Fernando's blog

We recently conducted a poll on Doodle, soliciting feedback on the preferred topics for the advanced track, which is meant to contain 2 days with 8 2-hour sessions focusing on one specific topic at a time. The table below shows the complete results, which I've only sorted for convenient viewing and anonymized (the raw Doodle output contains the names given by each person voting). If anyone would like the raw spreadsheet, just drop me a line. The score was computed as #yes-#no (i.e., yes=+1, neutral=0, no=-1), from a total of 30 responses, and the results are in the table below, ranked from highest to lowest score. In my personal opinion, all the topics offered would have made for very good and interesting tutorials, but the point of asking for feedback is obviously to follow it to some degree, which we will now do. I think it's worth noting --though not particularly surprising-- that the ranking roughly follows the generality of the tools: matplotlib and numpy are at th...

After the success of last year's Python minisymposium at the annual SIAM meeting, this year we had a repeat: Simula's Hans-Petter Langtangen (author of the well-known Python Scripting for Computational Science ), U. Washington's Randy LeVeque and I co-organized another minisymposium on Python for Scientific computing. At the Computational Science and Engineering 2009 meeting , held in downtown Miami March 2-6, we had again 3 sessions with 4 talks each ( part I , II and III ), with a different mix of speakers and focus than last year. While last year we spent some effort introducing the language and to a certain extent justyfing its use in real-world scientific work, we felt that this time, the growth of the many python projects out there speaks for itself and that we should instead turn our attention to actual tools and projects useful for specific work. Thus, we had no 'why python for science' talk, although obviously most speakers spent some time providing ...

Update : I've slightly modified the language of this review, which as my wife correctly pointed out to me, was unnecessarily harsh. While I stand by my previous evaluation of the book, I think the same things can be said in a more constructive tone. While this isn't strictly a SciPy post, I've already have a few questions about this book, so I guess I'll tag it as 'scipy' as well, for those interested. I recently reviewed the book Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziadé. While not aimed at a scientific audience, the book covers a number of topics that we frequently discuss on the Numpy and Scipy lists (such as documentation and testing, workflows, API decisions, etc). Since I really prefer to write longer text in reST using Emacs than in a blog editor, I've posted the review over at my static site. Feel free to head over there if you are interested in the full review , I've only reproduced here the summary:   Summary Expert Python Progra...

Update (2008.08.06): I have posted the slides I have available from the minisymposium described below. The 2008 SIAM annual meeting was held July 7-11 in San Diego, and we had a healthy presence of Python-based tools for scientific computing. Randy LeVeque from U. Washington and I co-organized a 3-part minisymposium entitled Python and Sage: Open Source Scientific Computing. You can see the list of talks for parts I , II and III online. I should add that for the talks where we had cancellations, we ended up with excellent impromptu replacements by Bill Hart from Sandia National Labs and Travis Oliphant from Enthought. Our sessions were well attended (especially considering the very large number of parallel sessions at the conference) and generated lively discussion. There's clearly a need in the scientific and mathematical community for open source , high level tools that integrate well with existing high performance codes written in Fortran, C or C++, while providin...

Well, at some point I suppose I had to get a blog... This will be mostly a way to post occasional updates on projects I'm involved with for others to pick up via aggregators. This blog is registered as part of Planet SciPy , and I'll also keep updates here on IPython , neuroimaging in Python , and we'll see what else develops. So, welcome!