Summary: jq rocks for speedy JSON mangling. Use it to make powerful git clean filters, e.g. when stripping out unwanted cached-data from Jupyter notebooks. You can find the documentation of git 'clean' and 'smudge' filters buried in the page on git-attributes, or see my example setup below.
Recently, I've been using Ansible to set up some new VOEvent-node deployment scripts. While I'm at it, I've also been converting a lot of messy provisioning shell-scripts (see old version, new version - work in progress). Here are my notes on why Ansible is, IMO, much nicer than plain old shell-scripts …
more ...Edit, July 2015:
A mere two weeks after I posted this, pip version 7 was released and changed things again. If you have the wheel library and pip version 7 or above, wheel building and caching is now switched on and run by default, you just need to pip install …
more ...Not much to report here directly of late - but things have been happening elsewhere. I recently uploaded most of my presentation slide decks. If anything catches your eye and you'd like to know more, feel free to contact me. I've also added some links making it easier to find my …
more ...Some personal highlights, in five minutes or less.
I spent the past couple of days attending the scientific talks at EuroSciPy 2014. Everything seemed to run smoothly, and hit about the right balance of packing a lot in without being overwhelming, so kudos to the organisers. I've summarised my personal …
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Show me the code already! (Link to online IPython Notebook.)
Recently I've been working on a project involving a bit of decision theory, which I hope to get finished up and published soon. In the process of figuring out how to calculate exactly what I need, I've also been exploring …
more ...Update 2015: This post is a bit out-of-date, now. See the more recent post on using the Wheel format to cache package builds.
After you've been coding in Python for a while, and you've been bitten by a few package-version incompatibility bugs, it gets to the stage where the first …
more ...This weekend, I finally got around to spending a little time cleaning up a single-file script I wrote to automatically process files as they are transferred into a local directory, via rsync.
The fact that I was able to do this in a short script is largely thanks to pyinotify …
more ...One of the fallbacks / features (depending on your preference) of using XFCE over the standard Ubuntu interface is that you don't get per-session ssh-agent handling (via a graphical interface) out-of-the-box, meaning you must manually fire up ssh-agent every time you login on your desktop. A minor annoyance, granted, but I …
more ...Or, everything you wanted to know about setting up Ganglia, but couldn't grok from the official documentation - part 2.
In this post I'll cover: