SciPy Sprint 0.7 ZA

We held the SciPy sprint at the Stellenbosch University Media Lab today, and managed to wrestle down a good number of tickets.

Here's the feel of it, to the theme of Monty Python themselves:

Or watch the slideshow here!

The full details of the sprint can be found at the official page.

aNobii

Favorite new site: aNobii — it's to bookworms what Facebook is to socialites! I've tried out virtual bookshelves before, with Google Books' "My Library" option being quite good. But where Google's focus is to make it possible to browse and search inside the text, aNobii immerses you in a social network of readers.

Not long after adding your first few books (done by entering their ISBN numbers in batch), aNobii's "matchmaking" system will introduce you to other books you may enjoy — and to other people with likeminded tastes. It's lovely to browse through other people's bookshelves, and inspect books that you might enjoy yourself. It's almost like a huge virtual bookclub.

The social linking is done very nicely: if you strongly identify with a complete stranger's taste in books, you can tag that person as a "neighbour" (someone living close to you in L-space, but whom you don't know in real life). You can then be notify when they update their bookshelves, for example by finishing new books and ranking them on a four-star system.

If you enjoy reading, and enjoy being exposed to new books by word of mouth, you're likely to enjoy this excellent online resource.

Scanned page to PDF converter

OK, so here's a first code snippet that I found useful. A scan utility that I used gave me a bunch of A4 images in folders, one image per page. I wanted to convert these scanned pages into PDF documents. The excellent reportlab package allows the creation of PDFs from Python; the rest was just globbing and glueing.

The script assumes that each subfolder in the current (or specified) path contains a collection of images that should be converted into a single PDF. It also assumes that the images are named in such a way that sorting by filename will place the pages in the correct order. For each subfolder, a similarly named PDF is created in the main folder.

#!/usr/bin/python

from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import A4
import os, sys, glob

width, height = A4

if len(sys.argv) > 1:
 try:
   os.chdir(sys.argv[1]) # Change working directory
 except:
   print "Usage: pics2pdf [directory]"
   exit()

# Iterate over all the subdirectories of the current directory:
for subdir in filter(os.path.isdir, os.listdir('.')):

 pdfname = subdir+".pdf"
 ignorelist = []
 print "Processing", pdfname, "[",
 sys.stdout.flush()
 c = canvas.Canvas(pdfname)

 # Iterate over all the possible pictures in the subdirectory:
 PicList = glob.glob(os.path.join(subdir,"*"))
 PicList.sort()

 for pic in PicList:

   try: # Assume the file is a valid image
     c.drawImage(pic, 0, 0, width, height)
     c.showPage()
     print os.path.basename(pic),
     sys.stdout.flush()
   except: # Didn't seem to be an image
     ignorelist.append(os.path.basename(pic))

   print "]"

   if len(ignorelist) > 0:
   print "Ignored non-image file(s)",
   for file in ignorelist:
     print file,
   print ""

 c.save()

init 5

Well, at last getting round to it! I've been playing around with the idea of starting a technical blog some time, a place to post random snippets of code or thoughts on software, hardware and engineering. It sometimes feels like such a waste to expend mental energy on, for example, putting together a quick script to do something useful, only to use it once or twice and then shelve it into some dusty folder. Rather put it out in the wild; maybe somebody finds it useful, or maybe someone can give useful suggestions on it.

So let's see how it goes, and whether I have the discipline to update this regularly :)