Last week I presented a poster at PyData Global 2020, about linking the pint and SQLAlchemy libraries together to provide robust handling of units with databases in Python. The poster is shown below: click to enlarge so you can read the text: The example code is available on Github and is well-commented to make it […]
I’ve neglected this blog for a while – partly due to the chaos of 2020 (which is not great), and partly due to being busy with work (which is good!). Anyway, I’m starting to pick it up again, and I thought I’d start with something that caught me out the other day. So, let’s start […]
For a number of years – since my now-toddler son was a small baby – I’ve been keeping track of various childhood achievements or memories. When I first came up with this I was rather sleep-deprived, and couldn’t decide what the best way to store this information would be – so I went with a […]
My son goes to a nursery part-time, and the nursery uses a system called ParentZone from Connect Childcare to send information between us (his parents) and nursery. Primarily, this is used to send us updates on the boring details of the day (what he’s had to eat, nappy changes and so on), and to send […]
This is more a ‘note to myself’ than anything else, but I expect some other people might find it useful. I’ve often struggled with accessing MySQL from Python, as the ‘default’ MySQL library for Python is MySQLdb. This library has a number of problems: 1) it is Python 2 only, and 2) it requires compiling […]
Just a quick post today, to tell you about a couple of simple zsh functions that I find handy as a Python programmer. First, pyimp – a very simple function that tries to import a module in Python and displays the output. If there is no output then the import succeeded, otherwise you’ll see the […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 (_) […]
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 […]