Thank You, Enthought

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are pleased to announce that Enthought has generously given us a grant to support some of the travel costs associated with our bootcamps. Along with hosting an earlier version of our material for several years and preparing a rock-solid Python distribution for scientific computing, this is one more good deed we'd like to thank them for.

Enthought, Inc is delighted to provide funding to Software Carpentry to support educating scientists in basic computing skills. Enthought was founded with a mission to improve the way scientific computing is accomplished, which we do through our support of open source initiatives, applications we build for customers, and through a goal we share with Software Carpentry: teaching scientists computing skills that improve their productivity and advances their contributions to science.

But I Was Gone Less than 48 Hours!

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I left Toronto for Austin mid-day Wednesday, and got back at midnight last night. Lots happened in the interim, so here's a linkandthoughtdump (which I bet actually is one word in German):

Gave a talk about Beautiful Code to the Austin Python Users' Group Wednesday at Enthought's swanky offices. (They're the kind folks who provide web hosting for the Software Carpentry course.) About 27 people in attendance, and good discussion afterward; was grateful to Travis Vaught and Sergey Fomel for rides from the airport and to the hotel respectively.
Gave another talk titled "HPC Considered Harmful" at the Texas Advanced Computing Center's Second Annual Scientific Software Days. I was a bit nervous about telling people at a supercomputing center that focusing on massive parallelism and peak performance is wrongheaded, but there were a lot of nodding heads.
I made lots of notes from two other talks that I want to follow up on at some point:
- Robert van de Geijn's FLAME system lets you draw matrix operations, then automatically generates the corresponding high-performance code. It's a great example of a real high-level programming tool for scientists (and yet another special case of what a real extensible programming system would support).
- Eric Jones (also from Enthought) talked about a tool they're building that watches changes to variables in Python programs, and automatically generates interactive plots of their values. It sounds simpler and less impressive than it actually is; I've asked him to put together a screencast, and I think you'll be wowed—I was. (Later: Steve Eddings from The Mathworks sent me a link about data linking in MATLAB, complete with a video tutorial.)
At roughly the same time, half a world away, Diomidis Spinellis presented a study comparing the code quality of Linux, Windows, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD. Very cool work; wish I'd been at ICSE'08 to ask questions.
Meanwhile, Dmitri Vassiliev, who is continuing his work on SlashID this summer, has discovered that generated code is next-to-impossible to debug. Not to be a one-note symphony or anything, but I said in that same article about extensible programming systems that the real challenge is not extending notation, but creating extensible debugging tools so that those notations and high-level representations can be fixed when they break. Robert van de Geijn doesn't think FLAME needs a debugger; respectfully, I disagree.
Science in the Open has a plea to scientists to make their raw data available, motivated by yet another irreproducible result.
Kosta Zabashta has posted early thoughts about integrating IRC into DrProject. (Gray on black? Kosta...your design skills rival mine...) I need to tell him that DrProject's RPC module doesn't handle tickets because Jeff Balogh is going to replace the entire ticketing system with an extensible one this summer, using his Dojo Form Editor as a front end...
Elisabeth Hendrickson has thoughts on automating tests for legacy web applications. Students, take note.
Thanks to Nick Jamil and others, we have instructions for installing DrProject on Windows. Yay!
Everything old is new again, including Ada and the Bletchley Park Colossus.

And then there's this:

Enthought on The Carpentries

Thank You, Enthought

But I Was Gone Less than 48 Hours!