During the Nepal earthquake response project I worked on, we were gradually getting access to historical mobile phone data for use in our analyses. I wanted to keep track of which days of data we had got access to, and which ones we were still waiting for. I wrote a simple script to print out […]
I really enjoy reading blogs. That seems to be a slightly outdated view, as many people have moved over to using Twitter exclusively, but I like being able to follow everything that a specific person writes, and seeing mostly long-form articles rather than off-the-cuff comments. Back in the day, when blogs were really popular, every […]
This is just a very brief reminder about something you might run into when you’re trying to get your code to work on multiple platforms – in this case, OS X, Linux and Windows. Basically: file names/paths are case-sensitive on Linux, but not on OS X or Windows. Therefore, you could have some Python code […]
At the end of my last post I left you with a taster of what Part 2 would provide: a way of producing automatically-updating graphs of power usage over time. Part 1 was based purely on Python code that would run on any system (Windows, Linux or OS X) but this part will require a […]
After borrowing a CurrentCost electricity usage meter from my local library (if you’re in the area, then Eastleigh library will loan you one for free!), I decided to buy one, as I’d found it very useful in trying to reduce my electricity usage. The benefit of buying one as opposed to borrowing one was that […]
This is really just a quick note for me in the future, and for anyone else who might find this useful. I have been involved in doing some administration of a Linux server recently – although I haven’t had full control over the server as administrators from the company that own the server have been […]
When running GDAL on my university’s supercomputer yesterday I got the following error: ERROR 1: Landsat_Soton.tif, band 1: An error occured while writing a dirty block This post is really just to remind me how to solve this error – I imagine the error may have a multitude of possible causes. In my case though, […]
For a while now I’ve been frustrated by an error that I get whenever I’m using git on Windows. When I try and run certain git commands – such as git log or git diff – I get the following message: The error message “WARNING: terminal not fully functional” appears, but if you press return […]
In a project recently I was struggling to find a way to parse strings that contain a date range, for example: 27th-29th June 2010 Tuesday 29 May -> Sat 2 June 2012 From 27th to 29th March 1999 None of the Python modules I investigated (including parsedatetime) seemed to be able to cope with the […]
As part of my research I do a fair amount of data collection in the field. Some of the instruments I use are very modern and connect to a computer via USB, interacting with custom-written client software which allows such luxuries as timed logging, triggered logging and local calibration. However, a number of the instruments […]