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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
This summer has been hectic (life is hectic anyhow!). As I was switching fields from physics to neuro-imaging, I took the chance to travel to the US and to spend the summer doing Python-related stuff.
I spent most of my time this summer at Enthought, in Austin, Texas …
Suppose you have a dynamic website using turbogears, and you want to publish part of the content of this dynamic site to a static website, for instance to garanty its perenity. Well turbogears makes it really hard for you to do this. On the mailing lists they pretty …
pyreport is a program that runs a python script and captures its output, compiling it to a pretty report in a pdf or an html file. It can display the output embedded in the code that produced it …
I have been planning to make a more interesting post highlighting the large trends of the SciPy2008 conference, but it is 3AM local time, and I am still hacking on Mayavi, so I think I’ll keep it short.
As far a the conference program goes, we can see a …
After Ipython and Sympy, Mayavi is now using sphinx to build its docs. Sphinx is very neat because it allows for high quality pdf and html from the same restructured text source. The killer feature is that the resulting html pages have a builtin search that works with javascript, and …
I have been struggling for the last few days trying to understand the issues behind packaging and installing the Enthought Tool Suite. I think have been making progress, though only in my head, no actual code or packages so far are terribly satisfying.
If you are developing a …
I have been reading an article about a new language paradigm (Erasmus, a modular language for concurrent programming). The authors discuss the limitations of objects in terms of modularity. To sum up their point (and most probably distort it completely), the limitations with objects comes from the fact that you …
I have been traveling recently and talking to friendly Geeks I didn’t know yet. I have been surprised to see that many people were pronouncing “Mayavi”, “Maya-V-I”, is in “V-I”, like the old Unix editor. Maybe this comes from the spelling “MayaVi”, that Prabhu and I recently decided to …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
