My PhD was done through a Doctoral Training Centre, and as part of this I had a taught year at the beginning of my PhD. During the summer of this year I had to do a ‘Summer Project’, which was basically a MSc thesis. My thesis was called "Can a single cloud spoil the view?": modelling […]
One of the most important things when developing software – particularly open-source software – is knowing when to stop working on something, relinquish responsibility and suggest that it should not be used any more. This is what I have recently done with AutoZotBib. For those who don’t remember AutoZotBib, it is a tool that I […]
Continuing my series of code that I’ve written in the past, and stuck up on Github, but never actually talked about…this post is about PyMicrotops: a Python library for processing data from the Microtops Sun Photometer. The Microtops (pictured above) measures light coming from the sun in a number of narrow wavebands, and then calculates […]
My last post about my favourite ‘new’ (well, new to me) Python packages seemed to be very well received. I’ll post a ‘debrief’ post within the next few weeks, reflecting on the various comments that were made on Hacker News, Reddit and so on, but before that I want to post a slightly more personal […]
As I’ve been blogging a lot more about Python over the last year, I thought I’d list a few of my favourite ‘new’ Python modules from 2015. These aren’t necessarily modules that were newly released in 2015, but modules that were ‘new to me’ this year – and may be new to you too! tqdm […]
I wrote a post a few months ago about a couple of useful Jupyter (formerly known as IPython) notebook extensions, and commented that they were a bit of a pain to install. Well, I’ve found a great way to get around that problem – an extension called nbextensions that will help you manage your notebook […]
Slightly boringly, this very similar to my last post – but it’s also something useful that you may want to know, and that I’ll probably forget if I don’t write it down somewhere. Basically, scipy.ndimage.filters.convolve is about twice as fast as scipy.signal.convolve2d. I run convolutions a lot on satellite images, and Landsat images are around 8000 […]
This entry in my series covers manifestoclouds: my code for producing word clouds from political party manifestos. This is very simple, generic code that just ties together a few libraries – and is by no means restricted to just political party manifestos – but I keep it around because I find it useful occasionally. I use […]
Recently I’ve been investigating a key dataset in my research, and really seeking to understand what is causing the patterns that I see. I realised that it would be really useful if I could plot an interactive scatter plot in Python, and then hover over points to find out further information in them. Putting this into […]
As a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, I have talked a lot about how important software is in science, and how we need to make sure we recognise its contribution. Writing good scientific software takes a lot of work, and can have a lot of impact on the community, but it tends not to […]