Kicking off processes from a web interface

In a previous job I had, we did a lot of work with Django as a front end for the control of our analytical system.  In the process, someone used cron to track the system frequently in order to be able to pick up toggles input through the UI.  I wasn't the biggest fan of this approach, but that's a story for another day, because the reality is that I couldn't think of a better approach.  Enter my recent discovery of Celery.  I have been wanting to try this out, because it might be exactly what I'm looking for when it comes to this, and I want to save this tutorial on just a proof of concept:

Using Celery With Flask

So, I'll have to have a follow-up blog with my experience with using it.

P.S. He also has a thorough Flask tutorial as well:

The Flask Mega-Tutorial

Keyword Arguments in Calculating Distance Matrix

One of the challenges I had when writing up my RREML package in R was how to handle the coordinates as a keyword argument to my rreml function.  Well, I've pretty much abandoned my R package at this point in time, and would eventually like to implement the approach in Python.  I just stumbled across this very brief Reddit discussion:

Euclidian distance calculation with 2 matrices

And I found the scipy documentation referred to in the response to be a great reference for how to setup my new keyword argument.

scipy.spatial.distance.cdist

Convolution History

Back in my grad school days, one of the more useful techniques in deriving distributions was using the Convolution Operation.  I found this article extremely interesting and want to save it for future reference.

A History of the Convolution Operation