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.
I call code design the process of designing …
We are organizing a coding sprint in Paris on 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 …
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 …
Euroscipy 2010, the third European conference for the use of Python in science, is just over, and I think it was a great success.
The attendance this year was huge: there was a grand total of 160 who came to EuroScipy, with 140 that came only to …
Some advices and examples on making posters for scientific conference.
A simple LaTeX document, to use as a skeletton
My contributions to the scientific computing software ecosystem are motivated by my vision on computational science.
Scientific research relies more and more on computing. However, most of the researchers are not software engineers, and as computing is becoming ubiquitous, the limiting factor becomes more and more the human factor [G …
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 …
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 …
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 …
We have been getting a few questions on the enthought-dev mailing-list on how to represent an additional information on a surface with Mayavi, using color not given eg by the elevation. A recent post on his blog by Didrik Pinte shows the problem quite well:
This problem can be seen …
Packt publishing sent me a copy of Sandro Tosi’s book Matplotlib for Python Developpers a while ago. Unfortunately, it arrived after I had left for the Christmas break, and I couldn’t find time to review it for a while (I am terribly bad at time-management, and I do …
A week ago, the Peter Wang released a new version of the Enthought Tool Suite (ETS). With it came a new version of Mayavi2.
Prabhu and I have been horribly busy we real life, and I had the bad feeling that we were not giving enough love to Mayavi. I …
The Aikon project has just been slashdotted.
The project is about implementing a robotic artist, with a special artistic touch:
The Co-principal investigator, Patrick Tresset, gave a talk at the French Pycon this year and I was simply flabbergasted by the project. It is amazing to mix together art and …
EuroScipy 2010, the 3rd European meeting on Python in Science, will be held July 8-11 in the center of Paris, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
We have made good progress in the organization, and we already have an exciting program although paper submission is not yet even open.
Dimension reduction and interpretability
Suppose you have statistical data that too many dimensions, in other words too many variables of the same random process, that has been observed many times. You want to find out, from all these variables (or all these dimensions when speaking in terms of multivariate data …
We are finally announcing the online edition of SciPy proceedings:
http://conference.scipy.org/proceedings/SciPy2009/
This year, we tried to raise the bar in terms of article quality. This involved having a more strict review process, and we must thank a lot all the reviewers. I have the feeling …
Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure, July 8-11 2010
We are happy to announce the 3rd EuroScipy meeting, in Paris, July 2010.
We’re famous: the work that concluded my PhD is now picked up by the press http://www.physorg.com/news179481148.html
I hadn’t realized before reading this journalist’s version of the story, but we have all the proper buzz words:
Decoration is a fantastic pattern in Python that allows for very light-weight metaprograming with functions rather than objects (see this article for an in-depth discussion). However, when decorating, it is very easy to break another great feature of the language: its reflectivity and its ability to do static representations of …
