What happens to a talk deferred...

2013 06 17 technology
python talk

I'll be in Austin, TX for SciPy next week, and I'll be giving an updated talk about tools for reproducible research.

What follows is the abstract of a talk that I really wanted to give and submitted to the general track which did not get in. I care deeply about this topic, and I'm hoping to have conversations with others about it. The talk was deferred to a poster, so if you don't bump into me at other times, seek me out during the poster session (mine's poster #15, 10:35 AM - 11:35 AM on June 27th). This post is intended as a pre-conference warm up to that.

Navigating the Scientific Python Communities - the missing guide.

The awful truth: our newcomers have a deluge of options to wade through as they begin their journey. What tools are available, how do I install them, how do I make them work together -- all hard questions facing a budding scipythonista.

On developer-friendly platforms, the popular approach is to just install numpy, scipy, matplotlib, and ipython using package management facilities provided by the operating system. On Mac OS X and Windows, the least painful, bootstrapping approach is to use a Python distribution like Python(X,Y), EPD, Anaconda, or Sage.

Both of these paths obscure a reality which must be stated explicitly: the development of packages is fundamentally decentralized. The scientific python ecosystem consists of a loose but thriving confederation of projects and communities.

The chaos of installation options and lack of centralization around a canonical solution, which on the surface appears to be a point of weakness that is detrimental to community growth, is a symptom of one of its greatest strengths. Namely, what we have is a direct democracy for user-developers. They vote with their feet: filing bug reports, testing pre-release versions, participating in mailing lists, writing and reviewing pull requests, and advertising the tools they use in talks, papers, and conversations at conferences.

I will discuss why this is the case, why this is a good thing, and how we can embrace it. The talk will present the ethos and expectations of an effective newcomer, as well as resources and strategies for incremental progress toward becoming a master scipythonista.
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tags-vs-categories in Pelican
2013 05 24 technology
pelican python

So, following up on my transition to pelican, here's a little help for navigating a pelican site. If you've ever wondered why sometimes there's a highlighted menu item at the top, and other times there isn't, read on.

Categories

With Pelican, every post belongs to exactly one category - that category is 'misc' if one is not provided (and you can override that named by setting DEFAULT_CATEGORY = 'somethingelse' in your pelicanconf.py file). Alternatively, if the post is in a subdirectory, it's category becomes the subdirectory name. So if you have a situation like this:
```
.../content/unicorns/lady-rainicorn.md
```
The lady-rainicorn post will be filed under the category of unicorns. You can explicitly override this category-from-subdirectory behavior, by specifying the category in the header of the file, like so:
```
title: All about Lady Rainicorn
slug: lady-rainicorn
category: adventure-time
```
Categories are where a lot of the pelican themes get the top navigation bar, which is referred to as the menu in Pelican. You'll notice that this post is filed under technology. If you're viewing this on the main page, that won't be highlighted, but if you click on the title of this post, you'll see that technology will become highlighted. Same deal if you just click on technology, which will get you a listing of the latest post in that category, and a pagination of all previous ones.

Pages

The menu items need not be limited to categories, however. With the popular notmyidea template (which is what I've customized for my journal here), if you create any pages (by putting the file in a content/pages/ directory), then the title of that page will appear in front of all of the categories in the menu. These pages don't show up in RSS feeds, though.

Menuitems

Additionally, you can specify other MENUITEMS in pelicanconf.py, which will go in front of all pages and categories. MENUITEMS is a list of tuples, each tuple should be composed of a link name, and a url. This is how I link to the listing of all of my blog posts:
```
MENUITEMS = [('all', '/blog/archives.html')]
```
Tags

Finally, you can have zero or more tags attached to a post. Tags, by default, do not get a feed generated for them. To enable a tag feed, you'll have to set a line like this in your pelicanconf.py files:
```
TAG_FEED_ATOM = "feeds/tag_%s.atom.xml"
```
Menu highlighting

The notmyidea template only contains logic for highlighting the active category. This is why, if you click on 'All' at the top of mine, it doesn't stay highlighted when you're on that page.

On the other hand, if you click at cycling at the menu bar, it will stay highlighted, and you will see a listing of the articles in that category. But if you click on the cycling tag in one of those posts - the menu item will not be highlighted, and you will see some more articles - in particular, right now my review of Just Ride will also be listed, but it lives in the category of books, because that's where I'm keeping book reviews.

Summary

So there you have it - now you know the differences between categories, tags, pages, and menu items, as far as Pelican is concerned. For me, the bottom line is that I'll probably stick to just using categories, and will try to use tags sparingly. In my transition from WordPress, I cleaned up and removed a whole bunch of tags (since they were either redundant (the same tags kept appearing together), or were too specific (most tags were only used for one post).
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embracing my hypertextuality
2013 05 24 technology
hello-world pelican python

Well, it's happened again, I've jumped (back) on the static blog engine bandwagon. Early versions of my site were generated literally using #define ,#include, gcc, and a Makefile...). Back then I was transitioning away from using livejournal, and decided to use WordPress so I wouldn't have to roll my own RSS feed generator.

I tolerated WP for a while - and the frequency of my posts was so low, that it wasn't much of an issue.

Except for the security upgrades. I logged into the wp-admin console way more times than I cared to just to press the little "upgrade" box. The reason is that wordpress keeps everything in a database that gets queried every time someone hits the site. I was never comfortable with the fact, because content can be lost in case of database corruption during either an upgrade or a security breech. Also, my content just isn't that dynamic. The WP-cache stuff just seemed overkill, since I don't get that many visitors.

But lately, I've found myself wanting to write more, to post more, but also shying away from it because I hate dealing with the WordPress editor. And I also hate being uncertain about whether any of it will survive the next upgrade, or the next security hole, whichever I happen to stub my toe on first.

And the thing is, I really like to use version control for everything I do. I liked my blog posts to be just text files I can check into version control. I also like typing "make" to generate the blog, and now I get to!

For added fun, I'm hoping that writing my posts in markdown will make it easier to coordinate my gopher presence, since it's pretty close.

For posterity, I'm capturing what the first version of my Pelican-based blog looked like. I did the same thing when I moved to WordPress.

I ran into some confusing things about transitioning to Pelican, so I thought I'd note them here, for the benefit of others.
Unadulturated code blocks

I like to use indentation as a proxy for the venerable <tt> tag - which uses a monospace font.

If you just want to use an indentation, but do not want the indented text parsed as a programming language, put a :::text at the top of that block. Here's what I mean. Take this Oscar Wilde quote, where I've inserted a line break for drammatic effect, for example:
```
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings
unintentionally.
```
Now, you see that ugly red box around the apostrophe? Well, That's because all I did was indent the two lines. If I just put a :::text above the quote, indented to the same level,
```
 :::text
 A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings
 unintentionally.
```
the result will render like this.
```
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings
unintentionally.
```
As the pelican documentation specifies, this is also the way you can also specify the specific programming language you want, so :::python would be one way to not make pygments guess. You can get a list of all supported languages here, just use one of the short names for your language of choice.

And you should really do this, even if you aren't bothered by the red marks, because the code highlighting plugin goes in and tokenizes all of those words and surrounds them in  tags. Here's the HTML generated for the first version:
```
<div class="codehilite"><pre>A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone&#39;s feelings
unintentionally.
</pre></div>
```
and here's the version generated when you add the :::text line at the top:
```
<div class="codehilite"><pre>A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone&#39;s feelings
unintentionally.
</pre></div>
```
nikola?

At some point, having a dialogue with myself, I wrote in here "or should I not use pelican and use nicola instead?"

Ok, tried it - nikola takes too long to startup -
```
nikola --help
real 0m1.202s
user 0m0.876s
sys 0m0.300s

pelican --help
real 0m0.639s
user 0m0.496s
sys 0m0.132s
```
I'm sure it's a fine static blogging engine - and Damian Avila's already written IPython Notebook converters for it, but it just feels like it tries to do too many things. Constraints are good. I'll stick with Pelican for now. (Though I did use the nikola wordpress import tool to grab the wp-upload images from my WordPress blog)

another set of instructions I consulted: Kevin Deldycke's WordPress to Pelican, which is how I did get my articles out using exitwp which I patched slightly, so files got saved as .md, and preserve other format properties.

Redirects

also known as: not breaking the web

I wanted to preserve rss feeds, and also not break old WordPress style /YYYY/MM/DD urls - the Nikola wp-import script had created a url remapping scheme in a file called url_map.csv.

I don't have that many posts, so I just added them in by hand:
```
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RedirectMatch 301 /blog/feed/ /blog/feeds/all.atom.xml
RedirectMatch 301 /blog/2006/10/18/todd-chritien-greens-choice-voting/ /blog/todd-chritien-greens-choice-voting.html
RedirectMatch 301 /blog/2007/01/04/changelogs-with-dates-gui-goodness/ /blog/changelogs-with-dates-gui-goodness.html
...
```
Enabling table of contents for posts

If you want to include a table of contents within a post using [TOC], you must enabled the markdown toc processor with a line like this is your pelicanconf.py:
```
MD_EXTENSIONS = [ 'toc', 'codehilite','extra']
```
Categories and tags

Ok, so this was never clear to me in wordpress, either - but what's the difference between a tag and a category? is it the case that a post can only belong to one category, whereas it can have any number of tags?

I think I used categories as tags on wordpress. Looks like all posts on Pelican can have at most one category. Turns out this little aside was long enough to turn into its own post, so if you're interested, pelican tags-vs-categories has got you covered.

That's it for now

Thanks to Preston Holmes (@ptone) for encouraging me to transition away from WordPress, and pointing me to this post by Gabe Weatherhead (@MacDrifter) for how to do that. It should be said that the pelican documentation itself is very good for getting you going. Additionally, I consulted this post by Steve George which has a good description to get you started, and also covers a bunch of little gotchas, and lots of pointers. Also, thanks to Jake Vanderplas (@jakevdp) for his writeup on transitioning to Pelican, which I will consult later for incorporating IPython notebooks into my markdown posts, in the future. This is good enough for now. LTS.
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remembering John Hunter (1968-2012)

2012 09 03 technology

John Hunter, the author of matplotlib, passed away on August 28th, 2012. He will be dearly missed.

Please donate to the John Hunter Memorial Fund. A giant in our community, John lead by example and gave us all so much. This is one small way we can give back to his family.

what follows are excerpts from my paper journal over the past week:

John Hunter passed away this morning,
Oh my god. John Hunter was incredibly
kind and warm -- I can't believe he bought
me this laptop. I can't believe that such
a wonderful man could be dead -- so suddenly.

    What a tremendous loss.

Dear Merlin,
    John Hunter died yesterday --
getting unstuck. It is entirely appropriate
to be stuck -- to feel it, smell it, taste it
feel it drilling though your head

I keep pacing around the house.
I just need to leave.
    calmly.
My thoughts are with John's
family. & with the folks in Louisiana.

    A rat in a maze --
panicked -- & the water
level rises still. escalates.

    Our loss of John makes me
want to code furiously.

I feel the urge to code furiously,
but only have the capacity to tweet about
it, and lack thereof to censor myself.

I don't believe I'm losing
my mind. I believe I never had
one to begin with.
  I'm not losing my mind. I never
  had one to begin with.
  I'm not losing my mind.
  That would imply I had one
  to begin with.
Left the house without shoes --
waiting for my laptop to charge.

  I want to share this with the
  group -- so I can come to
terms with it myself. forgive myself.

  Connection with a stranger -- can be a form of escape.
but it can help you gain perspective on
your own life. I think it has for
me.
  I am a severely broken
person. Ok. Time to get shoes,
shower, & then go to try &
talk w/ Greg Wilson.

I must be mistaken. Maybe I was.
Who's to say that I wasn't.

The scientific python community lost one
of it's giants this week, and
I lost an important mentor.

Remembering John Hunter (JDH)

    People keep dying. I don't know
how to deal with that -- I feel like
I never really processed dedushka's death --
nor Ken Green's, nor Jessi Debaca's,
nor babushka's

... I lost another mentor. Most of
these people (all?) don't know that they
were mentors to me -- but they were.
I looked up to John -- I secretly
wanted to please him -- but did not
even dare to do so directly (I
have Fernando Perez to thank for getting
my first contribution into Matplotlib.

I remember feeling really bad after my first
sprints at SciPy 2009 -- John actually
knew who I was -- and wanted me
to work on some matplotlib stuff --
  I ended up doing some rote work with
David Warde Farley (and felt kind
of like a third wheel - since dwf
(pronounced "dwoof" - did I get
that right, David?) is more than
capable as a command-line
cowboy (David doesn't know this --
but I learned a great deal from
just sitting next to him and watching
him string together standard unix
tools, pipe-after-pipe -- to clean
up some scipy wiki content, to
try and export it to a new site.
David's also a role model in other ways --
he's very calm and collected (unless
he senses you've pushed the bozo button from
some punditry vending machine - instead of
understanding and engaging with the full complexity of some
social or political issue)

    John was extremely kind and understanding -- 
he wanted to invite & welcome me to
code alongside other matplotlib developers,
but there was no expectation.

  I got to hang out with John the 
most at the PyData conference in
Mountain View in late February. He was
giving a matplotlib talk, and was seeking
feedback on what to talk about --
& how to do it. He's warm -- and always
had this kind smile about him.

    After hanging out with John at PyData --
this email arrived in my inbox

Fernnado knew about the email -- & I was at
a barbecue at his house -- to sort of
celebrate an awesome week of lots of
Python Giants in from out of town.
  Fernando was giddy -- "Have
you checked your email?" -- with a
twinkle in his eye "Let's go have you
check your email right now" -- & he
walked over to turn on his desktop machine.

    On the mailing lists -- I always tried to
emulate John's approach -- helping everyone
even if in the slightest manner.

I was offered commit rights sort
of out of the blue -- after sending
a couple of pull requests.

    We are a community.
We need to remember John, & keep
remembering John -- for many, many,
many years to come.

I feel the urge to reach
out to everyone I know & don't know.
I'm desperate -- i think I've been that
way since I was a little kid -- I
remember having the same feelings when
we were leaving Moscow -- a ten-year old,
talking to friends and my teachers,
many for the very last time.

I am posting this, but it isn't finished.

This is broken, half-finished, confused,
necessarily so -- because there is no way
to mend what we have lost. This
is an expression of my current state --
and if I don't let this out, it will just
keep ricocheting around in my head for years
to come.

    This is a first pass. This is me
grieving. This will never be enough. This
is just a start.

videos of John Hunter's talks:

matplotlib: Lessons from middle age. (Scipy 2012)

Advanced Matplotlib Tutorial (PyData)

SciPy 2009 - Advanced tutorial 3: Advanced topics in matplotlib

(beginning) SampleDoc

Scipy '09 Panel on Visualization tools

Scipy '02 Core Projects update

NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning Open Source Software (MLOSS)

Fernando Perez and John Hunter

Sept 2009: "some fun stories like 'Jeez, you guys have some crazy examples. I am surprised there isn't dolphins swimming around inside a sphere.' So now there is."

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pheriday 2: termcasting overview
2012 08 05 technology
python pheriday science

pheriday 2: termcasting overview (2012-08-03) from Paul Ivanov on Vimeo.

paul's habitual errant ramblings (on Fr)idays (2012-08-03)

show notes:
http://pirsquared.org/blog/2012/08/04/termcasting/
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/ivanov/pheridays/2012-08-03 (yes, gopher!)
1. try to not say "uuuuhhhhmmnn"
BAM/PFA Summer Cinema on Center Street http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/summercinema
1. SciPy 2012 videos up, go check them out! (I have!) http://www.youtube.com/nextdayvideo (removed nextdayvideo internal box url, by request)
Software Carpentry: Record and Playback post http://software-carpentry.org/2012/07/record-and-playback/
1. termcasting: a review of what's out there.
http://termcast.org and http://alt.org/nethack/ mostly nethack stuff, both just use telnet protocol, only live sessions (though there are "TV" scripts to re-run sets of ttyrec files).

