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 …
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 …
I just arrived in Austin, Texas. I need to settle down a bit more, blog about my fantastic holidays, but I wanted to give an update of where I was.
The hospitality here has been fantastic so far. I am sitting in a confy chair, sipping a fresh orange juice …
I am currently changing jobs and changing countries. This is why I have been really bad at dealing with questions on the mailing-lists, bug-reports or feature requests.
So far I have been working as a physicist, doing atomic physics (Bose Einstein Condensation). I studied quantum physics, mostly theory, and …
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 …
This month I have traveled a bit for scientific-computing related reasons.
First of all, I was speaking at the OKcon, open knowledge conference in London, about Scientific tools in Python in general, and Mayavi in particular. I jumped on the occasion to visit the Airbus campus in Bristol …
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 …
We really need to get numpy 1.0.5 out. And for this release to rock, we want to have good docs. This is why Jarrod offered to have a doc sprint tomorrow.
In addition we are currently having a sprint in Paris for neuroimaging in Python, with a bunch …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
