Future energy systems will depend much more on renewable energy resources than the current ones. Renewable energy resources, in turn, fluctuate and are not permanently available to the same extent than fossil ones. In consequence, new approaches are required to balance electricity demand and production. One approach is to schedule the compressed-air production of industrial installations according to the current load and supply of the electric grid. To be able to do this, compressed-air has to be stored for peak load phases. Computer simulations are an efficient tool to judge the technical feasibility of such an approach and to compare it with other load management systems. This paper describes the thermodynamic fundamentals of compressed-air energy storage and their integration in a computer model. The obtained results from simulations were compared with results from measurements showing good consistency. Thus, the model was used to simulate different principles to store compressed-air. Systems with low pressure level and with high storage volume appear to be the most energy-efficient ones. In general the technology has the potential to be utilized in the electric load management. However, further simulations are required to determine the most economical solution.

Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation, written by Georg Brandl and licensed under the BSD license.

It was originally created for the new Python documentation, and it has excellent facilities for the documentation of Python projects, but C/C++ is already supported as well, and it is planned to add special support for other languages as well. Of course, this site is also created from reStructuredText sources using Sphinx! The following features should be highlighted:

• Output formats: HTML (including Windows HTML Help), LaTeX (for printable PDF versions), ePub, Texinfo, manual pages, plain text
• Extensive cross-references: semantic markup and automatic links for functions, classes, citations, glossary terms and similar pieces of information
• Hierarchical structure: easy definition of a document tree, with automatic links to siblings, parents and children
• Automatic indices: general index as well as a language-specific module indices
• Code handling: automatic highlighting using the Pygments highlighter
• Extensions: automatic testing of code snippets, inclusion of docstrings from Python modules (API docs), and more
• Contributed extensions: more than 50 extensions contributed by users in a second repository; most of them installable from PyPI

virtualenvwrapper is a set of extensions to Ian Bicking’s virtualenv tool. The extensions include wrappers for creating and deleting virtual environments and otherwise managing your development workflow, making it easier to work on more than one project at a time without introducing conflicts in their dependencies.

The basic problem being addressed is one of dependencies and versions, and indirectly permissions. Imagine you have an application that needs version 1 of LibFoo, but another application requires version 2. How can you use both these applications? If you install everything into /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (or whatever your platform’s standard location is), it’s easy to end up in a situation where you unintentionally upgrade an application that shouldn’t be upgraded.

Or more generally, what if you want to install an application and leave it be? If an application works, any change in its libraries or the versions of those libraries can break the application.

Also, what if you can’t install packages into the global site-packages directory? For instance, on a shared host.

In all these cases, virtualenv can help you. It creates an environment that has its own installation directories, that doesn’t share libraries with other virtualenv environments (and optionally doesn’t access the globally installed libraries either).

Syntastic is a syntax checking plugin for Vim that runs files through external syntax checkers and displays any resulting errors to the user. This can be done on demand, or automatically as files are saved. If syntax errors are detected, the user is notified and is happy because they didn't have to compile their code or execute their script to find them.

The modular python source code checker: pep8, pyflakes and co

Publons allows you to record, verify, and showcase your peer review contributions in a format you can include in job and funding applications (without breaking reviewer anonymity).

• Get recognition for all the peer review work you do for journals.
• See how you compare with our review stats and graphs.
• Help your university climb the university leaderboard.
• Simply forward your "thank you for reviewing" emails to reviews@publons.com to add reviews.

In response to the Snowden revelation that the CIA compromised Apple developers' build process, thus enabling the government to insert backdoors at compile time without developers realizing, Debian, the world's largest free software project, has embarked on a campaign to to prevent just such attacks. Debian's solution? Reproducible builds.

Reproducible builds, as the name suggests, make it possible for others to reproduce the build process. "The idea is to get reasonable confidence that a given binary was indeed produced by the source," Lunar said. "We want anyone to be able to produce identical binaries from a given source."

Google's motto is to do no evil. Fair enough. Yet, they are getting an alarmingly large amount of the pie at the moment, and we don't want to fall into a Minitel2.0 world. So let's see how the world looks like without Google, and with a sprinkle of self-hosting (on distant-sun or a NAS-to-come), and double serving of open source and free software.

Replacing other non-Google proprietary services for open protocols is also the extended scope of this.

OpenGrok is a fast and usable source code search and cross reference engine. It helps you search, cross-reference and navigate your source tree. It can understand various program file formats and version control histories like Mercurial, Git, SCCS, RCS, CVS, Subversion, Teamware, ClearCase, Perforce, Monotone and Bazaar. In other words it lets you grok (profoundly understand) source code and is developed in the open, hence the name OpenGrok. It is written in Java.

Replace your VBA code with Python, a powerful yet easy-to-use programming language that is highly suited for numerical analysis. Supports Windows & Mac!

0bin is a client side encrypted pastebin that can run without a database.

0bin allows anybody to host a pastebin while welcoming any type of content to be pasted in it. The idea is that one can (probably...) not be legally entitled to moderate the pastebin content as they have no way to decrypt it.

It's an Python implementation of the zerobin project under the WTF licence. It's easy to install even if you know nothing about Python.

Ken Thompson's "cc hack"

Presented in the journal, Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, in a paper entitled "Reflections on Trusting Trust".

Ken Thompson, co-author of UNIX, recounted a story of how he created a version of the C compiler that, when presented with the source code for the "login" program, would automatically compile in a backdoor to allow him entry to the system. This is only half the story, though. In order to hide this trojan horse, Ken also added to this version of "cc" the ability to recognize if it was recompiling itself to make sure that the newly compiled C compiler contained both the "login" backdoor, and the code to insert both trojans into a newly compiled C compiler. In this way, the source code for the C compiler would never show that these trojans existed.

Interesting approach to quick filesystem navigation.

Automated tools like autojump, z, and fasd address this problem by offering shortcuts to the directories you often go to. The author of this shell hack prefers a more manual solution, which provided quite an increase in efficiency with this.

The programming language Python has overtaken French as the most popular language taught in primary schools, according to a new survey released today.

Six out of ten parents said they want their primary school age children to learn the coding language over French. And 75% of primary school children said they would rather learn how to program a robot than learn a modern foreign language.

The internet's best chess database and community.

Shaarlier - Simple Android app for sharing links on Shaarli.