Last PyCon US (2013) I attended, there were many interesting talks, but if I had to talk about what's happening, what's the trend, between other things I would mention IPython Notebook.

In a few words: it's an excellent tool, you can have an IPython console within your web browser where you can write code snippets and run them, and also render the results within the browser (not only text, also graphics, plots, rich media, etc). These code snippets are called "cells" and in addition you can add formatted text cells between your code cells. These text cells ...

In a previous blog post, I spurred some ideas on why it is meaningless to pretend to achieve 100% accuracy on a classification task, and how one has to establish a baseline and a ceiling and tweak a classifier to work the best it can, knowing the boundaries. Recapitulating what I said before, a classification task involves assigning which out of a set of categories or labels should be assigned to some data, according to some properties of the data. For example, the spam filter your email service provides assigns a spam or no spam status to every email. If ...

Keeping up with our efforts to be an active part of the open source community, we are pleased to announce the public release of our Simple Getty wrapper.

Python Simple Getty is a basic wrapper to the extensive Getty Images Connect API. In its current state it does not fully implement Connect, but it works really well in the most common use case: Search, get details and finally buy a set of images.

You can get the code in our github:

https://github.com/tryolabs/python-simple-getty

We recommend that you read the readme, but once you have the code, finding ...

A news worthy of The Tryolabs' Herald: 

We have just proudly released to the public LibreQDA, a Qualitative Data Analysis tool that we have developed alongside with the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona and the Universidad de la República Oriental del Uruguay.

LibreQDA is what is commonly know in the psychology area as Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS). This tool allows the users to log in, import documents from different formats and assign valuable metadata to them. Once documents are opened, the user can select portions of them, tag them and codify them using a hierarchic coding system. Using ...

So you have made the decision to use timezone-aware dates and now you are building your cool REST API using Tastypie. Of course timezones are important to your application, so you want to expose them when Tastypie exposes dates in the API.

You have a very simple resource that exposes a Django model that has an attribute, for example:

from django.db import models


class Entry(models.Model):
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    # ... more fields

from tastypie.resources import ModelResource
from myapp.models import Entry


class EntryResource(ModelResource):
    class Meta:
        queryset = Entry.objects.all()

Out of the box, you notice ...

In the event participated several speakers from Uruguay, Argentina, Brasil and Denmark with talks ranging from Biopython,  Machine Learning to Web applications with Django framework and Tastypie.

Raul (Tryolabs, Uruguay) speaking about Machine Learning.

Erico Andrei (Plone Foundation, Brazil) speaking about open source and Python community in Brazil.

Andrea Gavana (Maersk Oil, Denmark) speaking about Python applications in the oil industry ...

Uploading images to our django application can be as easy as adding an ImageField to our model. However, ImageField falls short in one key aspect, thumbnails. Usually when uploading images, we want to create smaller versions for them, for using in for example, galleries or previews. This however, has to be done manually using the appropriate imaging libraries available.

Enter django-thumbnail-works:

Very often we get people contacting us for projects in which they envision the usage of some Machine Learning (ML) techniques to solve a specific problem they have.

Sometimes these people do not have any automated system and are solving whatever problem they currently have with human labor. In these cases, the mere fact of being able to produce anything that works reasonably well can make a huge difference for them. Imagine, for example, that your company wants you to review 100,000 tweets that make reference to its brand name, because they want to know which customers are not ...

Free tools are great, but the world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes, we may need to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server database from one of our Python applications running under Linux. Fortunately, there are ways to achieve this.

I am assuming we got this:

• • A Microsoft SQL Server installation running under Windows. I tested this using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, but hopefully this will work with other versions as well.
• • Ubuntu Linux. I am using 12.04 LTS.

Without further ado, here are the steps you should follow to get this working.

1. SQL Server ...

A while back I had a Django application in which I needed registered users able to view, create, update and delete objects in my system. These objects were instances of only a subset of all the Django models.Model subclasses I had defined in the models.py file of my application.

You may find this problem very similar to what the Django Admin site solves for administrators: you register some models that are displayed, and then the admins can create/update/delete the objects in the system as needed. Cool, lets use the Django admin! We should only call admin ...