Interrelativity

Category: Programming

  • Notes from #PyData Seattle 2015

    I was among 900 attendees at the recent PyData Seattle 2015 conference, an event focused on the use of Python in data management, analysis and machine learning. Nearly all of the tutorials & talks I attended last weekend were very interesting and informative, and several were positively inspiring. I haven't been as excited to experiment with…

  • Motivating and Visualizing Recursion in Python: Three Flavors

    Yesterday, I encountered some great instructional posts on programming, Python and the IPython Notebook. How to more effectively teach the concept of recursion (by Gustavo Duarte) How to use the web-based PythonTutor to learn Python (by Philip Guo) How to embed an IPython Notebook inside a blog post (by Brian Granger) I thought it would…

  • Python for Data Science: A Rapid On-Ramp Primer

    In my last post, I was waxing poetic about an IPython Notebook demonstration that was one of my highlights from Strata 2014: "this one got me the most excited about getting home (or back to work) to practice what I learned" Well, I got back to work, and learned how to create an IPython Notebook. Specifically, I…

  • Using pydelicious to fix Delicious tags with unintended blank spaces

    I've been using the Delicious social bookmarking web service for many years as a way to archive links to interesting web pages and associate tags to personally categorize – and later search for – their content [my tags can be found under the username gump.tion, a riff on the original Delicious URL, del.icio.us]. In December…

  • Valuable Advice on Preparing for Technical Interviews … and Careers

    The cover of Gayle Laakmann McDowell’s book, Cracking the Coding Interview, and links to her Career Cup web site and Technology Woman blog are included in the slides I use on the first day of every senior (400-level) computer science course I have taught over the last two years. These are some of the most…

  • How to approximate BorderLayout with GridBagLayout or BoxLayout

    I recently encountered some challenges using Java 6 Swing and AWT components to develop a GUI with a top-level BorderLayout, which did not prevent the shrinking of components in its CENTER area in response to an expanding JList in its WEST area. I provided more context about this problem (and its solution) in my last post,…

  • How to Prevent a JList in a JScrollPane on a JPanel from Resizing

    I've been working on a graphical user interface to enable a user to view, modify and add relevance judgments for a set of results returned by a search engine in response to a set of topics. The GUI was developed as part of some work I've been doing on the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) 2012…

  • def main() in Python considered harmful

    I recently graded the first Python programming assignments in the course I'm teaching on Social and Computational Intelligence in the Computing and Software Systems program at University of Washington Bothell. Most of the students are learning Python as a second (or third) language, approaching it from the perspective of C++ and Java programming, the languages…