Unexpected integer/float math behavior in Python
Thursday, November 6th, 2008 Posted in Python, Software development | No Comments »I wasted some time today tracking down a bug in one of my programs. It turned out to be "unexpected behavior" rather than a bug. I was aware of this aspect of the language, but I made an assumption and ...
Even faster collision detection in Python using Numpy
Thursday, October 16th, 2008 Posted in Python, Scientific computing, Software development | No Comments »Last night, in the shower, I realized that my collision detection routine could be even faster. Here is a representative snippet of code from my previous post: d2 = (x-self.x[0:i])*(x-self.x[0:i]) + (y-self.y[0:i])*(y-self.y[0:i]) + (z-self.z[0:i])*(z-self.z[0:i]) For some reason, I ...
Speeding up Python math with Numpy: collision detection example
Sunday, October 12th, 2008 Posted in Python, Software development | 1 Comment »Python is a very-high-level language. That makes it easy to write code quickly, but the program may not be as fast as a program compiled from a lower-level language. For this reason, many scientific programs are written in Fortran or ...
Python Pickle: Painless binary storage for Python objects
Monday, September 15th, 2008 Posted in Python, Software development | 2 Comments »The pickle module provided with Python is so useful that I'm surprised I haven't used it before. Pickle allows you to save an entire data structure (such as an object) to disk as a binary file in a effortless ...
Python threads are easy (with example)
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 Posted in Software development | 1 Comment »It's remarkably easy to spawn a Python thread. However, before doing so, I caution you that a Python thread is not the same thing as an OS thread. Python threads run within the Python interpreter, but the Python interpreter always ...
Fun with threads in Python and wxPython
Monday, August 11th, 2008 Posted in Software development | No Comments »I have finally gotten back to programming in the last couple of days. Our project has finally started to generate a lot of data, so I've been refactoring and improving my code that reads data stored in LabView binaries. Today ...
Reading Labview binary files with Python
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 Posted in Scientific computing, Software development | 4 Comments »My research group uses Labview 7.1 to write custom data acquisition (DAQ) software. I code everything else in Python, so I need to get data from Labview into Python for processing. Our DAQ program produces Labview binary files, so ...
Server move completed and general update
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 Posted in Linux, Software development, Stage Lighting | No Comments »The site is back online after a server move. Actually I can't blame the server move for the downtime, because I went out of town and then had a lot of catching up to do, and as a result I ...
Presentation at BarCamp Orlando 2008
Sunday, April 6th, 2008 Posted in Software development | No Comments »I gave a presentation at BarCamp Orlando on 5 April 2008. Here is a link to my presentation, Data Analysis with Python.
My current Gentoo Linux setup
Monday, November 12th, 2007 Posted in Software development | No Comments »This post is a reminder to myself more than it is intended for anyone else. Well, that's most of this blog. Gentoo is a great distribution of Linux, but you have to install everything yourself. This is a good ...