Thursday, November 25, 2010

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Chararcter set detection python script

Charset detection script exctracted from the mozilla detection script: chardet
I tried it and it works.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Re-creating user 0 fixes inaccessible Drupal site

Devbee explains why user 0, the default user is so important in Drupal. A missing user 0 can mean that your site cannot be reached from the outside!

If you find yourself having trouble accessing cotent or using your site as an anonymous user, you can safely run the following queries against your Drupal DB (4.6/4.7):

INSERT INTO users (uid, name, mail) VALUES ('0', '', ''); INSERT INTO users_roles (uid, rid) VALUES (0, 1); INSERT INTO node_access VALUES (0, 0, 'all', 1, 0, 0);

If any of the queries above returns a "duplicate entry" error, that means a row already exists, and that table is already OK.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Googlification

Science can’t accept technical barriers of content use!:

But I have a different worry. The worry’s called Google and I have a great fear that we are being "googlified". The great simplicity and the enormous quantitative search results that Google produces are being seen uncritically. This might result in a tendency to no longer use documents, articles and books, but to solve all our information problems using Google. There, information is not really indexed deeply enough and the algorithms behind the ranking are unclear. "Googlification" should create great concern for everybody in the information as well as education sector, including parents of children.

Thursday, October 07, 2010

Nice way to insert a stylesheet in an HTML doc

I find this is a nice way to insert a stylesheet in a HTML document. Just specify it in the <HEAD> section, between <STYLE> mark-ups.
like this:

<STYLE>

</STYLE>

I used this tool to convert the html code in HTML entities.

Monday, September 27, 2010

World map with users in real time

This site has a worldmap showing users in real time: http://www.worldcorrespondents.com/google-doodle-happy-12th-birthday-google/8812323

Thursday, September 16, 2010

A little MD5 CHeck sum utility to check the integrity of a downloaded file is available at fourmilab.
I just pasted the md5.exe in my download folder. And from a DOS command prompt, the command "md5.exe filetoanalyse" will return the checksum. For example:

C:\user\Downloads>md5.exe py2exe-0.6.9.win32-py2.6.exe

Returns

F05FD1F17B1473A13E1919D6D7FA0B08 py2exe-0.6.9.win32-py2.6.exe

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Virtual Python

What It Does

virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments.

The basic problem being addressed is one of dependencies and versions, and indirectly permissions. Imagine you have an application that needs version 1 of LibFoo, but another application requires version 2. How can you use both these applications? If you install everything into /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages (or whatever your platform's standard location is), it's easy to end up in a situation where you unintentionally upgrade an application that shouldn't be upgraded.

Or more generally, what if you want to install an application and leave it be? If an application works, any change in its libraries or the versions of those libraries can break the application.

Also, what if you can't install packages into the global site-packages directory? For instance, on a shared host.

In all these cases, virtualenv can help you. It creates an environment that has its own installation directories, that doesn't share libraries with other virtualenv environments (and optionally doesn't use the globally installed libraries either).

Monday, September 06, 2010

Google Map competitor

Map24 Looks very similar to google maps. The interface makes it possible to move the point of view, much like in Google earth.

The same company also has a different interface on the website Navteq.com in my region it shows traffic data for a lot more roads than google map does. I wonder how this is possible.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Make the Tab bar visible in FIrefox full screen mode

According to Tweak Firefox 3 full screen mode • Mozilla Links, in about:config, you need to change the value of browser.fullscreen.autohide to "False".

Pour afficher la barre des tabs en mode plein écran, d'après Tweak Firefox 3 full screen mode, vous devez changer un réglage en entrant about:config dans la barre d'adresse, puis modifier la valeur de browser.fullscreen.autohide à "False".

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

When software patents become conter-productive

Oracle attacks Google and Android developers

The way the US patent system is currently set up, it’s difficult if not impossible to write a sizable body of code without unknowingly infringing on somebody’s patent. Your best hope seems to be to waste a lot of time filing as many patents as you can of your own, and hoping that anybody who sues you is unknowingly infringing on one of yours. That gives you a bargaining chip so you can do some kind of cross licensing deal. It’s a stupid, wasteful, unproductive government-created system that achieves the exact opposite of what was intended when it was first started. But, what can you do.

Friday, August 06, 2010

Python CGI scripts under wamp

If you want to run cgi script using wamp server on windows, you need to edit the Apache configuration file httpd.conf. Use the command line as administrator and run
C:\wamp\bin\apache\Apache2.2.11\conf>notepad httpd.conf
Then search for the line containing "addhandler" and write:

AddHandler cgi-script .py

For python scripts (for any other scripting language, just use the relevant extension).
Then the first line of your script should contain the path to the python program:

#!c:/Python26/python.exe -u

According to python cgi on windows.
Place your script in C:\wamp\bin\apache\Apache2.2.11\cgi-bin\myscript.py and you're done.
The output of the script can be accessed at

http://localhost/cgi-bin/myscript.py

The script works but there are restrictions on the modules I can import. I can import native python modules, but not the module I made myself in other places outside the cgi-bin folder. I don't know how to solve that yet. (This is probably a security restriction)

pyodbcs connection strings

Pyodbc conncetion strings gives a useful piece of advice concerning ODBC connection to Excel.

The Excel driver does not support transactions, so you will need to use the autocommit keyword:
cnxn = pyodbc.connect('DSN=test', autocommit=True)

DSN (Data Source Names) are defined in the ODBC data source administrator of the control pannel in windows (in the section administrative tools).

I wasn't able to establish a DSN-less connection.

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Link to a specific part of a YouTube video

Matt cuts blog

If you want to link to a specific part of a video on YouTube, you can. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s
Notice the “#t=31m08s” on the end of the url? That link will take you 31 minutes and 8 seconds into that video.

Monday, August 02, 2010

Write tests in programming

In this lecture, Richard Buckland says that tests should be written before the functions.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Creating icons with Irfanview

This blog post explained me How to create icons with Irfanview.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

To model or not to model?

How not to model autonomus behavior: "Models and instantiations are very different things. An instantiation is supposed to be a proper member of the class of phenomena under study. By contrast, a model need not be; it can be crude – almost ignoring the majority of interested aspects of the phenomenon of interest – and yet be extremely useful. In general, simple models tend to be scientifically very powerful. This is because the purpose of a model is not to replicate a phenomenon, but to help explain it. There are lots of ways in which this can happen that do not involve producing an instantiation: models can show us the mistake in our assumptions, they can be explanatory rich in the way they actually fail to capture the phenomenon of interest, they can act as proofs of concept, they can generate novel hypotheses, and generally they can help re-organize complex ideas by exercising and questioning our intuitions."
[...]
"Evolutionary robotics (ER) is still proving a useful and open-ended method for exploring this increasingly less constraining role of the designer that may be required to achieve strong artificial autonomy. ER hands in the task of filling in design specifications pertaining to mechanisms, morphology, structural and functional organization to an automatic process of artificial evolution (Harvey et al. 1997, Nolfi & Floreano, 2000). Thus, instead of designing a robot that must explore the environment but should go to the green light when the battery is down, one can attempt to design a robot that more generally must keep the battery up during its explorations, or more implicitly, a robot that explores indefinitely."

Monday, July 19, 2010

The command line as administrator

To use the comand line as an administrator in windows, you can go the the C:\WINDOWS\system32 folder and click on "run as". Here is a screenshot:

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Django running

I wanted to test one of the python web frameworks. I installed Django on Ubuntu. Here is the Django server running on my machine:

Now I'd like to know how I can use it to show the extracts of a table of metadata ! :-)

I don't know weather this was a stand-alone server or not. It's also possible to use Django on a standalone server. django-wsgiserver installs a web server for Django using CherryPy's WSGI server.

Python scripts as CGI on a web server

Today I wanted to run python scripts on a server. I have already Apache installed on my Ubuntu machine at home.
I dropped a python script (called rubbish.py) at /usr/lib/cgi-bin/rubbish.py But I couldn't see the output in my browser at: localhost/cgi-bin/rubbish.py (there was an error).
So I looked for help from the python cgi-script documentation. And their sample script works, it gives an html output that I can see in my browser. The main thing I had forgotten seems to be the need for the comment #!/usr/bin/env python as a first line of the file.
Here is what I see at the address http://localhost/cgi-bin/rubbish.py :

I wanted to run the script without cgi-bin, so i installed modwsgi.
Then restarted the Apache with sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
I added a little python script into the /var/www/ folder. But it doesn't execute. Instead it loads the file. I saw somewhere that I have to change the .htaccess file. To tell the server that this is not just a file but a script the line AddHandler python-program .py does this. Well somehow it doesn't word. And the Apache doc says: "In general, you should never use .htaccess files unless you don't have access to the main server configuration file." I should change the

httpd.conf file located at /etc/apache2/ on my computer. Pffffiou, :-) I'll do this another time, I already spent the whole afternoon on it.

I got inspiration from this forum (first result on google for "LAMP server python"), but then needed more help to get to the correct cgi script formatting (the first line with #!/usr/bin/env python).

I plan to check those web frameworks for python actually, I have already installed one to try it out (see next post). There are heaps of frameworks and there seems to be an effort at standardization.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Wooden keyboard

Clavier en bois en kit au Japon.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Crop pages in a PDF

It's possible to crop pages in Adobe Acrobat:

That's usefull if you have a document that has increadibly wide margines and you'd like to print 2 pages per sheet.

Undo close tab in Firefox

I was looking for a way to undo close tab in firefox an I have found an extenssion for it.
But a comment on the page says: " Useless Press Ctrl. Shift T instead of installing an add on for it." And that's quite true! :)

You can also view the recently closed tabs in the history menu.

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Turn off auto notifiers to increase your productivity

Process your email in batches:

A simple way to increase your productivity is to turn off auto notifiers. It’s simply not necessary to check email constantly throughout the day, and doing so will regularly interrupt more important tasks. After receiving thousands of emails I can safely say that I’ve never received one that couldn’t wait 12 hours or so.

Process your inbox in batches. Make it once or twice a day, and try to get your inbox down to zero. This will allow you to plow through the rest of your productive tasks without constant interruption.

I'm sad to say I use outlook at work. Turning off auto notification is called: "Turn Desktop Alerts on or off" in the outlook help page:

On the Tools menu, click Options.
On the Preferences tab, click E-mail Options, and then click Advanced E-mail Options.
Under When new items arrive in my Inbox, clear the Display a New Mail Desktop Alert (default Inbox only) check box.

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Why Python

Python Experts - Why They Do Python

Matthew: """Python syntax encourages programmers to write easy-to-read programs . [...] A well-written python program reads like a book. """

The homogenization of scientific computing, or why Python is steadily eating other languages’ lunch

Tad: """A few years ago, you couldn’t really do statistics in Python unless you wanted to spend most of your time pulling your hair out and wishing Python were more like R (which, is a pretty remarkable confession considering what R is like)."""

Paypal engineering: 10 myths of enterprise python:

Myth #7: Python does not scale

"""Scale has many definitions, but by any definition, YouTube is a web site at scale. More than 1 billion unique visitors per month, over 100 hours of uploaded video per minute, and going on 20 pecent of peak Internet bandwidth, all with Python as a core technology. Dropbox, Disqus, Eventbrite, Reddit, Twilio, Instagram, Yelp, EVE Online, Second Life, and, yes, eBay and PayPal all have Python scaling stories that prove scale is more than just possible: it’s a pattern."""

Astronomers switch from IDL to Python. IDL is a vector oriented programming language. A wiki version of the IDL vs Python comparison, comment from the blog IDL vs. Python:

"Lately I’ve gotten increasingly frustrated with programming in IDL: [...] I find myself spending more and more time on “stupid stuff” like wrestling with the ancient and limited plotting system, building very ugly GUIs which nonetheless take vast amounts of cumbersome code to build, and dealing with namespace conflicts between routines with identical names in different libraries. Python is not perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than IDL in all of these aspects. Like I said, I’m only halfway switched (and certain collaborations are going to keep me in IDL for years, as will all my legacy code) but for new stuff Python seems like it’s got the wind behind its sails."

Interesting modules

Ipython Notebook, now called Jupyter

xlrd and xlwt

Have a look at those python tools to read and write Excel files:

Maybe have a look at this discussion group: python-excel.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Battery sizes

I needed a 23A battery for a key-fob style car opener. I wasn't sure about the number and I think I found a List of Battery sizes, with a correct description of the battery I'm looking for: 12 V, length 29mm Diameter 10mm.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Using synaptic on the eeePC

Using synaptic on the eeepc:

OK, it turns out there's an easy way to install Audacity[...]. I showed you the hard way already. Now let's take a look at the easy way.

Go ahead and open a terminal by starting the file manager (located under the Work tab) and selecting "Open Console Window" from the Tools menu.
Now type "konqueror" to bring up the KDE file manager/web browser. If you want to avoid entering your password down the line, try typing "sudo konqueror."
Select Applications
Select System
Select Synaptic Package Manager
Under Settings, select Repositories
Click add and enter "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main"
Click the Search button and enter Audacity, GIMP, or any other program you're looking for.
Click on the check box next to the program you want to install and select Mark for installation
Click Apply and you're all set.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Biologische Vielfalt ist ein Teil der agrarischen Nutzung

Zwei Tage drehte sich alles um die Biologische Vielfalt

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Check Zwiki

Check zwiki, a wiki engine based on the Zope 2 platform.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Annoying line in word

This blog post saved an annoying problem I was having in word. A line that was impossible to remove turns out to be a table border, just choose *no border* and it's removed.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Remove image tags from an html page

On my company's wiki site, there is an internal phone book . I wanted to be able to use it offline, so I saved it to my local computer. The web paged saved with a folder and attached images (normal behavior). But I wanted to remove the images.

I used Scite's replace function with regular expressions, I first removed all line breaks, then I used the simple regular expression

 <img[^>]*>

to match for all images and replace them with no text.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Installing Ubuntu server on KVM virtual machine

In the previous post, I tested the usage of Xubuntu on a virtual machine.

Today I installed Ubuntu server edition on a virtual machine. The 64 bit edition won't install on the virtual machine. By dowloading the 32 bit version , I could install a server on the virtual machine. Command:

kvm -m 750 -cdrom ../Downloads/ubuntu-9.10-server-i386.iso -boot d ubuntu-server.img

It installed fine, and I added the 2 options to install a LAMP server and a Postgreesql database.
After installation, I restarted the new system with the command:

kvm -no-acpi -m 700 ubuntu-server.img

[edit] The -no-acpi flag is to disable acpi. I used the command from a how-to done by a guy who wanted to avoid a kernel panic on an Ubuntu 7.10, but in ubuntu 9.10 acpi works well. So I can start the server with:

kvm -m 700 ubuntu-server.img

Starting Ubuntu-Server on KVM Virtual Machine

Next step would be to access the http server from outside the virtual machine. For this I probably need to set a public bridge.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Virtual Machine

I installed KVM on my Ubuntu computer.
Following this instruction, I created a raw drive image with the command:

qemu-img create xubuntu.img -f qcow2 2G

I used the option -m 750 to start the virtual machine (VM) with 750 Mb of RAM. Then I used the option -cdrom to use a file as a cdrom image and the option -boot d to say that the VM shall boot on a cdrom drive. The command:

kvm -m 750 -cdrom ../xubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso -boot d xubuntu.img

...starts the installation of Xubuntu on the virtual machine.

Screenshot of the starting page of Xubuntu on the virtual machine.

The virtual Machine runing Xubuntu

Now I'm going to install Ubuntu server and try to install a LAMP on it.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

From DOS to Windows NT

In 1981 IBM relesead the Personal Computer with Microsoft's MS DOS as operating system.CP/M-86:

When IBM contacted other companies to obtain components for the IBM PC, the as-yet unreleased CP/M-86 was its first choice for an operating system because CP/M had the most applications at the time. Negotiations between Digital Research and IBM quickly deteriorated over IBM's non-disclosure agreement and its insistence on a one-time fee rather than DRI's usual royalty licensing plan.[1] After discussions with Microsoft, IBM decided to use 86-DOS (QDOS), a CP/M-like operating system that a Seattle area computer company had made for its own hardware. Microsoft adapted 86-DOS for the PC hardware and IBM shipped it as PC-DOS.

After learning about the deal, Digital Research founder Gary Kildall threatened to sue IBM for infringing DRI's intellectual property, and IBM agreed to offer CP/M-86 on the PC to settle the claim. CP/M-86 was released a few months after the PC and was one of three operating systems a customer could buy from IBM. At $240 per copy it sold poorly compared to the $40 PC-DOS. Kildall would later accuse IBM of setting the prices to marginalize him, but the accounts of Microsoft, IBM, and other DRI executives indicate that Kildall had demanded a substantial royalty for CP/M-86 while Microsoft had accepted a fixed sum. Customers rapidly adopted the PC platform with PC-DOS as the new industry standard, and opportunities for DRI to license CP/M-86 to other customers dwindled.

Windows NT:

Microsoft decided to create a portable operating system, compatible with OS/2 and POSIX support and with multiprocessing in October 1988.[10] When development started in November 1989, Windows NT was to be known as OS/2 3.0,[11] the third version of the operating system developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM. In addition to working on three versions of OS/2, Microsoft continued parallel development of the DOS-based and less resource-demanding Windows environment. When Windows 3.0 was released in May 1990, it was eventually so successful that Microsoft decided to change the primary application programming interface for the still unreleased NT OS/2 (as it was then known) from an extended OS/2 API to an extended Windows API. This decision caused tension between Microsoft and IBM and the collaboration ultimately fell apart. IBM continued OS/2 development alone while Microsoft continued work on the newly renamed Windows NT. Though neither operating system would immediately be as popular as Microsoft's MS-DOS or Windows products, Windows NT would eventually be far more successful than OS/2.

Windows NT was intended to complement consumer versions of Windows that were based on MS-DOS. NT was the first fully 32-bit version of Windows, whereas its consumer-oriented counterparts, Windows 3.1x and Windows 9x, were 16-bit/32-bit hybrids. Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Home Server, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 are based on Windows NT, although they are not branded as Windows NT.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Linus: Software evolves over time

Linus (after having been asked about cooperation in writing software): "I never actually though about how the kind of community works at all. Until people started asking me about it later on, like journalists started - how can this ever work? - (in a very doubting way, by the way). [...] these people who asked the questions, they were not exactly convinced that it could work at all. So I kind of had to rationalise, why the Linux kind of development does work. And I don't know if this answers your question, but I actually came to my private conclusion which is that it really is all about evolution. And what you find, whether you like it or not is that [...] you don't design software, you don't even know what it is the user wants. Most cases the user himself doesn't know what he wants [...] If you designing things and you don't know what you're designing for, the design simply cannot work [...] and it turns out that this is a problem that humanity has had forever"

In this video (around 0:36:00) :

Interactive linux kernel map.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Richard Stallman comparing proprietary software companies with colonial powers

Richard Stallman speaking at a conference on development. He compares proprietary software companies to the colonial powers of the past: Another feature you might remember from the colonial system was that the colonial power would recruit a local elite, a few local people who would - like maybe the nobles or whoever, or one tribe against another or they would create tribes if they weren't tribes (so they can massacre each other decades later) - and so the local elite, they would get certain privileges and in return they would help keep everybody else down. Well you can see that today, some proprietary software companies actively recruit local elites, they set up a software development centre in your country and the people who work there are part of the local elite or they do some favour either for politicians secretly or for the government openly. But it doesn't make any difference which one, either way they're buying influence in the government, converting that governement - from a sovereign state - into their local overseer, of their empire, who's job is to make sure everybody else becomes dependent on the same non-free software. They say the schools: "we will help you by giving you these gratis copies of our non-free software, so that you can turn your students into addicts of our software. Why do I use the term addicts? Because they develop a dependency, on this software. And then after they graduate, you can be sure they're not going to be offered these gratis copies any more. Because it's only the first dose that's gratis. Once you're addicted, then you're supposed to pay. And then, also of course the companies that these graduates work for,... those companies are not going to be offered gratis copies, so what essentially these companies - these software developers - are doing is: they're recruiting the schools into agents to lead people into permanent life-long dependency. These are things that the open-source movement usually doesn't talk about, that's why I don't support open-source. Open source is a way of promoting software that usually is free, but without mentioning these ideals. These are issues of freedom, they're left in the background, open source people usually talk only about practical values, you know, how do you get powerful convenient software and how much will it cost. Well free software probably allows you to save money too if you're not being forced to pay for permission to use it, you can probably save money. But I think that's a secondary issue, even in poor countries freedom is important. We should never start saying: "Oh they're so poor, freedom for them doesn't matter. All they need is some bread and circuses". Which they had here once upon a time. and then they shouldn't even think about being free. I think freedom is important in every country, in every society, whether its rich or poor. Nonetheless, people who support open-source often contribute to extending the free software community. Many of them develop free software, those are useful contributions. I'm not saying that what they do is bad, I'm saying that by itself it is not enough. Because it's weak, you see. When you say: "the goal is to have powerful, reliable, convenient software and get it cheap", then it becomes possible for the representatives of proprietary software to say: "well we claim that we'll deliver you more powerful reliable software, we claim that our total cost of ownership will be cheaper". And I think it's usually bullshit. When Microsoft says this, it's based on distorted facts, but it's weak, but when we say the goal is to live in freedom and to be allowed to cooperate with other people in a community, they can't say they're going to offer us more of that cheaper. Because they don't offer that at all, they're not even competing with us. They're out of the running! Once you decide you want to live in freedom, they're out of the running. So we are trying to help you reach freedom, in a community, they are trying to subjugate you, but they say that they'll get you there faster! And maybe they would.

Monday, March 01, 2010

Wikibook linuxguide

Linuxguide: "The easiest way to begin using a Linux system may be to use an already running system. For example, some systems may be available in various educational or work environments. In this case you only need to contact the appropriate administrator and obtain a user ID and password. You will only be able to explore the system to a certain extent, but the first steps can be taken without having go through the installation process. Another trouble-free way of obtaining a Linux system is to buy a computer with Linux pre-installed. The number of vendors selling such systems is constantly increasing."

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Totem python console

Today I learned that you can script Totem Movie Player 2.28.2 with the python language. There is even a python console included as a plugin to Totem.

On the screenshot you can see a few commands in the console to play, pause and seek on a video or a sound file.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Linking to places in Excel

Much like you can link from a table of content in word to the corresponding title in the document, I wanted to link an Excel cell to another cell inside the document (for example to the cell A5). The problem is that if a new cell is inserted above the destination cell (changing it from A5 to A6 for example), the original link doesn't change the destination cell's number (it stays to A5).

So I decided to use the "name range" possibility. But as explained here, "If the cell or range already has a name you may type a new name in the name box and it will be accepted as a name for that cell or range as long as it is not a name that is currently used elsewhere. However, the first name given will still exist and will still be the one shown in the name box when you select the cell or range. In formulas etc. You will still be able to use both the new name and the old name. "
Here (in 2004) they proposed to use a VBA function, but that is actually not nessecary.

The solution is to use the "Name Manager" dialog box. From Excel help: "Use the Name Manager dialog box to work with all of the defined names and table names in the workbook. For example, you may want to find names with errors, confirm the value and reference of a name, view or edit descriptive comments, or determine the scope. You can also sort and filter the list of names, and easily add, change, or delete names from one location.

To open the Name Manager dialog box, on the Formula tab, in the Defined Names group, click Name Manager."