(playterm vs ascii.io vs shelr.tv)

tldr: playterm.org supports ttyrec files, but has the most primitive player. Players on ascii.io and shelr.tv can both seek. shelr.tv can also speed up playback! Downside is both of those have their own recorder programs (though at least shelr leverages script or ttyrec)

http://playterm.org/ - supports ttyrec files, outgoing links for author and related article, comments. - most primitive player (https://github.com/encryptio/jsttyplay/) - Pause only - only terminal sized of 80x24 or 120x35 - supports tags and comments - service only (code for playterm.org does not seem to be available, though jsttyplay is doing the hardest part of actual playback)

http://ascii.io/ - supports non-standard terminal size - player can seek. - aesthetic thumbnail previews - login via github or twitter credentials (for uploads) - code for website available (ruby and javascript) https://github.com/sickill/ascii.io - code for recorder available (python) https://github.com/sickill/ascii.io-cli

http://shelr.tv/ - supports non-standard terminal size - player can seek. - player playback speed can be increased (currently up to 10x of real time) - supports tags, comments and voting up/down on a video - shelr can playback from command line ("shelr play http://shelr.tv/records/4f8f30389660802671000012.json") - code for website available (ruby and javascript) [AGPLv3] https://github.com/shelr/shelr.tv - code for recorder available (ruby) [GPLv3] https://github.com/shelr/shelr
1. my wanted list for termcasting
2. should support ttyrec files (upload and download)
3. live-streaming (like ustream - but for coding)
4. termcast.org has ttrtail which does just this
5. quick "encrypt" switch - to keep streaming, but start GPG encrypting the stream as it goes out - so you can still look at it later. This would make it easy to leave the streaming on all the time
6. a .tty editor that's like a video editor cut out portions [i.e. dead time]
This is a low-bandwidth way of capturing what I'm working on and thinking about. Now, I'm going to try to record everything I do! "ttyrec -e screen -x". I've only done it a couple of times so far while coding, but I find being able to go back and re-view (and review) what I worked on at the end of the day to be really helpful.

I was inspired by Joey Hess' "git-annex coding in haskell" where he reviews and narrates some of the code he wrote, after he wrote it. http://joeyh.name/screencasts/git-annex_coding_in_haskell/

P.S. It's Saturday now. I tried to save some local diskspace by running recordmydesktop using the --on-the-fly-encoding option, and that was a mistake. The audio and video were (un)hilariously desynchronized - the audio ran for 9:48, but the video wanted to be just 7:30. Audacity came to the rescue by allowing me to change the tempo to be 30% faster, which made the syncing better. And then I used avconv to stitch in the faster audio.

tools used: Debian GNU/Linux sid, recordmydesktop, xmonad, fbpanel, screen, chromium, cheese, xcompmgr, audacity, avconv
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pheriday 1: software carpentry, digital artifacts, visiting other OSes
2012 07 27 technology
gopher python science pheriday

Here's pheriday 1, another edition of paul's habitual errant ramblings (on Fr)idays

pheriday 1: software carpentry, digital artifacts, visiting other OSes (2012-07-27) from Paul Ivanov on Vimeo.

2012-07-27.mp4 (28 MB) 2012-07-27.avi (71 MB) 2012-07-27.ogv (321 MB)

show notes

I had three topics I wanted to cover today, and ended up spending about an hour thinking about what I was going to say and which resources I was going to include. This was too long, and the end result was still very rambling, but I think I'll get better at this with more practice.

SDF Public Access UNIX System http://sdf.org gopher://sdf.org/1
1. try to not say "uuuuhhhhmmnn"
2. be lazy (software carpentry)
3. flipside of "publisher's block" (git-annex)
4. visiting another country (windows 8 release preview)
As usual, I didn't know what I was really trying to say in 0, and here's a really good overview of what I meant: Software Carpentry

If you have 90 seconds, watch the pitch

play it in 60 seconds, instead: mplayer -af scaletempo -speed 1.5 Software_Carpentry_in_90_Seconds-AHt3mgViyCs.flv
1. publisher's block
Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget What I mention in the video is not at all the main point of Lanier's book (which is quite good!), and in fact, his book is a critique of (over) digitization. Nevertheless, I'm only pointing out that there are redeemable aspects of an increasingly digital artifact producing life, such as preservation.

David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous

My review of David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, where I go into more depth about "information overload".

git-annex Excellent project. The technical details is that when you "annex" files, they are renamed to long hash of their contents (bit rot resistant!) and stored in a .git/annex/objects directory, whereas in place of where the file was, you get a symlink to the original file, which gets added to git. So git only keeps track of symlinks, and additionally has a git-annex branch that keeps track of all known annexes, so that you can copy, move, and drop files from the ones that are accessible. Very handy!

