Who is who

[Henri Martin]

I am ICT at the ROB. I work for the seismological section.

I have a OOP experience but essentialy with C++
My experience with python is new. I am currently
learning python 3.0. (At home, because i have some
health problems)

--
Henri Martin
Service de Seismologie
Observatoire Royal de Belgique
tel: 02/373.02.61 / fax : 02/373.03.39
Avenue Circulaire, 3 - 1180 Bruxelles

[Vincent Malisse]

*********************
I'm Software Developer at the ROB (SIDC)
Started coding in Python in 2012, but have almost 10 years of experience in software development.
I'll mainly use python as scripting language.

I'm currently working on STAFF. A timeseries viewer for the AFFECTS project.
*********************


Kind Regards, Vriendelijke Groeten, Bien a Vous,

Vincent Malisse
Software Developer
Royal Observatory of Belgium
Ringlaan 3, 1180 Brussels

[Stijn Calders]

Hi,

I'm an IT support engineer for "Services and Operations: Space Weather" at BIRA-IASB.
I mainly develop web applications in PHP, but from time to time I also write code in other languages, e.g. Python. A few examples:
- I made the animation on http://www.spaceweather.eu/ccmc-enlil-help with Mayavi2
- I wrote some algorithms to process radio meteor data. The plots were done in matplotlib
- I am currently writing a code to calculate a satellite's position with respect to the magnetopause and the bowshock
I attended the EuroSciPy conference at the ULB last week. The beginners ' tutorial notes could be found at http://scipy-lectures.github.com

Best regards,
Stijn.

-- 
! Please consider the environment before printing this email
________________________________________________
Stijn Calders
Services and Operations: Space Weather

Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB)
Ringlaan 3
B-1180 Brussels
BELGIUM

phone  : +32 (0)2 373.04.19
e-mail : stijn....@aeronomie.be
web    : www.aeronomie.be
________________________________________________

[Louis Dumortier]

Hi all,

I'm a programmer for the astropysics dept, working in python since 2007.

I wrote the "hermes data reduction pipeline" for the hermes spectrograph fitted on the mercator telescope.

http://hermes.ster.kuleuven.be/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_Telescope

That instrument is producing around 5GB daily data.

I use scipy, numpy and matplotlib together with pyfits.

I use pyGTK to produce nice GUI's

I wrote the first 64-bit fits-files editor in python in 2008, years before the nasa, just for our test purposes. 

I use SQLITE3 and mySQL python libs to connect with databases.

There is a webpage descibing the project :  http://www.astro.oma.be/HERMES/

I also use some php and javascipt to produce monitoring systems : http://www.astro.oma.be/HERMES/monitor.html

http://www.astro.oma.be/HERMES/monitor.html

All this is available on demand, just write me.

Best Regards

Louis Dumortier

Observatoire royal de Belgique.

[Frédéric Clette]

Dear all,

I am working in the solar physics group, currently mainly on
ground-based solar image acquisition and on the World Data center for
the Sunspot index.
My past programming experience was mainly in FORTRAN and IDL, with some
C. So, although I have good notions of OO programming, I did not really
develop OO software in practice.

My first contact with Python was for private use. A few years ago, I was
looking for a scripting language for my Windows PCs, replacing and
expanding the old MS-DOS (and before Powershell was introduced). Anyway,
I only wanted to invest and learn a language that was multi-platform.
Python filled the bill pretty well.

Now, with some of my colleagues, we would like to introduce it here at
work. One of the main reasons invoked is to get rid of IDL and its
costly licences. However, most of my colleagues never programmed in
Python. A new incentive however, came from the recent introduction of of
the SunPy library, dedicated to solar physics and meant as a replacement
of the SolarSoft library, a huge "heritage" library for IDL that has
become an "inescapable" standard in our field of science (mainly for
space-based experiments).

Currently, for my research and publications, I am developing in Python,
using the standard IDLE, numpy, scipy and matplotlib. In the coming
months, I plan to convert a lot of our old routines from FORTRAN to much
more flexible and versatile Python, for automated document generation,
plotting and MySQL database access.