And the way I solved my problem was by using the "create from selection" dialog in the "defined names" area of the formula tab.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Setup of programs I use daily

Research Software

LyX to write articles and structured documents including citations, Check my blog post on LyX
JabRef to manage a bibliography
LaTeX to typeset publications, exported in PDF format
R statistical software and the R-Studio application

Several packages: plyr, ggplot2, FAOSTAT, testthat
Knitr and R Markdown to produce work reports in html. Knitr and LaTeX to produce more elaborate reports in PDF
xlsx to write data frames to Excel

OS

Debian GNU-Linux at work
Ubuntu and Lubuntu at home
Until 2014 windows XP and windows 7 at work

Office Software

I use Firefox (renamed iceweasel on Debian) for web browsing, with the following extensions:

Adblock to block annoying ads
Delicious bookmarks to have mobile bookmarks across many browsers
Mindthetime to keep track of time usage. This extension is not working any more.

For simple image editing I use Irfanview. I crop scanned pictures or screenshots and I redimension them for web use or use in documents. Very occasionally, I use the "sharpen" function or the brightness, contrast, gamma corrections.
I use Microsoft word and Excel at work. I use Google documents when writing something at home.
To work collaboratively I use media wiki with the extension Semantic Mediawiki
Based in this review, I installed spacesniffer it helps analyse disk space usage on windows. Like Disk space analyser on GNU-Linux systems. You can use filters such as this one: "*.jpg;>100kb;>2weeks" to filter only certain type of files, sizes and dates.

Command line tools on GNU-Linux

du to analyse disk usage. I created an alias duh for du -h.
grep to search inside text files
pdfgrep to search inside pdf documents
git see programming below

Thesis writting

Writing documents in Lyx
Keeping track of versions with git
Managing a bibliography with Jabref.

Programming software

Scite to edit code
Git to track versions of code. See also git commands and posts tagged with git.

I want to test

hubic remote for git annex
Etherpad (within a company)
Kaban (within a company)
Sage mathematics software
Panda data analysis because it brings data frame structures to python
Montage Video sur ubuntu and Ubuntu video tools

I stopped using

QuickWiki Quick search of definitions
Zotero to share search results with colleagues
Mendeley to insert citations in Microsoft Word and to manage a bibliography (can import bibtex files form Jabref)

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Singularity - the opinion of Peter Norving

Interview of Peter Norving: "Do you agree with Kurzweil's forecast regarding the singularity?"

"So Ray is great and I appreciate all that he's done, I appreciate all the advances in AI that he has done in reading, in music and so on, so he's a great technologist. I think in terms of these predictions, euh, I think he's doing the best he can by saying, I wanna nail down this prediction, I'm gonna look at the data that we have, I'm gonna extrapolate from that data and come up with an answer, euh, I think the only problem is that the data is not conclusive, right. So you look at, Moore's law, yes, you can say computers are going at this particular rate, but I don't think you can necessarily say that when we pass a certain number of transistors, that corresponds to a certain number of neurons and therefore the 2 are equivalent, I think that's where the analogy breaks down."

What are your thoughts on molecular manufacturing and Bio-Engineering?

"So it's fascinating to me, euh, I'm trying to learn something about it. I'm educating myself, I gotta long way to go. I think it does tie-in because it is a mix between the physical world and the world of information. Euh, I think it is likely that in the coming century a large part of manufacturing will be done with cells or with atoms. I kind of think it'll be more done with cells than with atoms just because they're bigger, they're easy to manipulate, they've already got this 3 Giga bite computer on board, we just gotta figure out how to program it."

Peter Norving is director of research at google.

Home server

This company is selling a home server. For what it's worth! ;-)
They are based in Anger, how bizarre! And their website is in French and German.

