I have moved to www.jeffskinnerbox.me
Signals & Systems for Dummies
To gain a deeper understanding of the GNU Radio software, I want to rebuild some skills & insights in digital signal processing. But before I take on this topic, I want to refresh my signals & systems skills I learned long ago while in college. I have chosen Mark Wickert’s book, Signals and Systems For Dummies, to do this.
Learning IPython for Interactive Computing and Data Visualizatio
Go ahead and laugh if you wish, but I got good reasons for choosing this book. I like its brevity, since I don’t want to spend a great deal of time re-honing these old skills (I expect them to come back quickly), and its use of IPython will help me master a powerful tool that I foresee using within this blog; specifically the IPython Notebook. To begin learning IPython, I’m currently reading Learning IPython for Interactive Computing and Data Visualization by Cyrille Rossant. So it’s currently “back to school” for me on many levels.
Example of a IPython Notebook
So this brings me to the topic of this posting. Initially I considered moving my blog off of WordPress.com to a WordPress.org hosting site. This should allow me to post IPython Notebook pages. WordPress.com is very restrictive on what you can do with your blog, but the WordPress software, when self hosted via WordPress.org, can provide you a great deal of blogging freedom. I need to take advantage of some of the powerful WordPress Plugins and WordPress.com will not support any of them. Moving to a self-hosted WordPress blog doesn’t appear to be very difficult. The biggest trick will be picking the right web hosting company that is strong WordPress supporter who will make it easily move my blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org.
I then took a closer look at how others have successfully using IPython Notebook for blogging. I took a very close look at Carl Boettiger’s online Lab Notebook. This introduced me to GitHub Pages and Jekyll. With these tools you can create an archived, static site that is hosted for free. I saw the synergy between these tools and how I work with my Linux box, electronics, and now IPython and its seemed like the way to go. The site “Learning Jekyll By Example: Build a Jekyll Website, Start to Finish” says it well:
- Jekyll can be hosted on any web hosting service that serves static files.
- Jekyll-powered websites are also extremely secure.
- Jekyll is mainly targeted at tech-savvy bloggers.
- But what Jekyll lacks in newbie-friendliness it makes up for in power and flexibility.
- Jekyll allows you, the content author, to display your work as you see fit, without the typical restrictions imposed by other blogging platforms.
Jeff's Skinner Box 