Here are some bits of code I've released recently:

UK mountain weather forecast aggregator

The Mountain Weather Information Service do an excellent job, providing weather forecasts for all the mountain areas in the UK - most weather forecast sites only give forecasts for inhabited areas, and the weather at sea level often differs in interesting ( Read more... )

This post is a mea culpa, an admission of failure: if any of you have read my stuff thinking that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to programming, this is your chance to recalibrate. I'm posting in the hopes that by writing this particular ultra-basic technique down in public, I'll never ever ( forget about it )

Those of you who do scientific computation may be interested in this link:

Bye Matlab, hello Python, thanks Sage.Short version: Sage is a bundle of all of the various numeric/scientific/graphing tools for Python, made easy to download and install (even if you don't have root access, apparently). According to the blogger linked above, it's now good ( Read more... )

Here's something that occurred to me the other day: consider ( duck-typed languages like Python )

Several of my fellow PhD students here have to do a substantial amount of programming as part of their PhDs: unfortunately, most of them haven't done any programming before. The usual procedure, alas, is to hand them a Fortran compiler and tell them to get on with it, often hacking on a large mass of code written by someone else who was "taught" ( Read more... )