open data & open source
April 4, 2014
What does bar.foo do? - An exploration of Python assignment, objects, attributes and descriptors
This is a talk I gave March 27, 2014 at the Ottawa Python Authors Group meetup.
Follow along with the IPython notebook version if you would like to play with the code examples.
October 4, 2013
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.
This paper won the Walter E. Peterson award for Best Paper on Technology.
June 18, 2013
A site I’ve been working on for the past few months has just launched. data.gc.ca “2.0” (update: now open.canada.ca) 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!
March 14, 2013
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!
October 20, 2007
Announcing XTerm Colour Chart 2.0 “Old and busted: Colour Cubes. New hotness: Colour Cows” release.
The script has been completely rewritten. It now requires python 2.3 or later for the optparse command-line parsing module.
Many new features have been added to this version: