stay focused

the woods are lovely, dark and deep. but i have promises to keep, and lines to code before i sleep, and lines to code before i sleep. ginac

global temperatures

interesting article from technology review with a plot from jim hansen, a global warming honcho at nasa. shows co2, temperatures, and ocean levels for the last 400000 years.

ultrasonic transducers for nondestructive testing

by silk, 1984. many of the analytical approximate models seem dated, but the practical info on pzt transducers is probably still relevant.

introduction to inverse problems in imaging

by bertero and boccacci, this book is cited by many imaging papers and gives pretty good depth and breadth. the math gets right up to the point that i can't understand it anymore. might be worth having on the shelf.

an introduction to high frequency finance

nice 2001 book by dacorogna et al. shows a lot of the practical details that are very glossed over in academic papers and quickie whitepapers. some practical experience-type stuff, too. not sure if i ever really read past chapter 3, but skimming the rest shows some cool stuff.

picloud and mrjob

picloud has gone a step further in making cloud computing effortless. just install and import their module and give it a function call to execute. give it several calls in a row for embarrassingly easy, embarrassingly parallel computing. the price is right, too, at 7-9 cents/hour + 10 cents per gb of bandwidth. i figure that burns up the cost of buying a machine for one year of solid run time. no maintenance costs/time and even the hassle of dealing with amazon's cloud (setting up the server, scheduling 1 hour blocks). apparently there is a test server to try code locally before running it on their machines, so maybe i'll try it out. only question i have is whether or not they will allow anything other than pure python; ie, cython, scipy.weave, etc. mrjob looks like a similar system. worth a look.

pymite

pymite is a project focused on compiling python-like code for the atmel line of avr microcontrollers. has some nice features, like the compactness (64kb code, 4 kb ram) and easy c/asm extension. still waiting for class, generator, and exception support and it looks like there's been no activity on the website for several months. i hope they keep going with it.

project has now morphed into python-on-a-chip. sounds like a southeast asian fast-food stand. i think the class, generator, etc. has been added and it's even more compact.