2012-11-15 (1.1.1)
2011-12-08 (2.8)
Ian Ward's email:
first name at this domain
wardi on OFTC, freenode and github
After working on PyRF this past year, I was asked to help edit to a paper written by ThinkRF's Nikhil Adnani for AUTOTESTCON 2013: Wideband 20 GHz RF Digitizer and Python-based Open Application Framework for Test and Measurement.
We were fortunate enough to win the Walter E. Peterson award for Best Paper on Technology, and while I missed the show I did receive a handsome plaque and certificate for my contribution.
Having to process thousands of JSON records for the data.gc.ca project, I learned about the JSON Lines format. JSON Lines is very convenient for handling this sort of data and for setting up parallel batch processing.
This format should be more widely known, so now it has its own site:
Tags: Software
And as my sister suggested, let us all eat two pies to celebrate.
A site I've been working on for the past few months has just launched. data.gc.ca "2.0" is a completely rewritten version of the Open Data portal for the Government of Canada.
I worked on the CKAN portion of the site responsible for the data catalogue. CKAN is an open source Data Portal application written in Python. I built a fully bilingual schema with many additional fields for our datasets. I also optimized, fixed and improved many parts of CKAN itself.
Our team built templates based on the Web Experience Toolkit (WET). WET provides building blocks for creating accessible, mobile-friendly web sites. These templates include a map widget for our geospatial datasets and an interactive data table for previews of tabular data.
All of our work is available on the open-data github page and is released under a permissive license.
data.gc.ca might just be the largest, most fully bilingual and most accessible CKAN site anywhere. More to come!
I've spent a lot of time with Sphinx this past year working on updating and improving the Urwid documentation. I've found writing documentation is a really hard but also really important and rewarding part of my programming work.
update 2013-10-14: videos posted here
Notable talks: Integrating Development, Documentation and Reporting, Getting Developers and Engineers to Write the Docs, How Mozilla supports users all over the world, Typography for Docs, Write Tight(er)
At this conference I learned lots of things I'm doing wrong. Dark borders on my urwid docs detract from the most important thing: the content. I should be limiting the number of characters per line.
I liked the suggestion that a FAQ is a list of bugs. If people really are asking these questions all the time, why not fix the software?
I also learned a lot about writing in general, and had lots of fun. I couldn't get used to some people saying just "doc" (without the s) for documentation, however.
Tags: Software
This is something I've been wanting to write for a while.
Unicode page U+2800 has all the combinations of a 2x4 grid of Braille dots. Braille dots that line up neatly with the ones on all sides in most fonts. We can paint with this!
This is the second part of the talk I gave January 24, 2013 at the Ottawa Python Authors Group.
Part One introduces Python iterables and iterators and generators. This part covers the advanced use of generators while building an interactive two-player network game.
Tags: Ottawa Software Python OPAG
This is part one of a talk I gave January 24, 2013 at the Ottawa Python Authors Group
Part Two is now also available.
Both parts of this presentation are also available as a single IPython Notebook which you can download and run locally, or view with nbviewer.ipython.org. The complete source is available at https://github.com/wardi/iterables-iterators-generators
Tags: Ottawa Software Python OPAG
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