. Noise is higher when there is a big peak (on the diagonal or elsewhere). Noise is low where there's no signal. Annotate the minimum value for this noise, let's call it "min". Now, pick again each column. Divide its "noisy regions" by the value of their own noise, then multiply them by "min". The portions containing true peaks are not a...