Archive for the 'python' Category

04 Sep

Scikit Learn coding sprint

We have been really crap at communicating the next scikit-learn coding sprint. It’s next week!
The coding sprint will take place the 8 and 9 September at INRIA Saclay, near Paris, in the room K110 (building K).
For those who cannot make it, it will be possible to participate using the IRC chan (#scikit-learn on irc.freenode.net).
We will [...]

24 Aug

SVG Word map of countries

To be able to visualize some quantities attached to countries all over the world, I needed a image with various countries color-coded. The fantastic matplotlib basemap package was not an option as I really needed a static image.

So I generated an SVG image with all the countries. It was generating by tracing a bitmap, so [...]

17 Aug

Git…

No point me launching in a rant against Git, it’s the future anyhow… but it’s the only DVCS that I know with which I routinely loose work, and it is called a feature (I lost work a few times with bzr, but these were bugs)!

01 Aug

Software design for maintainability

I have just spent the best part of my Sunday fixing a bug that turned out being a seemingly-trivial two-liner. Such unpleasant experiences are all too frequent, and weight a lot on my view of code design.
My stance on code design

I call code design the process of designing the architecture of a piece of software: [...]

23 Jul

Sprint Scikit learn in Paris

We are organizing a coding sprint in Paris on the scikit learn, machine learning in Python. The goal of this sprint is to set the API and the general coding guidelines of the scikit to be able to tackle many different statistical learning problems in a consistent framework.
This is why we would like to have [...]

16 Jul

Simple object signatures

A signature pattern

There are many libraries around to specify what I call a ’signature’ for an object, in other words a list of attributes that define its parameter set. I have heavily used Enthought’s Traits library for this purpose, but the concept is fairly general and can be found eg in ORMs (Object Relational [...]

13 Jul

Euroscipy 2010: code, science, and a lot of fun

Euroscipy 2010, the third European conference for the use of Python in science, is just over, and I think it was a great success.
Euroscipy in numbers

The attendance this year was huge: there was a grand total of 160 who came to EuroScipy, with 140 that came only to the tutorials, and 130 only the conference. [...]

15 May

EuroScipy abstract submission deadline extended

Given that we have been able to turn on registration only very late, the EuroScipy conference committee is extending the deadline for abstract submission for the 2010 EuroScipy conference.

On Thursday May 20th, at midnight Samoa time, we will turn off the abstract submission on the conference site. Up to then, you can modify the already-submitted [...]

13 May

EuroScipy is finally open for registration

The registration for EuroScipy is finally open.
To register, go to the website, create an account, and you will see a ‘register to the conference’ button on the left. Follow it to a page which presents a ’shoping cart’. Simply submitting this information registers you to the conference, and on the left of the website, the [...]

02 May

Status of the EuroScipy registration

It is still not possible to register for the Euroscipy conference: we are having difficulties with payment for the registration, and we are still not sure that we will be able to actually charge money!
This might not be a bad news, because it might mean that the conference will be completely free. This would mean [...]