My main complaint regarding Python is the poorly designed documentation
(also for libraries like Matplotlib). It has the form of a reference
manual giving all details for Python language and library developers.
This does not respond at all to the needs of users of the language!
How to fill the huge gap between basic tutorials and this unstructured
language dictionary? I would need something that goes directly to widely
used elements of the language, shows how those elements can be
associated (examples!) and gives a global picture (e.g. organigrams
showing the class hierarchy and interdependencies inside libraries).
So far, I spent a lot of time just for locating "obvious" information
hidden in a heap of irrelevant details. Therefore, I joined this mailing
list with the hope that exchanging questions may help taking shortcuts
when a "how to" question arises.

Cheers,

Frédéric Clette
Solar Physics
Uccle Solar Equatorial Table (USET)
Royal Observatory of Belgium

[Giovanni Rapagnani]

Hello,

I'm a hardware and IT support engineer for the Seismology section at
the Royal observatory of Belgium.

I develop data acquisition software (mainly written in C), seismic
acquisition systems, manage the servers of the section and do all the
data managing stuff (retrieval, backup, conversion, ...)

I have been using Python for around 2 years mainly as scripting language
and for the conversion of data between various seismic formats.

Best regards.

--
Giovanni Rapagnani
Royal Observatory of Belgium
Section of Seismology
3, avenue Circulaire
1180 Brussels
Belgium
mail : g.rap...@oma.be
phone : +32.2.373.03.15

[Giovanni Rapagnani]

Dear Frédéric

On 04/09/12 08:56, Frédéric Clette wrote:
> My main complaint regarding Python is the poorly designed documentation
> (also for libraries like Matplotlib). It has the form of a reference
> manual giving all details for Python language and library developers.
> This does not respond at all to the needs of users of the language!
> How to fill the huge gap between basic tutorials and this unstructured
> language dictionary? I would need something that goes directly to widely
> used elements of the language, shows how those elements can be
> associated (examples!) and gives a global picture (e.g. organigrams
> showing the class hierarchy and interdependencies inside libraries).
> So far, I spent a lot of time just for locating "obvious" information
> hidden in a heap of irrelevant details. Therefore, I joined this mailing
> list with the hope that exchanging questions may help taking shortcuts
> when a "how to" question arises.

For learning Python, I would recommend the reading of the following book
(unfortunately only available in french):

"Programmation Python : Conception et optimisation",
Auteurs: Tarek Ziadé, Stefan Richter
Edition: 2e édition (9 avril 2009)
Editeur: Eyrolles

http://www.eyrolles.com/Informatique/Livre/programmation-python-9782212124835

It covers basic things as which editor (IDE) to choose, how to structure
the code, what are the basic functions, modules of the language and more
complex things as class creation (inheritance, ...), python libraries
packaging, test-driven development, function decorators, OO programming,
code optimisation, ..;

Part of the book is also dedicated to several exercises with their
solution in order to have a more practical approach of the language.

It is well-written and I think can rapidly become a reference book for
its reader as it contains a description of all the main modules.

Finally lots of free ebook are available on-line. One that I have
started learning Python with is "Dive into Python":
http://www.diveintopython.net/

also available for Python 3 branch: http://getpython3.com/diveintopython3/

[Yves Frémat]

Hello,
I'm astrophysicist contributing to the same python project, HERMES, than
Louis.
I use scipy, numpy, pylab and pyfits, as well as other more general and
basic
packages.
Since my involvement in the HERMES project I'm using more and more python
for other purposes also, especially scripting.

cheers, Yves

[Thomas Lecocq]

Dear All,

about "books", I think the ROB IT dept has ordered Python-related books
recently , maybe Fabian can comment on that?

Thomas

> Dr. Thomas Lecocq
> Geologist
> Seismology - Gravimetry @ ROB
>
> Python-Dev Mailing List Archive is on GG:
> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/python-dev-oma

[Mark Dierckxsens]

I'm a scientist working at BIRA-IASB on the FP7 project COMESEP (alert
system for CMEs and SEPs). My experience in programming is mostly in
c++, fortran and python and the analysis package ROOT from CERN (they
also have a python interface). I've used numpy, scipy, pylab and other
packages extensively for previous work. Currenly we use mostly IDL but
would like to move towards python.

Best regards,
Mark