News and thoughts – Page 13

Mayavi UI issue

I have been wanting to change slightly the design of a Mayavi dialog for a while. Here is the issue: when you create a visualization, eg throught the command line in IPython, whith mlab, you get a nice and small window with only your visualization, and a toolbar. If you …

Frank Willison on the French

I couldn’t help myself, this Franck-Willison quote is brilliant:

“And the Europeans accept chaos and know how to live with it. I came away from France believing in the strong faith of the French people, not because of their magnificent cathedrals, but because I saw them drive around L …

Error in my article

There is an error in a code example in my article that just came out in Linux Magazine France. I am so ashamed. I did test the code, but I didn’t have automated tests, so I broke it when tweaking it :(. I think the lesson is that you need …

Mayavi image of the fortnight

It’s been two weeks since I posted a ‘Mayavi image of the week’. Prabhu has made a really cool example of integrating trajectories in a 3D vector field, using, of course, the Lorenz equation for the 3D field. With nice colors, it makes a new fantastic image:

The green …

LinuxMag special edition on Python

The French LinuxMag just published a special edition on Python, in which I authored a 12-page article on scientific computing. The edition is in French, so if you don’t speak French, it is of limited interested.


Ce dossier hors-série est une excellente ressource pour découvrir Python, entre autre par …

Mayavi image of the week

The title of this post is a lure: there won’t be a Mayavi image each week, because I would run out quickly. But it sounded cool.

Anyway, here is an image of a graph, visualized with Mayavi. The graph is actually a protein structure, downloaded from the PDB. The …

GPS coordinates for the world’s major cities

This may sound stupid, but I have failed to find on the web a simply-accessible text file giving the GPS coordinates for the world’s major cities. The web site World-gazetteer is helpful, but doesn’t really give what I want. So I wrote a small Python web-scraping script to …

Tracking objects in scientific code

When I started working in my new field (data analysis of functional brain images), I was surprised to find in our data-analysis scripts what I thought was a very particular code smell: the numerical code is always doing a lot of filename and path manipulation, loading and saving data even …

What’s new in Mayavi 3.1.0?

Mayavi 3.1.0 has just been released, and I think it is a fantastic version. We are starting to be able to focus on the details and the focus. In addition, we are getting user feedback, which helps identify the pain points.

Automatic scripting

This is a huge deal …

120 pages!

The mayavi manual in SVN has now 120 pages when compiled to pdf. I know that this is a stupid metric, and that the quality is more important then the number of pages, but it does give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

More seriously, next release of Mayavi (coming …