Category Archives: Python

Fractals in 10 minutes No. 6: Turtle Snowflake

Posted on August 31, 2009 by lorg

I didn’t write this one, but I found it’s simplicity and availability so compelling, I couldn’t just not write about it. In a reddit post from a while ago, some commenter named jfedor left the following comment: A little known … Continue reading →

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Posted in computer science, Fractals, Python | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

PyWeb-IL Presentation on Harvesting: Finding the Most Influential Artists

Posted on July 28, 2009 by lorg

Yesterday I gave a presentation on harvesting to the PyWeb-IL group. In the presentation, I described what I learned about harvesting and also gave a concrete example of how to find the “most influential artists” using data from allmusic.com and … Continue reading →

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Posted in Python | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Computing Large Determinants in Python

Posted on March 25, 2009 by lorg

Story: For my seminar work, I had to calculate the determinant of a large integer matrix. In this case, large meant n>=500. You might say that this isn’t very large and I would agree. However, it is large enough to … Continue reading →

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Posted in Algorithms, computer science, Math, Programming, Python, Research | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Easy Harvesting

Posted on March 23, 2009 by lorg

Image by existentist. I’ve been doing a lot of harvesting (aka screen-scraping) lately. Fortunately, I don’t need forms automation, so I’m using urllib2 and not Mechanize like my friend Ron Reiter recommended. At first, when I wanted to get some … Continue reading →

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You know you need to install a new Python version when…

Posted on March 11, 2009 by lorg

>>> import decimal >>> decimal.Decimal(’0.2′) <&nbsp; 0.3 False >>> This little gem took me two hours to track down. It turns out that since my code is using sqlobject, it also uses the decimal module. I had some constants set … Continue reading →

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Posted in Programming, Python | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

A Python Rant

Posted on March 2, 2009 by lorg

Last night I encountered yet again one of Python’s annoyances. The annoyance I’m referring to is the lack of string like functions for lists. Trivial examples include find() and rfind(). Before you mention index though, it’s important to point out … Continue reading →

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Posted in Programming, Python, rants | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Fractals in 10 minutes No. 5: Sierpinski Chaos Game

Posted on December 25, 2008 by lorg

A few years back, I was in some course where they also taught me some Matlab. One of the exercises was to draw the Sierpinski triangle using a method of progressing a point randomly. I was quite surprised at the … Continue reading →

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Fractals in 10 minutes No. 4: Mandelbrot and Julia in Ascii Art

Posted on December 10, 2008 by lorg

I felt like it’s about time I tackled the Mandelbrot and Julia sets, in Ascii-Art. Heck, the Mandelbrot fractal is on the logo of this Blog! However, being the most well-known fractal, this issue was tackled already, with satisfactory results. … Continue reading →

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Must Have Python Packages

Posted on December 5, 2008 by lorg

Python 2.6 and 3.0 are upon us. I helped a friend set up the new Python environment for research and development, and we thought about constructing a PythonPack: a compilation of packages every home should have lying around.

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Posted in Programming, Python | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Small Python Interactive Interface Trick

Posted on November 30, 2008 by lorg

Not too long ago, I helped someone with some research work, and one of the research tools was also used from the Python interactive prompt. The interface used was handy enough for development: intuitive, readable, short, and useful. Still, for … Continue reading →

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Posted in Programming, Python, Research, Utility Functions | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments