News and thoughts – Page 7

SciPy abstract submission deadline extended

Greetings,

The conference committee is extending the deadline for abstract
submission for the Scipy conference 2009 one week.
On Friday July 3th, at midnight Pacific, we will turn off the abstract
submission on the conference site. Up to then, you can modify the
already-submitted abstract, or submit new abstracts.

The …

SciPy 2009 conference opened up for registration

We are finally opening the registration for the SciPy 2009 conference. It took us time, but the reason  is that we made careful budget estimations to bring the registration cost down.

We are very happy to announce that this year registration to the conference will be only $150, tutorial $100 …

Fuzzy on OOP and the French

Fantastic:

Haha - I shake my fuzzywuzzy beard at you in bewilderment. Do you people dislike OOP, the class statement is mere boilerplate to you, I mumble incoherent French obscenities in your general direction. (Did you know the French acronym for object-oriented programming is POO?).

Job offering for junior Python developer

Our lab is seeking to hire an engineer to work on porting our machine learning code to the scikit learn, adding tests and documentation and packaging it.

We are looking for someone motivated by quality in software and open source. No prior scientific computing experience is required. You will be …

Pycon FR: presentations and tutorials

May 30th and 31st the French Python conference, Pycon FR, will be held at ‘la citée des sciences’, la Villette, in Paris.

The first day, I will be giving a one-hour-long tutorial (in French) on numpy, scipy, and all the Python for Science jazz. On the following day, I will …

Minimum spanning tree

Gary Ruben came up with the excellent idea of visualizing the minimum spanning tree of a Delaunay tesselation in addition to Delaunay tessalation itself. After he sent me his code, I spent some times playing with it, because I found out that, with the right choice of visualization parameter, it …

Extracting the data from the Delaunay triangulation

Gary Ruben just asked me if it was possible to retrieve the triangulation information from my previous Delaunay example. Actually the reason I came up with this example is that Emanuelle Gouillart, my partner[*], needed to do Delaunay triangulation on some data. She was kind enough to extract that code …

Mayavi image of the … month

Tonight I sat down and played a bit with VTK’s Delaunay tessalation filter. I wanted to inspect the local structure of a graph created by Delaunay tessalation of random points. To see better the structure, I selected a slab of the resulting unstructured grid. I think the image is …

Long sys.path and consequences, one more reason not to use easy_install

For those who don’t know, sys.path is the path that the Python interpreter traverse at each module import to look for the module file imported.

This blog post is about the consequences of having a long sys.path. I’ll try and make it short, but I would …

Mayavi documentation: in multiple small pages, or a few long ones

Prabhu and I can’t decide: what is best for the documentation, have more pages, and thus have them be small, or have longer pages, but have less. Two specific examples:

http://code.enthought.com/projects/mayavi/docs/development/html/mayavi/examples.html

http://code.enthought.com/projects/mayavi/docs …

Mayavi on the web

Ondrej Certik has installed a sage notebook on a server opened to the net, with Mayavi installed on it. The result is that you have a command line interface on the web, in which you can enter Mayavi commands, and see the result. You have to be very careful to …

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 …