ET - The Extra Terrestrial

Today I went with the family to see a screening of the 1982 classic film ET - Extra Terrestrial at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.  The background music was provided live by the Hong Kong Philamonic Orchestra. I have watched the film many times before but never with an orchestra providing a live soundtrack. In some ways this harks back to the the silent era where an organist would provide the background music to a film. It was nice to see this film again and it brings back memories of days before smart phones, the internet and where children went out to have fun.

Python 2017-07-09 data science

Now that I finished my Django course I will now concentrate on my python and its application in the world of data science.  I shall be following my kindle book "Data science from scratch" by Joel Grus. 

Update: although the book's text mentions python2 Joel Grus has kindly provided a python3 version of the code in Github along some explanatory notes.

https://github.com/joelgrus/data-science-from-scratch/tree/master/code-python3

Django 2017-07-07

I have come to end of my  'Tango with Django' book and I won't be working on the final chapters to do with unit testing and hosting a django website.  I have thoroughly enjoyed the tutorial example in this book and I did come across a few bugs in the text which I was able to correct with my own python/html/django knowledge.  I like the fact the book provides links to different aspects of django for your own perusal rather than add extra content in a book that is aimed at beginners.  Thanks to this book I can create my own rudimentary django website and make it call various python functions in the back end.  I give this book 4 out of 5.

Django 2017-07-02

I am now at the later end of the 'tango with django' book by Leif Azzopardi.  The chapter I'm on now is dedicated to exercises on upgrading the website project.  The chapters afterwards deal with JQuery and Ajax which are not part of Django nor Python but extensions of Javascript. These items improve the look and feel of website rather than the functionality.  So basically the workflow in Django is as follows

Update the models
Update the view
Update the template
Update the URLs

Once I have finished this book I will probably buy another Django book before I am fully confident in building my own websites.

Python 2017-06-25 Data science

One of the increasingly popular uses of Python is in the field of data science.  Data science is essentially statistics and it is used in social media trends, social media analysis and marketing.  I am seeing it more and more often in job adverts involving Python.  I know a little about statistics myself thanks to my A level in pure maths and statistics.  To this end I have bought a Kindle book on the subject called "Data science from scratch" by Joel Grus.  This is a primer on the subject and it uses Python to demonstrate the techniques.  There is a short crash course chapter on Python, but don't expect it to be a Python tutorial. 

Django 2017-06-25

I am now midway through my Django book "Tango with Django" by Leif Azzopardi.  I can now create simple interactive packages to reflect what I have in my data layer, allow the user to create accounts, login, logout and determine what a logged or logged out user can see or not see depending on whether on the login status.  For practice I created extra data items and displayed in pages on top of what is required in the book. 

Django 2017-06-17

I am a third of the way through my 'Tango with Django' tutorial book and I have passed a major psychological milestone thanks to the wonderful explanations and exercises in the book.  

I can now create models(internal database tables), populate them and present the data on a web template page at will.  I think the reason for the easy pickup is that the author does not spend too much time on the fancy html tags.