Alex C. Viana's Blog

"If you don't know what a metaclass is you don't need to use one."

Because I frequently work remotely as well as run long processes I recently gave up my desktop system at work in exchange for a laptop and a couple of virtual machines.

For one of my projects at work I engineered an automation platform for one of our instrument teams.

"Give me a point and I can draw a line.

In my last post on my PSF Project I characterized the PSF shape by fitting a 1-D Gaussian to the a row and column slice through the central pixel.

A few weeks ago I was awarded an research grant to continue working on a prototype software pipeline for HST moving target (solar system) observations.

I've started a new project working with 10 million stellar PSFs.

the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry - Billy Collins, The Trouble with Poetry To paraphrase one of my favorite poets, the trouble with tech blogs is that they encourage the writing of more tech blogs.

All other languages were for some reason inferior, and as a Python programmer, I was the member of an elite cabal of superhuman ultranerds, smarter than those childish Rails/JavaScript/PHP/whatever developers that couldn’t write a bubble sort or comprehend

**DjangoCon Lightning Talk: Hello from Hubble ** from alexcostaviana Here are my slides from my lightning talk at the 2012 DjangoCon in Washington DC.

Overly honest commenting on hitting 'accept' on a GitHub pull request for the first time.

Making sure we stay at the forefront of space exploration is a big priority for my administration.

The academic system does not respect practitioners' knowledge (or timescales).

I'm on-site today at Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville working on Space Telescope's collaboration with CosmoQuest on an exciting crowd-sourcing project for citizen-scientists.

On Leaving Academia « Ars Experientia I saw this blog post being passed around Twitter this afternoon by the likes of David Beazley and Greg Wilson and the timing was perfect for post I was thinking about writing.

I learned how to use Python's cProfile module last week and thought it was pretty cool.

[I wrote this post a few months but never posted it for some reason.

We have several SQLite calls in our pipeline that look something like this for file in file_list: conn = sqlite3.connect(database) c = conn.cursor() command = 'SELECT * FROM table' c.execute(command) conn.close() I originally wrote our

K: I can appreciate using "12345" as a password, like ironically.

Finding the Right Plot I really like data visualization, even if I can't claim to be any an expert at it.

Just registered for SciPy2012.

I just wanted to share a quick and dirty visualization I made to analyze some an processing pipeline I'm working on.

I'm excited I finally have a reason to learn JavaScript at work.

Widget Factory vs Film Crew Organizational Models

Top 30 Most Popular Stolen LinkedIn Passwords Seriously?

You need to do something spectacular before anyone knows you;re doing anything at all.

I've been programming in Python for over 4 years.

Just had the same thought this morning.

Sure, I trust Google to index the contents of all my files.

Right now to interact with Windows Command Prompt I use a wrapper called Console2.

It's been a productive few days.

In December 2006, Palm CEO Ed Colligan summarily dismissed the idea that a traditional personal computing company could compete in the smartphone business.

Why does clicking on an RSS feed link take you to XML source code for the feed?

I just spent an hour paying a series of small bills, parking tickets, vehicle registration, toll fees, medical bills, etc.

I just watched this Google Tech Talk on "Inbox Zero" by Merlin Mann.

Email is not a messaging protocol, it's a to-do list, right?

I was reading a fun bit of analysis of value of a pound of coins on Dan Kozikowski's blog and stumbled upon the greedy algorithm (via wikipedia): A greedy algorithm is an algorithm that follows the problem solving heuristic of making the locally optimal c…

My friend showed me how to see my local file system on my windows Vista machine.

On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy.