If you suffer from dyselxia or find it difficult to spell “reproducibility”, there is a shorter name for the new Madagascar website: ahay.org. Thanks to Nick Vlad for creating a mirror. Origin of the name: Ahay is the Malagasy name for aye-aye, a strange nocturnal primate that lives in Madagascar. If you have seen the Madagascar movie, you may remember Maurice the Aye-aye character (voice by Cedric the Entertainer).

Thanks to Nick Vlad, the wiki page moves to a new location and is open for editing.

A newly created website reproducibleresearch.org collects experiences about reproducible computational research from different groups and scientific fields. Check out the associated blog for updates. The site is maintained by John Cook from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

A new stable version is out. In comparison with the previous stable release, madagascar-0.9.6 features multiple structural changes and new reproducible papers.

We are already well into 2008 — and could this year pass without a Madagascar Event?
Of course not!
A coding sprint is coming at full speed, towards us!
Madagascar developers are invited to congregate during May 23-27 in beautiful Golden, Colorado, for the
2008 MADAGASCAR IMPLEMENTATION WORKSHOP:
TOWARDS FULL AUTOMATION AND BETTER ROBUSTNESS
Yes, this is right. Instead of dozing in a dark room listening to others talk, we will actually write code together! We will give Madagascar a real push towards maturity. All necessary info, and more, can be found on the wiki page of the event. See you in Golden!

The first constraint to observe when dealing with wide/full-azimuth data is its sheer volume (tens of Terabytes). Data manipulation becomes the bottleneck procedure that the programmer must pay attention to. In practice, this means that data sorting, FFT-ing, axis reversing and transposing are not trivial operations any longer and their number must be minimized. As a consequence, it will often be preferrable to re-write a particular processing tool to apply to the current form the data is in, instead of re-shaping the data to fit to an existing algorithm. Thankfully, such re-writing would usually only involve re-ordering loops and adding or removing FFTs.
The circumstances above mean that clean, documented, maintainable codes, that can be modified in a pinch without adding bugs are a must when working with wide-azimuth data. The collaboration among geographically separated programmers that do not know each other and do not share a common cultural background necessarily imposes these qualities on open-source software. Considerable discipline is needed by in-house programmers in order to get to the same result. Companies which use open-source software that has the above-described qualities will be able to have a faster wide/full azimuth project turnaround. Conversely, the emergence of wide/full-azimuth data acquisition represents a great opportunity for community-based geophysical open-source software!

New stable version is released.
The previous stable versions have been downloaded more than 1,500 times in 16 months. In the same period of time, the development version experienced more than 3,300 read transactions, more than 1,100 write transactions, and more than 7,400 file updates (statistics from SourceForge).

OpendTect announces plans to implement a Madagascar interface:
http://www2.opendtect.org/madagascar_rsf.html.
OpendTect is a seismic interpretation software system as well as a research and development environment for seismic interpretation.

Yes, that’s right, now you can get your Madagascar apparel, mugs, wallclocks, mousepads, bags and more at the Reproducibility Store! Prices are as low as they can get, as no markups were added to prices given by Cafepress. You can check that by opening your own store with them, it takes 10 minutes and costs nothing. They say they offer bulk pricing for orders over 15 items. Feedback is welcome on the quality of items and service, as we have only seen the items on sale as computer-generated images 🙂 Suggestions for products to be added are welcome; Cafepress’ interface kindly offered to put the logo on more items, including underwear, but sometimes there can be too much of a good thing 🙂

In one year of public existence, Madagascar has been showing a good rate of spreading. More than 1200 copies of the stable version were downloaded from Sourceforge, with the record activity in the last four months. The number of registered developers went from 2 to 16. Needless to say, many important deficiencies remain and will require a community effort to get overcome. Several new issues were pointed out by developers of OpendTect working on integrating Madagascar tools with their product through a graphical user interface.
Recent presentations on Madagascar are available on the Conferences web page.