As many of you probably know, I’ve been working towards a PhD at the University of Southampton. This post is the brief story of my PhD, my graduation and my future plans. So, back in the dim and distant days of 2010, I started a PhD with the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS) at […]
I’ve just had my second journal paper published, and so I thought I’d start a series on my blog where I explain some of the background behind my publications, explain the implications/applications that my work has, and also provide a brief layman’s summary for non-experts who may be interested in my work. Hopefully this will […]
The last few months have seen a flurry of activity in Py6S – probably caused by procrastinating from working on my PhD thesis! Anyway, I thought it was about time that I summarised the various updates and new features which have been released, and gave a few more details on how to use them. These […]
This post is more a note to myself than anything else – but it might prove useful for someone sometime. In the dim and distant mists of time, I set up a startup file for ENVI which automatically loaded a specific image every time you opened ENVI. I have no idea why I did that […]
As part of my PhD I’ve developed a number of algorithms which are implemented as a class in Python code. An example would be something like this: class Algorithm: def __init__(self, input_filename, output_basename, thresh, n_iter=10): self.input_filename = input_filename self.output_basename = output_basename self.thresh = thresh self.n_iter = n_iter def run(self): self.preprocess() self.do_iterations() self.postprocess() def preprocess(self): # […]
I do a lot of my academic programming in Python, and – even though I often write about the importance of reproducible research – I don’t always document my code very well. This sometimes leads to problems where I have some code running fine, but I don’t know which modules it requires. These could be […]
10. Can you re-generate any intermediate data set from the original raw data by running a series of scripts? It depends which of my projects you’re talking about. For some of my nicely self-contained projects then this is very easy – everything is encapsulated in a script or a series of scripts, and you can […]
Recently I ran into a situation where I needed to select Landsat scenes by various criteria – for example, to find images over a certain location, within a certain date range, with other requirements on cloudiness and so on. Normally I’d do this sort of filtering using a tool like EarthExplorer, but I needed to […]
7. Do you use version control for your scripts? Yes, almost always. I’ve found this a lot easier since I started using Git – to start using version control with Git simply requires running "git init" – whereas with SVN you had to configure a new repository and do all sorts of admin work before […]
I recently read the article Don’t be a technical masochist on John D. Cook’s blog, and it struck a chord with me about the way that I see people choosing software and programming tools in my field. John states "Sometimes tech choices are that easy: if something is too hard, stop doing it. A great […]