News and thoughts – Page 16

Usability

I just wanted to echo a very good blog post about usability:

Users are busy not stupid.

As you design something, ask “is this relevant to what people are trying to do?” rather than “is this confusing?” […] It doesn’t matter whether people could figure something out. It matters whether …

Supporting our users under Windows

Many of our users use Windows. I don’t, I use Linux, but I completely respect people’s choice to use the OS they want, as I expect other people to respect my choice. As Prabhu also run Linux (and MacOS X), this means I should sometimes roll up my …

Playing with filters in Mayavi2

Mayavi uses VTK as a rendering engine. It does its best not to force you to learn anything about VTK, and I often forget about the infinite possibilities of this visualization toolkit, but sometimes it can be interesting to actually look at bit more at its data processing algorithms to …

Adding simple customisation to Mayavi2

Mayavi2 is a rewrite of the original Mayavi application to make it easier to adapt and customize.

Mayavi2 uses, for its full-blown application, the Envisage framework. As a result it can both use envisage plugins (such as the logger and the python shell), and contribute to other plugins, thus providing …

Mayavi2 in Ubuntu

After Debian, Mayavi2 has just made it into Ubuntu Hardy (http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/science/mayavi2). From what I can see, the deps look just good, thanks a lot to Varun for making sure the Debian package was in shape. This means in April, it will be massively …

Mission accomplished

I defended my PhD yesterday. I am pretty happy to be done with this.

After the defense, the other PhD students offered me a plastic python (well it was a cobra, actually, but they told me to pretend it was a Python.

Mayavi2 in Debian

Thanks to the combined efforts of Ondrej Certik, who made me do the necessary tarballs, and Varun Hiremath, who finalized the packaging efforts, Mayavi2 is now in Debian ( http://packages.debian.org/sid/mayavi2 ). Currently, it is in testing, but it will soon trickle down to unstable. Along with Mayavi2 …

Mayavi2: using from ipython

Recently Prabhu and I have been ironing the library aspect of Mayavi2 (library as opposed to application). One of the usecases we are interested in, is interative use, via for instance ipython, a la pylab.

Most people think of Mayavi as a big and powerful application, maybe a bit clunky …

Hello world… hu I mean Planet !

Thanks to Jarrod Millman, we now have planet.scipy . This means it is time for me to create a blog, on top of my good old static site.

Garamond fonts for LaTeX

An easy to install version of Garamond fonts for LaTeX