Re: [Opengrads-devel] Fwd: PyGrads tarball

[Arlindo da S. <da...@al...>]

On Jan 9, 2008 8:44 AM, Mike Fiorino <mfi...@gm...> wrote:

> dear arlindo,
>
> i'm back in the office after the holidays in CA and finally grabbed the
> latest pygrads...  i also install PIL..
>

How about the basemaps. Because  the map datasets it is a relatively large
tarball they do not include it in the standard Matplotlib, you need an
additional install. See the readme file.


>
> when i try running the examples:
>
> kishou.nhc.noaa.gov[W2]:/home/work/wxmap2/trunk/src/opengrads/pygrads-
> 1.0.6/examples
> 208 > ./galab_examples.py
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "./galab_examples.py", line 149, in ?
>    ga = GaLab(Bin='gradsnc',Window=False,Echo=False)
> NameError: name 'GaLab' is not defined
>

This usually means that you do not have some of the dependencies.  I
designed the grads package in a way that when you import it, only imports
modules that *can* are imported; in retrospect, it is  perhaps  too quiet.
Here is how to diagnose the problem: start pygrads and at the ga-> prompt
type "import galab", the error messages should tell you what you are
missing.


>
> also in checked the tests/grads_tests.sh and it looks hardwired for a
> particular grads/src?
>

Yeah, "grads_tests.sh" is something Pat introduced specifically for the
"make check" in autotools. Run "grads_tests.py" instead.  Outside the GrADS
build environment you will need to specify the location of your grads
binaries. Type "grads_tests.py -h" for more info. However, these tests are
meant to test the grads binaries and only uses module gacore.py.


>
> some news from CA:
>
> bob drach says the lab is finally acting on converted lats to
> opensource; not sure when but at least it's in the works.


This is great news! Pat will finally be able to have a complete Fedora
package.


>
> bob was very interested in pygrads, especially passing data to/from
> grads/python.  bob also was surprised that you think perl is faster with
> numbers the python and numpy, his impression was that python was on par
> with other languages.


I read this in a couple of places, including a article implementing fractal
algorithms. Although to be taken with a grain of salt, I heard the same in
the PDL list as well. It would be nice to come up with a benchmark relevant
to our problem. I like Matplotlib, but performance is lousy compared to
GrADS.


>  i'm glad to see you getting into python, i have a
> lot of legacy grads scripts that i would like to convert over...
>

It would be nice to inline them. Something like:

def test(arg):
     return ga.inline(arg,
"""
function test(arg)
i = 3*arg
return i
""")

So,

>>> print test(7)
21

We just need a version of run that reads from stdin. (I am avoiding exchange
files for performance reasons). It may be less work than convert a bunch of
scripts...


>
> thanks and best regards, mike
>


Let me know if basemaps fixes your problem.

  Cheers!

       Arlindo

-- 
Arlindo da Silva
da...@al...