Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Easily specifying colours from the default colour cycle in matplotlib

Another quick matplotlib tip today: specifically, how easily specify colours from the standard matplotlib colour cycle. A while back, when matplotlib overhauled their themes and colour schemes, they changed the default cycle of colours used for lines in matplotlib. Previously the first line was pure blue (color='b' in matplotlib syntax), then red, then green etc. […]

Markdown in WordPress – and writing blog posts is fun again

As you may have noticed, I hadn’t blogged here for quite a while, but have recently started blogging regularly again. This is mostly due to sorting out various WordPress issues I was having, and installing some new plugins to make writing blog posts fun again. Ever since I installed the WordPress update that added the […]

Five new-ish Python things – Part 1

I keep gathering links of interesting Python things I’ve seen around the internet: new packages, good tutorials, and so on – and so I thought I’d start a series where I share them every so often. Not all of these are new new – some have been around for a while but are new to […]

Automatically generating a legend for a choropleth layer in Leaflet

Some work I’ve been doing recently has involved putting together a webmap using the Leaflet library. I’ve been very impressed with how Leaflet works, and the range of plugins available for it. leaflet-choropleth is an extension for Leaflet that allows easy generation of choropleth maps in Leaflet. The docs for this module are pretty good, […]

Easily hiding items from the legend in matplotlib

When producing some graphs for a client recently, I wanted to hide some labels from a legend in matplotlib. I started investigating complex arguments to the plt.legend function, but it turned out that there was a really simple way to do it… If you start your label for a plot item with an underscore (_) […]

Calculating Rayleigh Reflectance using Py6S

A user of Py6S recently contacted me to ask if it was possible to get an output of Rayleigh reflectance from Py6S. Unfortunately this email wasn’t sent to the Py6s Google Group, so I thought I’d write a blog post explaining how to do this, and showing a few outputs (reminder: please post Py6S questions […]

Automatically annotating a boxplot in matplotlib

You can probably tell from the sudden influx of matplotlib posts that I’ve been doing a lot of work plotting graphs recently… I have produced a number of boxplots to compare different sets of data. Some of these graphs are for a non-technical audience, and my client agreed that a boxplot was the best way […]