Summary: This book takes you all the way from Morse Code to a fully working computer, explaining everything along the way. What’s more, it’s a great read too! If you ever wondered how a computer worked then buy this and read it – even if you think you already know (unless you’re, you know, a chip designer at […]
So, I’ve been pondering an interesting scientific dilemma recently: how do you validate a validation technique? That is, if you’re using a certain procedure to validate some data (that is, check how correct/accurate it is), how can you validate the validation procedure itself? This has come up in my work recently in relation to validating […]
A while back I released a GIS dataset containing Snow’s Cholera analysis data in modern GIS formats, and georeferenced to the British National Grid (see my previous post). Unfortunately, there was an error in some of the attributes of the Cholera Deaths shapefile which caused issues when using the data. This error has now been […]
I’ve just signed the Science Code Manifesto because I firmly believe in what it says. Ok well, that probably doesn’t tell you much – generally I tend to believe in things that I sign – but I’d like to tell you why I signed it, and why I think it’s really important. A lot of […]
As you might know from some of my previous posts, I’m a big fan of making my scientific work reproducible. My main reasons for being so keen on this are: Reproducibility is key to science – if it can’t be reproduced then it can not be verified (that is, the experiment can’t be tried again to […]
Recently I was shocked to find that there didn’t seem to be a simple tool which would convert BibTeX files to COINS metadata span tags – so I wrote one! That sentence probably made no sense to you – so lets go through it in a bit more depth. I use LaTeX to write all […]
Sphinx is a great tool for documenting Python programs (and lots of other things – I recently saw a lecturer who had done all of his lecture notes using Sphinx!) and I’ve used it for my new project (which will be announced on this blog in the next few days). Now that the project is […]
While processing some data at work today I had an issue where I had a raster dataset in ArcGIS, where all cells with invalid data had been set to 9999. Of course, this caused a lot of issues for the statistics on the dataset – basically they were all nonsense – so I needed to […]
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 […]
In my field I often need to plot polar contour plots, and generally plotting tools don’t make this easy. In fact, I think I could rate every single graphing/plotting package in the world by the ease of producing a polar contour plot – and most would fail entirely! Still, I have managed to find a […]