Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Roadside leafiness from space – Part 2

In the last post in this series, I showed some pretty maps of roadside leafiness, created by extracting NDVI values near roads – like this: This time, I want to move away from pretty images to some numerical analysis – and also move from a local scale to a national scale. My first question was: […]

Roadside leafiness from space – Part 1

If you just want to see some pretty maps of roadside leafiness then scroll down…otherwise, start at the top to find out how I did this. I’ve recently started doing a little bit of satellite imaging work again, and started off with a project that was inspired by a post on James O’Connor’s blog. He […]

Regression in Python using R-style formula – it’s easy!

I remember experimenting with doing regressions in Python using R-style formulae a long time ago, and I remember it being a bit complicated. Luckily it’s become really easy now – and I’ll show you just how easy. Before running this you will need to install the pandas, statsmodels and patsy packages. If you’re using conda […]

Reminder about cross-platform case-sensitivity differences

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 […]

Showing code changes when teaching

A key – but challenging – part of learning to program is moving from writing technically-correct code “that works” to writing high-quality code that is sensibly decomposed into functions, generically-applicable and generally “good”. Indeed, you could say that this is exactly what Software Carpentry is about – taking you from someone bodging together a few […]

Reading AERONET data in Pandas: a simple helper function

I use data from the AERONET network of sun photometers a lot in my work, and do a lot of processing of the data in Python. As part of this I usually want to load the data into pandas – but because of the format of the data, it’s not quite as simple as it […]

Resources for learning Python for Remote Sensing – or switching from IDL

I’m supervising an MSc student for her thesis this summer, and the work she’s doing with me is going to involve a fair amount of programming, in the context of remote sensing & GIS processing. She’s got experience programming in IDL from a programming course during the taught part of her Masters, but has no […]

Software Sustainability in Remote Sensing

As part of my fellowship with the Software Sustainability Institute, I’ve written an article on Software Sustainability in Remote Sensing. This article was originally written a couple of years ago and it never quite got around to being published. However, I have recently updated it, and it’s now been posted on the SSI’s blog. I’ve […]