viziblr

I've been using a Wacom tablet since 1995, never in that time I even considered an alternative. But based on this review by Ray Frenden and given the price ($50 versus $400), I might have to think twice during my next purchase.

After spending a week with the 6.25“x10” Monoprice, my Yiynova and Cintiq remain unplugged and I gave my Intuos away to a friend. The Monoprice tracks subtle pressure variances and small movements with less lag and more crisp fidelity than any of the others. It is, put crudely, fucking awesome, in both OSX Lion and Windows 7 x64.

 

More details at the product page and check out the Amazon reviews of this tablet.

 

Note that unlike the Wacom, the Monoprice pen requires a AAA battery. Given how many of us are using wireless mice, I don't think this is an impediment.

 

In preparation for some posts on analytics and visualization, I was inspired by this video of Wes McKinney introducing a PyCon audience to Pandas. I needed a low-friction tool to interactively work with tabular data and for now Pandas looks like the right choice.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to learn how to use PyPI to install packages instead of relying on binary installers. Unfortunately getting this done end-to-end isn't entirely clear so I've put up my steps below.

State of My System Before I started

• Operating System: Windows 7 SP1
• Python Components: Python 2.7.3 and PyWin32–217.

 

 

Step 1 Install SetupTools

Go here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools and find the binary installer for Python 2.7

I downloaded this version: setuptools-0.6c11.win32-py2.7.exe

Yes, this is a binary installer. But once we have setuptools everything else is easy and will not require an installer.

Look in the C:\Python27\Scripts folder. You'll see that it contains an EXE called easy_install.

 

 

Step 2 Install NumPy

Start a cmd shell are this simple command

C:\>Python27\Scripts\easy_install.exe numpy

This command will start and eventually after spitting out a lot of text numpy will be installed.

 

 

 

Step 3 Install dateutil

This package is actually called “python-dateutil” so we need to use that name instead with easy_install

C:\>Python27\Scripts\easy_install.exe python-dateutil

 

 

Step 4 Install Pandas

You can see where this is going …

C:\>Python27\Scripts\easy_install.exe pandas

 

 

Step 5: Verify Pandas is working

We are done with the installation, let's make sure it actually works by running a quick script.

import numpy
import pandas

df = pandas.DataFrame( { "A": [11, 12, 13], "B": [34,78,109] } )

df.sum()

 

 

Parting Thoughts

• easy_install versus pip: It's generally recommended that one use pip instead of easy_install. I chose not to in this example because I was having problems with pip.
• What next: Sometime soon I'll go through some simple pandas scenarios, focusing getting good analytics out of a bug tracking database.

 

 

Installing the latest  ArtRage Studio Pro updated (moving me from 3.5.3 to 3.5.4) gave an opportunity to relax for few minutes. Below is the result of about 30 minutes of playing.