Xavier Olive research teaching python blog til cli

The monthly digest #03

18 July 2018

NOAA over Europe

Python

  • Guido quits as BDFL.

  • Of course it cannot not exist, but I finally stumbled upon the full PEP list. PEPs are Python Enhancement Proposals, some are accepted, some are implemented in the language, some are under discussion… I consider it is what makes the language alive. This time, I enjoyed reading again about:

    • PEP 202: List Comprehensions;
    • PEP 3118: Revising the buffer protocol;
    • PEP 484: Type Hints;
    • PEP 557: Data Classes (though I am not yet convinced);
    • PEP 572: Assignment Expressions;
      Once it is implemented, my first intensive application will probably be:
if (m := re.match("'https?://(?:[-\w.]|(?:%[\da-fA-F]{2}))+'", text)):
    a = m.group()
  • GPU Accelerated, CUDA Python;

  • The black code formatter, by Łukasz Langa;

  • The pyre type-checker by Facebook, the new project to go beyond MyPy.

Software Defined Radio

  • SoftFM, finally a good radio decoder software;

  • rtl_433, to decode traffic from devices that are broadcasting on 433.9 MHz;

  • dumpvdl2, a VDL decoder, probably inspired by the ADS-B decoder dump1090;

  • How to decode High-Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT), and get great images like the excerpt above (from NOAA19 on May 6);

  • a nice timeline on the website of the Aireon company, deploying satellites to decode ADS-B messages from space to ensure a coverage over oceans and deserts.

Machine Learning

Data visualisation – Choice of colors

Miscellaneous