Update: this post was created from a Jupyter notebook, which you can access here.
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Passing Quals!
A few weeks ago, on January 25th 2016, I passed my qualifying exams! This means that I am now qualified to write my thesis and get my PhD. Passing quals involved a lot of reading; during January I was reading pretty much 5 papers per day:
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Deploying JupyterHub for Education
Over the last few months, I’ve been busily working on converting a class that I am a TA for from Matlab to Python. Actually, not just Python, but IPython/Jupyter notebooks! Part of this involved setting up a server that the students could log in to in order to complete their...
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How I learned to stop worrying and love PyCon
Ok, I’ll admit it. I was pretty nervous about going to PyCon. I was giving a talk, I was only going to know a couple of people there, I was going for an entire week, and it was going to be in a city where they speak a language of...
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Python Koans with the IPython Notebook
Short version: As a proof of concept, I converted the Python koan
about_strings (which you can find
here,
for Python 2, or
here,
for Python 3) into an IPython notebook. Here’s the
notebook on nbviewer.
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Installing 64-bit Panda3D for Python 2.7 on OS X
I use the Panda3D video game engine to develop experiments for my research. I needed to install a development version that included some bugfixes, but unfortunately, installing Panda3D on OSX is not the easiest task to accomplish. The development builds they provide are unfortunately only 32-bit, but I needed to...
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Rewriting Python docstrings with a metaclass
Update: I gave a talk based on this post at the November 2013 San
Francisco Python meetup! Here are the
slides
and a video of the
talk.
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On collecting data
When collecting data, how do you save it?
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Switching to Octopress
As you may be able to tell, the look of this site has drastically changed. I’ve been meaning to overhaul the theme for a while, and I decided I also wanted to try something different from Wordpress. In particular, I wanted more flexibility with embedding code, which Octopress seems to...
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Why is making a git commit so complicated?
I’ve realized that I don’t blog very often because I tend to write very long and thorough posts. In an effort to try to start blogging more, I’m going to let myself off the hook some of the time and just write about something short. Perhaps this will get me...
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Macs and Emacs
In my last post, I talked about how to set up Emacs as a Python
IDE. Since then, two things have changed:
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Emacs as a Python IDE
Update 04/08/2014: It seems like this post has been helpful for a lot of people, which really makes me happy! I just wanted to let new readers coming by know that the configuration I present in this post is out-of-date. However, I have my Emacs configuration on GitHub, and do...
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Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs
I’ve been using Emacs () as my primary text editor for several years now. It takes some getting used to – the keyboard shortcuts are completely different from what you’re probably familiar with, e.g. Ctrl-C for copy and Ctrl-V for paste. Despite the somewhat steep initial learning curve, however, I...
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Saving figures from pyplot
Well, it has been a while since I’ve posted. Over the summer I moved to beautiful Berkeley, California to start my PhD in Psychology at Cal. Moving has kept me pretty busy, but as things are starting to settle down a bit, I’ve decided to start making an effort to...
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The Demise of For Loops
I almost exclusively use Python in my research. I write 3D interactive experiments using Panda3D and I collect, analyze, and visualize my data using NumPy, SciPy, and matplotlib. While I have been using Python for almost 5 years now, I only began using Python for scientific programming when I joined...
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An Introduction to Classes and Inheritance (In Python)
If you would like a copy of the code used in this post, you can
download it here.
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In Search of the Perfect Email Solution
Wow, it’s been a long time since I blogged last. I should fix that.
Also, the site has a new theme! I hope you enjoy it. Anyway, onto
the content…
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Asking Good Questions (To Receive Great Answers)
A few months ago, I blogged about problems in the hacker world. One of the biggest issues that people ended up mentioning in comments and other discussion with me is that it is important for less-experienced people to ask intelligent questions of the more-experienced people. If they are able to...
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A Brief Update, and Why Numpy is Awesome
Wow, things are crazy. Classes and the rest of my responsibilities have hit like a tidal wave, and I finally am able to start swimming towards the surface to get some air. I’m only taking 3.5 classes this term, but I’m also working on my awesome UROP 15-20 hours a...
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Social Problems in Computer Science
This morning, I read a blog post about women in computer science which was quite compelling. It reminded me, of course, of another article about women in CS, and I began thinking about about what my own opinion is on the subject. Sexism in CS and similarly technical fields is...
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Karl Taylor Compton Prize
This year, SIPB won the Karl Taylor Compton prize, which is the
highest award that MIT bestows to students or student groups! I and
some other folks went to the awards convocation to receive it from
President Hockfield:
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SIPB's CPW
Every year, MIT holds a “campus preview weekend” (CPW) for the prefrosh to come see MIT and hopefully be enticed to come here next fall. Of course, this means that all the student groups and living groups busily scramble to throw awesome events, and hopefully recruit some of the prefrosh....
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Hackasaurus Rex
This past weekend, SIPB held a hackathon (an event where people come and work on various computer projects). SIPB, the Student Information Processing Board, is the student group at MIT in which I am most heavily involved. SIPB is essentially MIT’s computer club, and I had the honor of being...
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Rustic Change Purse
Here’s a pattern that I came up with, for a piece I’ve titled “Rustic Change Purse”. It’s a nice little change purse and is pretty sturdy. So far I’m very happy with it! I made it over Christmas break while I snowed in back home in VA because I got...
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