Moving to WordPress.org…

In a completely impulsive decision, I decided to move my WordPress.com blog over to my own domain hosted on Bluehost. It’s impulsive mostly because I have no idea what I’m doing, and am quickly becoming overwhelmed. I don’t know how the transition will go, because I’m still figuring it all out. So far, I’ve got myself space and a domain name at Bluehost – michw.com. Pretty simple. But there’s nothing at michw.com yet. I managed to export this blog to xml, and import it to Bluehost really easily (it can be found, in a sort of incomlete state, at http://www.michw.com/blog). Now I need to figure out how to get my wordpress.com posts linked over to there. So essentially, most of the content of my blog exists in two places simultaneously. I have no idea what happens when someone searches for something in that blog now. I guess they’ll get directed here…

I did find some helpful stuff on good ol’ Google — such as this document (from this website). Although it may be a bit dated. And it’s discouraging that the links on the blog in their example don’t work any more. But I am guessing that they might have stopped paying WordPress the 10 bucks a year to forward the links to their new site…

Pylint – bug and quality checker in Python

Monica just blogged about Pylint, and I thought it was really cool – it checks your code for bugs and for quality based on Python standards. More information can be found at the Python Pylint page.

SQLite configuration file

I just created a simple configuration file for SQLite. It’s in my home directory, and is called .sqliterc. It contains the following lines:

# SQLite configuration file
.echo ON  # repeat every command
.header ON  # print column names
.separator "\t"  # change default separator to tab
.nullvalue "Null" # print the word "Null" rather than having empty fields

Now, every time I start SQLite, these commands will be run.

* Thanks to Kurt, who showed me how to do this!

Getting started with SQLite

I’m just running through some basic commands from Kurt’s SQLite cheatsheet. I guess I already had some version of SQLite installed that came with the Karmic distribution, but it turns out that SQLite3 wasn’t installed. It was easy, I just did a sudo apt-get install sqlite3.

Kurt made a couple of website/tutorial suggestions in his notes:
A database overview and tutorial
Data Types
Speed and optimization

FFT Review

I haven’t done signal processing of any sort for a while now (that’s not to say I ever did very much of it) – but I occasionally find myself needing to do some filtering or frequency spectrum analysis. And as usual, I always need to look up how I did it before. I should really write myself a little cheat sheet. But since I don’t have time for that now, here’s a quick link: FFT Tutorial. It’s from someone in the EE department at the University of Rhode Island. I had a quick look and I like it because it provides some theory, and also a Matlab example (and it’s pretty clearly written using LaTeX – yeah!). And while I’m on the topic of signal processing, here’s a link to a tutorial by Richard Lyons: “Quadrature Signals, Complex but not Complicated“. I like this one because it has a movie trivia question on page 3. And I totally knew the answer without looking.

Interpolation using Scipy/Numpy

As part of a little script I’m writing, I need to do some simple linear interpolation. The Matlab equivalent of what I’m doing is called ‘interp1′. So far I’ve come across two ways to do 1-d, linear interpolation. One is ‘interp’ in numpy. The other is ‘interp1d’ in scipy.interpolate. I’m not completely sure of the difference. Is one faster? Is one older? I’ve googled around a bit, but still haven’t found a clear answer. For now, I’ve implemented ‘interp1d’, which is less similar to Matlab’s ‘interp1′. You first define an interpolated object given your x and y vectors. Then you call that object with your new x-values to generate the new y-values.

And here is an example, chopped out of my code:

depthvector1 = r_[0:nadirdepth:DepthIncrement] 
interpfun1 = interp1d(depth1,ssp1) # my x and y vectors
sspvector1 = interpfun1(depthvector1) # find the new y's for this x

GUIs – wxPython and wxGlade

I think I’m going to have to stop putting this off: it’s time to start learning about GUIs. I’ve decided to begin with wxGlade, which means that I am going to have to learn about wxPython first. I’m starting with this little tutorial for making a simple text editor.  Then there’s a wxGlade tutorial that I’d like to go through. I think if I got through these two things, I’d at least have something to build on, because at this point I don’t really know how to do anything. Well, except for maybe two TKinter commands. And no one seems to think TKinter is even worth learning…