Software Carpentry workshops for MAT/C4DM in QMUL¶

Dates/Where¶

• 6th-7th February 2013 -- MAT lab

Short schedule¶

Day 1 - 9.30am to 3pm

• Day 1 - Morning
  • Intro and get settled down - 20 mins - with coffee?
  • Shell - Steve - material from Software Tools For Engineers (ELE595) + Steve's head - 30 min to 10.30
  • Python intro - Luis - some potential material here from SSI - 10.30 to 12

• Day 1 - Lunch 12 - 12.30

• Day 1 - Afternoon
  • Version control - Chris - material here using Bitbucket - 12.30 to 2pm
  • Data management points - conversation points in the area outside the MAT lab - 2pm to 3pm

Day 2 - 10am to 4pm

• Day 2 - Morning
  • NumPy - Luis - material from Luis, in preparation - takes 1 hour
  • Audio file opening etc - Luis? - material here from Codasign

• Day 2 - Lunch - 12.30 to 1.15

• Day 2 - Afternoon
  • Testing, test-driven development - Chris? - based on ISMIR tutorial - up to 2 hours inc coffee at end
  • Philosophical stuff - Feedback cycles - Chris? - slides here -- mixture of What We Know and DAFx tutorial stuff with some of Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work - takes 1 hour at most

• Post-workshop assessment exercise
  • Register for soundsoftware site
  • Take the exercise from the last bit of the afternoon (based on ISMIR, but not quite the same) and complete some aspect of it.
  • Do this within version control on soundsoftware - add one of us as project member

MAT lab computer setup¶

Computer lacks:

• Login for Luis (and Steve?)
• hg and EasyMercurial
• Matplotlib
• iPython
• Nose
• pip
• scikits.audiolab
• Emacs with a window (as opposed to in terminal) - Aquamacs?

Computer does have:

• A text editor (TextWrangler)
• Python 2.7 system install
• NumPy

Detailed plan for schedule¶

Day 1¶

9am (?) to 2pm.

Day 1 is rather short because of the MAT lab being booked by someone else from 2pm.

Morning

• Intro to Shell (SJW)
  • Directories: pwd, cd, mkdir, ls
  • Files: cp, mv, rm, cat, editors
  • scripts #!/bin/bash
  • access control: chmod
  • Finding stuff: grep, find, locate, which
    • Regular expressions
    • Shell wildcards
  • Background tasks: &, fg, bg
  • Disk usage: du, df
  • Tying things together > < |
  • commands history, tab autocompletion
  • variables
  • doing stuff somewhere else: ssh
  • doing serious stuff: sudo

• More possibilities:
  • dot
  • wget
  • rsync
  • mounting network (home) directories
  • working on octave

• Version Control (CC) (exercise over lunch?)
  • Creating repositories on SSW

Afternoon

• Data Management (SJW) - Should content be integrated into discussion of shell / be before VC ?
  • Rationale
  • File formats - open vs. proprietary, lossy vs. lossless
    • Open formats should remain accessible in the future
    • The actual output from a lossy data format may vary depending upon how it's decoded
    • Converting files - ImageMagick convert, mplayer (to wav) + lame/flac/ogg, ffmpeg
  • Backing up
  • Archiving
    • "standard" compression tools good on text-like files especially if areas of content are similar
    • special compression needed for complex binary data which varies a lot e.g. FLAC
  • Publishing
  • Documenting
  • Available facilities in C4DM (relevance for MAT ?)

Day 2¶

10am to 4pm.

Morning

• Python (LF)
  • Variables
    • strings, integers, floats, lists, sets and dictionaries
    • By reference vs. by value
  • Control-of-flow
  • Libraries and modules - pip, easy_install
  • OOP, objects and classes ?

• Python for research
  • NumPy
    • Matplotlib
    • SciPy
  • Python for Audio/Media: audioop, ossaudiodev, wave, aifc, sunau, PyMedia, pygame (sndarray, mixer, mixer.music), libpd (?), Python Audio Tools, scikits.audiolab, Medussa

Afternoon

• Software engineering
  • feedback cycles
  • Unit Tests and TDD
    • nose

Note: We need to have some sort of evaluation so that we can give attendees a mark (some exercise to be submitted via version control a week later?)

Outcomes¶

• Students to have their own version control repository on soundsoftware.ac.uk and to know how to use it (command-line and easyHg)
• Removal of fear of the command-line
• Knowledge of basic UNIX shell commands
• Knowledge of basic Python
• Knowledge of (some) Python libraries for media research
• Understanding of the need for data management and how to manage data
• Understand facilities available at C4DM
• Know where to go for more info
  • Software Carpentry - software-carpentry.org
  • Version control / project management - soundsoftware.ac.uk
  • Python - python.org
  • Data management - SoDaMaT
• Improved practices for software engineering, souce code management, data management