This month’s Python North East talk will be an introduction to Apache Spark, given by yours truly. The presentation slides for the talk can be found here. Code Dojo Get Spark After the talk there will be chance to have a play with Spark yourself. Firstly you need to download the Spark binaries and unpack them to a folder on your local machine. I also have a few USB keys with the binaries on, so wave your hand if the network is slow.

As part of my PhD I was generously given a brand new Microsoft Surface Pro 3. Unfortunately, as I have been an Ubuntu user for the better part of a decade, using Windows again was a less than optimal experience. Having read many blog posts about the Surface 3 hardware not being supported by the current Ubuntu kernel I resolved to wait and battle on with Windows 8.1. However, after a sever bout of yak shaving I managed to get the latest 15.

As part of my MRes I am using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Microsoft provide Linux support for Azure and SDK’s for a lot of programming languages. However I hit a few bumps getting the command line tools installed due to some quirks with Ubuntu. The easiest way to get the Azure CLI is to use the Node.js package manager npm: $ sudo apt-get install nodejs $ sudo apt-get install npm This should all work fine and then you can simply install the Azure CLI using the command below:

Every year I use the great sonic festival that is EuroVision as an excuse to get my friends together and have a laugh. In an effort to make things more interesting I run a sweepstake, every one chips in a few pounds and the countries in the final are divided evenly between the group, with whoever was allotted the winning country taking home the pot. The allocation of countries originally took the form of the tried and tested “paper in a hat” method.

Well here I am again blogging about how to fix something on Ubuntu. It is a great OS, but as with everything in Linux, eventually you need to open up a terminal and poke it a bit. My university has a Remote Application Service (RAS) that uses the Citrix Receiver software to provide access to virtualised software. Great for running Matlab at home using the uni licence. Citrix do provide a Linux version of their receiver software (packaged as both .