A while ago we plotted time series data with Matplotlib. This worked nicely, but with the data at hand, a bar diagram would have looked much better. In this article I'll give you a template for using bar diagrams with time series data. This builds on the work we did …

I did it again. Upgrade Ubuntu right after a release despite all the problems I had in the past. But this time, after almost four weeks of working with Ubuntu 12.10 on my Asus Eee PC 1000HE, I'm confident that things are looking up again.

My biggest problem with …

My first contact with the R programming language has been in the Statistics One course I took in September. But since the things we did there with R only scratched the surface, I joined Coursera's Computing for Data Analysis course for learning a bit more about it. The course was …

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are all the rage these days, so I decided to try one out of curiosity. My choice was Coursera's Statistics One, a six week course taught by Andrew Conway, a psychology professor from Princeton University. Here's a short review of the first version of the …

I'm probably one of the last people on earth who still use a text-mode mail client. Mutt has been my tool of choice for 15 years and apart from certain limitations (hey, it's text mode!), I've never had any problems. Over the last few weeks, however, I've been struggling with …

Managing module or package dependencies is an important design activity that helps to keep a software project maintainable. Visualizing these dependencies is a good way of getting a first impression on a project and for exposing design problems. In this article we're going to create a basic visualization for a …

Sometimes people ask for my help when their shell scripts don't work. I've seen all kinds of problems, ranging from trivial to really, really weird. The one I'm describing in this article is definitely from the weird category, but I've seen it quite a few times.

The story goes like …

Two years ago, I published a Maven archetype for Hadoop that turned out to be quite popular, judging from the comments I received and the access logs on my server. Today I've updated it to use the latest version of Hadoop and to build on Maven 3 without warnings.

Like …

Recently I rediscovered Bottle, a Python-based micro framework for web applications. Bottle gives you full control over your URLs, has a simple built-in templating engine and a lot of other commonly used stuff. It takes you five minutes to get started and perhaps one hour with its great documentation to …

After upgrading my Eee PC to Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin", I also upgraded my Dell Precision M65 notebook. Like with my Eee PC, in previous versions little worked: Unreliable suspend, no hibernate, no WiFi, and frequent X freezes. This time though, things have really improved.

For the first time …