SIEminar: "Using Python for Data Analysis", by
Jorge A Pérez Prieto, Wednesday 18 April 12:30
The use of python as the day to day language of programmers and scientists
has increased in the last years, meanly due its clear syntaxis and easy
learning curve, in addition with its huge potential, with modules for
virtually any tasks. Today python is everywhere, in system administration
(Linux can't live without it), web programming (several NASA portals are
built on python and it is one of the Google ´s main languages) and is
also a big success as a scientific data analysis tool, competing with to
well-stablished languages such as Matlab or IDL. In this SIEminar, Jorge
will show us how easy is to use python to solve day to day problems.
Beoiac cluster retiring after 620817.62 hours worked
in the last two years!
Our trusted Beoiac cluster has retired after nearly four years of hard toil.
We only have usage statistics for the last two years (9 Mar 2005 to 24 Mar
2007), but in this time he has been 'crunching' numbers for a whopping
620817.62 hours (54.18% of the total possible hours: 1145856) -- see the
detailed usage statistics at the
SIE
Forum. (Well, in truth, he is not retiring just yet, he is being merged
with new machines to form the
Chimera cluster, but don't let him know, he thinks he will be
spending his retirement years in Mallorca...)
Bewildering problems with scripts and other files?
Recently, several users have got in touch with us concerning strange
problems with IRAF, shell or supermongo scripts (and MOOG parameter files as
well). Though these files may look perfectly OK, they give odd error
messages when loaded or executed. We found out that the reason was the
presence of extra hidden characters, such as "^M", at the end of
each line, probably produced by copying or transferring the file across
different platforms, like Windows and Linux, and ultimately due to different
newline conventions (for a full explanation, read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline).
Such characters can be displayed with
cat -v,
and easily removed with the Linux command
dos2unix.
New Google tools, and other IT developments
Google never ceases to surprise. After Google Mail and Google Docs and
Spreadsheets, it has just launched two new, very interesting services:
GMail Paper, and
Google TiSP, a revolutionary, totally
free in-home wireless broadband service. And, have you ever wondered why
your computer is much slower now than when you bought it? The leakage of MHz
from the CPU is to blame, according to the article in the
Reg
Hardware e-zine. Finally, Web developers will be happy to know that,
after RubyOnRails, a new open-source web framework, called
PythonOnPlanes,
has been released.