Month: February 2012

Kitegen comes back to fly

February 22, 2012 / / 2 Comments

[slideshow]

I’m very happy to read (link in Italian) that Kitegen has started the automatic testing for take off and landing at Sommariva site.

I just report the main points written in the post which I think they are interesting, without going into a full english translation:

  • first of all, they have managed to perform a take off with only 1.5 m/s wind speed at the ground, which is remarkable given the fact this wind speed is very small. Considering that the wind speed in Europe is around 3 m/s this is a great achievement.
  • the next step they are planning is to test how long the kite can fly without interruption, to achieve 5000 hours of continuous flight 5000 hours per year. H/T Stefano

All in all, it seems the control software is getting ready for the field, and I can’t wait to see the development during spring and summer!

Goodies: Link to the video!

Making playlist with Android

February 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Droid Music

If you would like to make a playlist based on the content on the folder on your droid, just open a terminal, go to the folder where the music is and run

$ls | sort | grep mp3 > "$(basename "$(pwd)")".m3u

and magically you have the playlist..
which looks like this:

04 - Pennywise - Fuck authority.ofn.mp3
07 - A Perfect Government.mp3
07 - Pearl Jam - Do The Evolution.mp3
13 - Goldfinger - 99 Red Balloons .mp3
Nirvana - 03 - Come As You Are.mp3
Oasis - Live Forever.mp3
Offspring - Smash - 05 - Genocide.mp3
System Of A Down - Aeralis.mp3
System Of A Down - Spiders.mp3
03 Whatever Happened to My Rock 'N Roll.wma

the last one is a wma, and if you don’t have time/will to convert it to mp3 can be added with:

$ls | sort | grep wma >> "$(basename "$(pwd)")".m3u

Tip found here

Neuronvisio 0.8.0 out in the wild

February 15, 2012 / / 0 Comments
pyramidal_3D_change_voltage

A Pyramidal Neuron model visualized with Neuronvisio

We have just released a new version of Neuronvisio, which depends on Mayavi 4.1.x. All the goodies are described in the docs, but I want to highlight an aspect of this release which is pretty important.

When we have ported Neuronvisio, from Mayavi 3.4 to Mayavi 4.1.0, two regression bugs popped out: Issues #32 and Issue #34 .

The good thing about issue #34 was that it was gone in the 4.1.1.dev version of traitsui, therefore we had just to depend on the development snapshot, however the story was different for #32. The bug was difficult to replicate, and it seems to not be deterministic. After investigating the problem, I’ve managed to isolate and set up a Pull Request which actually fixes it https://github.com/enthought/mayavi/pull/23.

While the Pull Request was still to be accepted in the main tree of Mayavi, we wanted to distribute it out there, because Neuronvisio paper is under reviewing, and the Reviewers had several trouble to install the version 0.7.3, which depends on Mayavi 3.4. We managed to package both traitsui and Mayavi and make them as required dependencies of the new Neuronvisio, and using the special version requirement in the pavement, we could make the installation as automatic as possible.

All in all, to install the latest version of Neuronvisio, depending on the latest version of Traitsui and the patched version of Mayavi 4.1.1.dev a user has to run

pip install -U --extra-index-url=http://www.ebi.ac.uk/~mattioni/snapshots/ neuronvisio

which I think it’s pretty neat.

With the new version out, we didn’t want to remove the old docs, ’cause the version are quite different and same information applying to one version in particular. Some of our user may don’t want to update to the latest version, so we have now Neuronvisio docs hosted to the beautiful Read The Docs, at http://readthedocs.org/projects/neuronvisio/ where you can choose the docs according to the version.