A lot of my research is based around developing and testing heuristic algorithms for various computation problems, in particular, I try to develop and adapt vector-packing based heuristics for scheduling virtual machines in distributed heterogeneous environments.
Toward this end, I've spent a fair amount of time investigating the large data trace released by google in 2011. The trace is available through Google Cloud Storage, and can be downloaded using the gsutil utility, which can be installed in a python virtual environment via pypi/pip.
I’m very fond of static website generators–they’re a lot faster than interpreted (php, ruby) or even most compiled (Java) based solutions. I’m using Octopress to manage this blog currently, it’s basically a set of customizations, style files, and build scripts that extend the capabilities of Jeckyll, a comprehensive platform in its own right. I’ve also tried out the node.js based Docpad and the pythonic Hyde and Pelican.
While these all do a fairly good job of managing a standard blogging sites, in my opinion they all suffer from trying to do a bit too much, to manage the whole job of website creation, which makes it difficult to decouple small, specific bits of functionality, like rendering just a few web pages from templates. Also, I never really got into the Jinja2 templating language: I don’t like the way that it (doesn’t) handle inline code, or the fact that every call to a macro has to be in the form of a block, or that every macro definition needs to do something with the content included in the block, even if you didn’t want to use that feature. I much prefer the style of Mako, but none of the popular static website generators seem to support it.
For the Department’s digital sign project, I just needed something that would rending a single, but fairly complicated, web page in a way that would be easy for me to customize, and I didn’t want to deal with the overhead of a lot of features aimed at things like blogging that I never intended to use. My first thought was to hack something together with Make and the mako-render script that came packaged with Ubuntu, but whereas the static website generators did more than I wanted, this seemed a little too simple. So, naturally, I decided to hack together something on my own.