What I learned today

I tried my first D3.js data visualization using csv data source My 'graph' would plot circles, where the x position of the circle would represent the value of the second column (file size) in my csv. The larger files would be plotted to the right. I posted my example d3csv.html at  https://github.com/binodpanta/webvisualizer I should be able to do some more interesting things with this, such as realtime monitor files. Enjoy!

A quick hack on Sublime text when working on Macs is to get the editor to invoke the 'open' command so that you can hit command+B to 'open' the file in your favorite app. My favorite use for it is when editing html files, i want it to open in my favorite browser. On a Mac, 'open' is the equivalent of the default file association in Windows, such as when you click on a text file, you can have it open in your favorite editor. In sublime, go to Tools > Build System Select New build system In the file that opens type this in into the pre-filled section and save the file with a name you want, such as 'open.sublime-build': { "cmd": ["open", "$file"] } Then go back to the file you were editing, Tools > Build System. Now select your newly saved build system. Now every time you hit command + B you get the file to open on Chrome (which is what my Mac is setup by default to open html files with)! Obvi...

I recently learned about the 'screen' command on Linux from one of my friends (and now I am hooked). Now I have learned to use another Linux command 'watch' to constantly run a command and watch its output. I was running into an issue when I ran a test session I would keep getting an error about disk space being filled up. So I thought to monitor disk usage as I ran my stuff. First, I setup two screens on my remote terminal (putty in my case) and ran screen ctrl+A S to create a split screen ctrl+A tab to move to the second view ctrl+A c to create a new window now that i have two screens On screen 1, run 'watch -n 2 df /tmp' to run the df command every two seconds against /tmp, and now i have a view that updates every 2 seconds in my screen1 On screen2 (switch using Ctrl+A tab), i run my command There you go, I have not yet found my source of trouble, but the technique still proved its worth since I could see the disk space update as I ran my com...

Lambda functions in Python Here is a very simple  lambda function , this example is one of creating a polynomial function with given coefficients, and storing that as a lambda function in a variable 'f' that can now be used as a function, cool! # This returns a function that represents a polynomial # Input is a dictionary with a,b,c being required keys def polyf(**coeffs): """Returns a lambda function""" return lambda x: coeffs['a']*x*x + coeffs['b']*x+coeffs['c'] # now returns a lambda function that will evaluate 2nd order polynomial with coeffs a, b, c when called f = polyf(a=1,b=2,c=3) print "Help doc for this function = ", polyf.__doc__ # Try using that lambda function now, Done! print f(0.1) print f(0)