Scraping Data from Facebook
Competition is a strange thing making you suddenly interested in the most unusual of problems It has become a tradition of The Lancer Band, of which I am a member, to produce a video as part of our ANZAC Day commemorations. These videos have been highly successful garnering milli…
A guide to setting up remote SSH
In the right (or wrong) hands ssh is a powerful tool for the remote management of a Unix system. Most desktop, or workstation distributions of Linux disable remote access over ssh by default. The simplest method to check if you have ssh server running on your machine is to run $ …
Adventures in the Python Visualisation Landscape
Calling the current python visualisation landscape fragmented would probably be an understatement, since itself requires a visualisation to even begin to comprehend. For various reasons I have been unhappy with the tool I was using for visualisation at that time and I have been s…
Creating an HDF5 Bomb
You may have heard of a zip bomb or other decompression 'bombs', which have the basic premise of containing a large volume of highly redundant data that when decompressed takes up more resources than the system can handle. Within the HDF5 file format there is support for compress…
The Perils of Packaging in Python
There are many guides to packaging a python application, including the official Python Packaging User Guide. While these guides offer step by step instructions for deploying a simple application, when deviating from a guide there can be unexpected problems. The application I have…
Quaternions for Orientation in MD
In the understanding of the dynamics of a molecule in a Molecular Dynamics (MD) Simulation the two main properties we use to understand liquid behaviour are the translational motion and the rotational motion of the atoms or molecules. These motions reflect changes in the positio…
Building interfaces with click
Running computer simulations is great. You tell the computer what to do, it sits there crunching numbers for a while. Then you can come back and look at the results. The problem with this is that most simulation packages take the simulation parameters in an input file, so running…