Spaced Out :: 2015

A little while back I blogged about the release of the EA LiDAR DEMs for the UK - well a nice pickup from GoGeo for a coverage map of the data.

I was using the CLustre code recently for analysing some lineaments and it reminded me to update to the latest version of WinPython (which I covered at the AGI). currently at 2.7.10.2. This necessitated reinstalling the libraries needed for CLustre which include numpy, scipy, matplotlib and gdal (which includes ogr). All bar the last are now part of the distribution, so that meant just an install of that.

And that has got a whole lot easier as pip (Python package installer) is now included by default. So just issue this command:

pip install gdal

And if that doesn’t work for some reason (possibly because it has to compile the code), then you can download the pre-compiled binaries from the Unofficial Binaries site (and remember to select either 64 or 32 bit version and the cp27 version if you are running Python 2.x). Then use this command:

pip install GDAL‑1.11.3‑cp27‑none‑win_amd64.whl

Life just gets easier and WinPython is great in that it’s portable.

I missed this last year, but it’s well worth flagging to all undergraduates as a fantastic way to get industry experience - Space Placements in INdustry (SPIN). As they say on their webpage:

“The Space Placements in INdustry scheme (SPIN) has been designed to provide an introductory link for undergraduate students considering employment in the space sector and space sector organisations looking to find the most talented and enthusiastic people to ensure the future success of their businesses.”

The programme takes students in their 2/3 or 3/4 year of an undergraduate degree and work over an 8 week duration, being paid on the job. The 2016 round will open shortly so keep your eyes on the website.

Need to get a plain and simple file listing from the command line in DOS to pipe in to a programme??

As ever a good starting point is to get help for the command. So:

dir /?

If you peruse through this you’ll eventually work out that this is the command you want:

dir /a-d /b > ..\list.txt

The “>” symbol sends the output and stores it in a file. Make sure to specify “..\” before the filename so the file is saved in the directory above the existing one otherwise that file will be listed as well. And if you want to sort on (for example) filename then you add the “\on” switch:

dir /a-d /b /on > ..\..\list.txt

This will now save me looking that command up everytime!

Following on from my neogeography/big data blog Edoardo L’Astorina at Blu Frame (web designers) contact me to note a review he’s recently completed on 20 online visualisation tools. And it’s a useful review and worth a look to see where things are at.