This post describes how to get GNU Octave up and running on a CentOS 5 Linux system for use in reading, processing, and writing video files. You will need to use the EPEL and DAG/rpmforge repositories, but I won’t explain how to do that here. NOTE: I had to go through some trial and error […]
How to install Octave video tools on CentOS 5 Read More »
As this site has grown, the example code has gradually become unmanageable. I’ve posted snippets and fragments here and there over the years, and the original code is scattered in various locations across several computers. Further, as people have pointed out bugs or ways to improve the examples, I’ve had a hard time making changes.
Moving example code to GitHub Read More »
If you’re used to coding in more modern languages, Fortran I/O can seem a little bizarre. Strings in Fortran are much more difficult to work with, since they are fixed-length rather than null-terminated. The following example illustrates a simple way to read an array of numbers from a text file when the array length is
Reading an array from a text file with Fortran 90/95 Read More »
MPI is a standard for communication between multiple processes in parallel computing. These processes can be running on different cores, CPUs, or entirely different computers in a grid. MPI is a standard, and there are many implementations available (many are open source). The features of MPI can be accessed from Python with the packages pypar
Managing a pool of MPI processes with Python and Pypar Read More »
Two posts ago, I described how I wrote a function in Python that reads in a binary file from Labview. In my last post, I described using wxPython to write a GUI to process the data from those binary files. Naturally, I called the binary-file-reader function from the GUI. The problem is that the file
Redirecting text output from Python functions Read More »
During the past week, the blog engine was updated and a few things were tweaked “under the hood.” You may have already noticed that the theme has been totally changed. It’s a modified version of the Blue Box theme by Bob–the header photo is mine.
Blog infrastructure update Read More »
I finally had enough and wiped Ubuntu off of my computer at work, and now Gentoo is happily running. Maybe I could have gotten Ubuntu to do what I wanted if I had spent more time with it, but I was sick of playing with it instead of getting work done. To be fair to
How do you say “bye bye Ubuntu” in Zulu? Read More »
What an unusual pine tree! Who would have guessed that this is actually a giant antenna, cleverly disguised as a tree? I just hope that my taxpayer dollars weren’t used on this monstrosity.
Who got fired for this? Read More »
I have a Motorola E815 cell phone. This morning, I was reminded why it hasn’t been an entirely satisfying experience. The E815 has excellent reception (on Verizon’s network) and lots of software features that work really well. Unfortunately the mechanical quality leaves a lot to be desired. The E815’s weakness is the socket where the