Microsoft's open source license

Microsoft's open source license for Non-Commercial Academic Use Only: "You may create derivative works of the Software source code and distribute the modified Software solely for non-commercial academic purposes, as provided herein.. If you distribute the Software or any derivative works of the Software, you will distribute them under the same terms and conditions as in this license, and you will not grant other rights to the Software or derivative works that are different from those provided by this MSR-LA. Your license rights to the Software (or any Microsoft intellectual property associated therewith) does not include any license, right, power or authority to subject the Software or derivative works thereof in whole or in part to the terms of any license that requires as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of software subject to such license that the software or other software combined and/or distributed with such software be (A) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (B) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (C) redistributable at no charge."
Bla bla bla. :-) You're allowed to modify it but you're not allowed to licensie it under another license that would allow the distribution in source code form or distribution at no charge.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Python, Delphi and oracle

"In Greek mythology Python, serpent, was the earth-dragon of Delphi, always represented in Greek sculpture and vase-paintings as a serpent. She^[1] presided at the Delphic oracle, which existed in the cult center for her mother, Gaia, Earth, Pytho being the place name that was substituted for the earlier Krisa.^[2] Hellenes considered the site to be the center of the earth, represented by a stone, the omphalos or navel, which Python guarded."

From the wikipedia article Python (pythology) (nice typo! :).

In computer fields
python is a programmin language and Delphi too. Oracle is a software company and you wonder where their inspiration came from.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Fibre optique jusqu'au point d'attache Free

http://ftth.free.fr/contexte_technique.html

Thursday, January 28, 2010

US department of defence advocates Open Source

US Department of Defence: "To effectively achieve its missions, the Department of Defense must develop and update its software-based capabilities faster than ever, to anticipate new threats and respond to continuously changing requirements. The use of Open Source Software (OSS) can provide advantages in this regard." (pdf on the website of David A. Wheeler)

Basic web server on a microcontroler

Web Xweb32 Lite is a web server that runs on a microcontroler ATMEGA32. With that you can visualise variables within a webbrowser. This is even smaller than any barebone computer.

A PC in the keyboard

A PC that fits in the keyboard for 99 EUR with linux: Northteck Gecko Surboard (article on Linux Devices.com)
Xcore is the manufacturer.

Géolocalisation par wifi

Le service de géolocalisation est assuré par la technologie Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS). Grâce au Wi-Fi intégré, les cartes Eye-Fi détectent les réseaux Wi-Fi environnants pendant que vous prenez des photos. Une fois que les photos ont été transférées, le service Eye-Fi leur associe des données géographiques.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Connect to a SQLite database using python

SQLite is included since python 2.5 I connected to a SQLite database created from zotero that way:

import sqlite3 as sqlite
con = sqlite.connect('zotero.sqlite')
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute('CREATE TABLE foo (o_id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, fruit VARCHAR(20), veges VARCHAR(30))')
con.commit()
cur.execute('INSERT INTO foo (o_id, fruit, veges) VALUES(NULL, "apple", "broccoli")')
con.commit()
print cur.lastrowid

cur.execute('SELECT * FROM foo')
print cur.fetchall()

Here is the output:
>pythonw -u "test_sqlite.py"
1
[(1, u'apple', u'broccoli')]
2

With help from DZone snippets and devshed. However devsched's information about downloading and building the sqlite library is outdated as it is now included in python.

Edit:
In a later post, I explain how to connect do an SQLite database with the R statistical software and a package called dplyr.

Visualise the history of python development

In this blog I found a link to this video of the history of python development from the release date in 1991 to the time when Gido Van Rossum was hired by google in dec. 2005.

First plot with python (x,y)

Showing a plot with pylab module from the python (x,y) package that I just installed on windows.

from pylab import *
test_list = [1,2,6,123,51,32]
plot(test_list)
title('Test plot of a list of numbers')
show()

Monday, January 25, 2010

Metaprogramming

Metaprogramming " is the writing of computer programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as their data."

Python at google, quotes

In February 2006 Greg Stein spoke about Python at google. I liked this quote: "Greg mentioned that to create code.google.com took about 100 lines of python code. But since it has so many dependencies, the build system generated a 3 megabyte makefile for it!" That gave me an idea of what a *glue* language means!

On the same blog there is another quote from Guido Van Rossum: "Guido uses print statements for 90% of his debugging and a debugger for the times when his brain stops working or he has to debug some wierd code that someone else wrote. "