Over at Biocurious, Philip is thinking about digital notebooks, and has found a system that works for him:
My computer algebra system of choice is Mathematica, and because of Mathematica’s notebook system, it became extremely straightforward to include sufficient commentary among the analysis and calculations. The important “working” details of my day are recorded on paper that is heavy on scribbles, numbers, and comments on the minutiae of a particular instrument or measurement, followed by references to specific data files collected that day. The Mathematica notebooks where I visualize and analyze data are then filled with the relevant comments about the data collection and subsequent analysis, but not usually the random scribbles that you need to keep on paper while leading-up to and actually taking a measurement. Having everything organized by date makes it simple to correlate between paper and digital notebooks.
It’s not a bad idea, save for one thing: Wolfram Research are utter bastards. even by the standards of scientific analysis software makers, they’re bastards.
I say this because we have a site license for Mathematica. You might think that having a site license would reduce the hassle of dealing with the program, but Wolfram is the only company I’ve run across that manages to make a site license burdensome.
It’s true that the license allows us to install the program on lots of different machines. Activating it, however, requires us to enter a numeric password on each machine. And the passwords are only good for one calendar year– every January, we need to get the new password from ITS, and re-enter it on all the machines. And, as a bonus, the passwords they use are long enough for every atom making up the campus to get its own unique identifier.
I thought that this year, the new version of the program might’ve fixed this problem, as they’ve moved to a new server-based license scheme. But no, it turns out that any hiccup in the network will completely hose the license, and shut the program down. Which is definitely a sub-optimal solution to the license issue.
Mathematica is a good program, and allows you to do some cool stuff. The whole reason I’m wrestling with the goddamn licenses is that I use it in my modern physics class, so the students can look at wavefunctions for a finite square well. The educational benefit is enough to outweigh my annoyance at getting the program to work.
I would never consider using it to record research results, though, because there’s just no telling what new and excruciating way they’ll find to screw up my access to my data.