Tales from Dallas II

There’s a lot relevant to scientific computing. For instance a very
impressive presentation by Travis Oliphant on the state of numpy and
why everyone should abandon Numeric except for legacy code. I hope the
audio will be available on the website soon but in the mean time the
slides are here

I am considering trying to get cdat_lite working with numpy as people
here assure me the transition shouldn’t be too hard.

People from the scipy vendor Enthought are here in force. They have a
framework for interactive visualisation called Chaco which looks
great, although not really relevant for web-based development. They
havn’t tried it with basemap yet. It was also reassuring to see
everyone agrees matplotlib installation is a problem.

I think I’m going to start using IPython again after I saw a demo.
This is an interactive python shell with enhanced introspection,
system access, debugging etc. It works particularly well with
matplotlib as a visualisation environment.

The lighting talks this evening were both entertaining and
informative. What about ZjengoGears — the 7th generation
web-framework that knows how you want to design your website? More
seriously, tgwebservices looked like a pain-free way of supporting SOAP
+ WSGI (can it really be that simple?) and there was an impassioned
plea to add numpy to the standard library.

Oh and Eggs seems one of the buzzwords of the conference — lampooned
as such at times. I felt I might be preaching to the converted but the content went well. There were some embarrasing technical difficulties brought on by my S5 presentation system. I think I’ll go with the safety of ooimpress next time. The material is available here and here, although I hope to fix a few typos and get out better versions soon.