Haiku OS

tools used: Debian GNU/Linux sid, recordmydesktop, xmonad, fbpanel, screen, iceweasel, cheese, xcompmgr, youtube-dl, mplayer, screen

gopher version of this post (proxy)
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pheriday 0: scientist-hacker howto (video post)
2012 07 20 technology
gopher hello-world python science pheriday

Hey everyone, here's pheriday 0, the first of paul's habitual errant ramblings (on Fr)idays

pheriday 0: scientist-hacker howto (2012-07-20) from Paul Ivanov on Vimeo.

Berkeley Kite Festival (510 Families)

Merlin Mann's Most Days (specifically the travel day one on 2009-01-11)

Sad that I missed SciPy Conference this year. One of the things I like doing at scipy is nerding it up with my friends, seeing each others workflows, showing off vim tricks, etc. This video was my attempt at scratching that itch, a little bit. As I mention in the video, this is take 2. Take 1 ended when I ran out disk space, but needless to say, it was more awesome than this. It seems I am cursed with losing first takes, see also a summary of last year's SciPy conference, where this exact same thing happened.

NumFOCUS: NumPy Foundation for Open Code for Usable Science

NumFOCUS Google Group see thread titled: "[Funding] Notes from Funding BOF at SciPy2012"

TLDP: The Linux Documentation Project (page I was scrolling through)

Transition to Gopher was rough this time, it was better during the first take.

Lorance Stinson's w3m (better) gopher support Use this if, for example, going to w3m gopher://sdf.org you get errors like:
```
[unsupported] '/1' doesn't exist! [unsupported] This resource cannot be located.
```
It still took some tweaking, shoot me an email for details

Robert Bigelow's About | Gopher & GopherSpace

Here's the HTTP Proxied version of the above: Gopher proxy provided by Floodgap

SDF Public Access UNIX System http://sdf.org gopher://sdf.org/1

Eric S. Raymond's How To Become a Hacker Howto

Fernando Perez' Py4Science Starter Kit

Q: Why are you using "Chromium --incognito"? I have chronic tabitis, and this is one way of mitigating that problem. If the browser crashes or I shutdown my computer, I won't have those tabs around anymore.

programs used: Debian GNU/Linux sid, recordmydesktop, xmonad, fbpanel, screen, chromium, cheese, xcompmgr, mutt, wyrd, tail, w3m

gopher version of this post (proxy)
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Ada Lovelace Day: remembering Shirley Theis and Evelyn Silvia

2011 10 07 technology
mathematics python teaching people

In case you didn't know it - today is Ada Lovelace Day!

Now, as any self-respecting Computer Science degree-wielding person should, I, too, think it's important to celebrate the day named after the world's very first programmer.

For me, the first math teacher I remember making a big difference was Shirley Theis - who taught me Algebra in 8th grade at McKinley Middle School in Redwood City, CA. Mrs Theis, an energetic dynamo in her mid fifties, was a deeply motivated and caring teacher, who expected a lot out of her students, but never in a disciplinary manner. She was full of enthusiasm, which projected out and infected even the most timid or disaffected student: in her class, you couldn't be just a sack of potatoes planted in your seat.

She often lead class in a nearly theatrical manner - pacing back and forth, egging students on by eagerly repeating their partial responses, getting exponentially more excited if the student was on the right track, barely containing herself from jumping up and down in anticipation of that lightbulb going off -- and yet just as quickly waning in her enthusiasm,becoming a personified caricature of hopelessness and despair to let you know the instant a response was starting to go astray.

It may have been the only math class I've ever taken where there were group assignments - we would work with a partner or a few classmates in trying to figure out an assignment, first trying it solo, and then putting our heads together to figure out why our answers disagree and which is the right one. I believe it was Mrs. Theis who succinctly captured a value I hold in high regard: "it's not about how far you go - it's about how many people you bring with you."

There was one other mathematics teacher I had in my life who clearly stands out: it was Professor Evelyn Silvia who had a comparable level of enthusiasm and energy, and from whom I had the pleasure of taking the first upper-division math course (Math 108 - Intro to Abstract Math) during my second quarter at UC Davis. Dr. Silvia was the real deal - she cared, gesticulated, encouraged us to question why something was true, and had an approach which demanded we each take ownership of our education. The book for the course, Introduction to Abstract Mathematics: A Working Excursion by D.O. Cutler and E.M. Silvia was a blue workbook - each of us had our own copy, and there were blanks left out for us to write our own answers to the exercises. The fact that the book had blanks for me to fill in was so inviting, there was a kind of "working mathematician" approach that came with it with that it made me really enjoy and look forward to working through the material. I still have mine.

Dr. Silvia was incredibly sharp, not just intellectually but also interpersonally. Not only could she gauge when the class was lost, but she also had a knack for spotting if something was affecting you outside of class. She was really committed to helping you not just as a student, but as a person. I remember spending hours at Mishka's, or Cafe Roma, or the CoHo, reading and writing, wanting to do well and not let Silvia down, because she invested so much energy and placed a great deal of trust in us.

So thank you both, Shirley Theis and Evelyn Silvia - you both encouraged me to grow a lot as a person, challenged my concept of what it means to be a student, and by your example provided a template of what it means to be an effective teacher, which I've imitated and embraced with pleasure in my own teaching.

(tagged scipy to spread word of Ada Lovelace day to Planet SciPy)
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vim-ipython two-way integration! (updated: 2011-08-02)

2011 07 28 technology
hello-world python vim vim-ipython

I'm very pleased to share with you a demo the forthcoming vim-ipython integration which will work with IPython 0.11(trunk).

You can either use the Flash player below, or download the OggVorbis file (14MB) update: vim-ipython 'shell' demo (9.6MB). The blog-free form of this post is here.

If you like what you see and want to try it, you can get the details from the vim-ipython github page ~~and it currently requires 4 line changes to IPython, which are currently in this pull request.~~ (Fixed to work on IPython trunk with no changes).

Big thanks to Min for walking me through the new IPython kernel manager during the SciPy2011 sprints.

Get the Flash Player to see this video, or download it in OggVorbis format

UPDATE: 2011-08-02

vim-ipython ‘shell’ mode.

Get the Flash Player to see this video, or download it in OggVorbis format

Just in case, here are the same videos as above, but hosted on Youtube:

If you're have any issues, try searching for your error on the vim-ipython github issues page, and if you don't find it, please file a new one, and I'll help you out there.
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on facebook, you die a quiet death...
2010 02 27 technology

So I finally got around to quitting facebook. I came to the HackerDojo tonight, and Waleed was working on sending out notifications for users of his app, because Facebook is disabling notifications as of March 1st.

Notifications was the way I was planning to announce my departure, because the "app" I created for that purpose would still be around after I deleted my account. But I was only able to send out a few of these notifications before facebook would not let me anymore.

Here's the message (with the cool icon I made) as it appeared on Facebook:.

But that wasn't going to stop me: so I made a status update - which contained essentially the same message:
```
Hey guys, as I alluded to in a status update a few weeks back:

I'm leaving Facebook.

This walled garden isn't the way the web was meant to be, and I *refuse* to
continue participating in it.

You can always find me by either searching for "Paul Ivanov", or through the
various means listed [on my website](//pirsquared.org/personal.html).

best, 
-pi
```
And then I was off to "Deactivate" myself. Beware - Facebook will play on your heartstrings by telling you that a couple of your friends will miss you - putting their photos right there and beckoning you to message them - but I was prepared to deflect this Faustian bargain. Though after I said "yes, really", it asked me for my password, and following that also sent a CAPTCHA! ("the escapade" indeed!)

and then, just like that: POOF! I vanished. Without any trace. The fake temporary account I created had no friends - my last (and all) status updates lost in the ether (at least as far as facebook users are concerned). But rest assured that the data lingers - permenantly - as facebook was immediately suggesting that my new fake account, who now had no friends to speak of - connect with the people I had been friends with, even though my account was gone.

For most of my friends, I got your birthdays, schools and jobs, as well as the most recent photo, and all of the friend-to-friend connection among you. For most - I actually had a stale copy (of everything but the photos) from 2007, which when I originally wrote the export scripts I used, and Facebook was just starting to open up its API and quickly devolving to a MySpace clone. It's not like I even frequently used the site - but reading about this reminded me to quit for good.

So I finally did.
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