Archive for the ‘developers’ Category

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The When of Python

Monday, May 1st, 2023

SOFA Statistics (and SOFA Lite) are both written in Python. SOFA Statistics was originally written in Python2 and ported into Python3. SOFA Lite is being written in Python 3.11 from the ground up and tries to use the best features that modern Python provides. Not all features added to Python recently are good features and sometimes it is hard to know which of multiple alternatives should be used – for example, should we use collections.namedtuple, typing.namedtuple, or dataclasses.dataclass? Which is where the When of Python project comes in – tag line:

Shrinking Python to fit our brains by providing guidance on when to use language features (and when not to)

Find out more at https://whenof.python.nz/blog and try out the demo app at https://whenof.python.nz. The project can also be followed at https://twitter.com/WhenOfPython

Tags:,
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Maintenance Mode & SOFA Lite

Saturday, January 7th, 2023

SOFA Statistics is now in stable, maintenance mode. New releases are mainly for bug fixes.

If you have been having problems running SOFA on Ubuntu / Debian / Linux check out the new deb and archive downloads at https://www.sofastatistics.com/downloads.php

Alongside SOFA Statistics I have started SOFA Lite https://github.com/grantps/sofalite. This is an almost complete re-write using some of the latest Python 3 language features and a new code architecture. It is called SOFA Lite because I am stripping out some features that were painful to maintain but were of limited value to most users.

One design goal for SOFA Lite is to make it super-easy to run analyses from Python scripts rather than just via the GUI.

Another goal is to significantly reduce the complexity of packaging SOFA Lite for different operating systems. For example, 90% of the pain of packaging SOFA Statistics has related to its image processing libraries, none of which are really needed now that user-friendly screen-shot software is so widely available. I would love to be able to release a version of SOFA (Lite) that works on the latest versions of the Mac OS (alongside Windows and Linux) and this looks like a good way of making that possible.

So onwards and upwards again 🙂

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Call for community help on packaging SOFA for Mac

Saturday, May 25th, 2019

SOFA 1.5.1 has just been released but unfortunately only for Windows, Ubuntu, and other Linux distros. Mac users cannot install the latest version of SOFA and I suspect the package for SOFA 1.4.6 doesn’t work on modern Mac systems. So it is probably time to package SOFA 1.5.1 for contemporary Mac systems. Hence the call for community help.

I have managed to make a Windows package using pyinstaller and hopefully it will be relatively easy for a Mac developer with packaging skills (and already-installed software dependencies) to pick up the spec file and create a functional package for other Mac users. Obviously I would be willing to assist but without community help there won’t be a version of SOFA available for Mac.

Is this something you could help with – possibly in conjunction with a few other volunteers? I would be happy to add credits to the downloads page so people could recognise your input in making SOFA available on Mac. If interested contact me via https://www.sofastatistics.com/contact.php.

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Nearly ready to release 1.5.0

Monday, April 29th, 2019

Version 1.5.0 is nearly ready to release and not before time ;-). The last release was 1.4.6 in January 2016 but the time since then has not been wasted. Here are some of the changes ready to go:

  • SOFA will be able to display worked examples for the following statistical tests:
    • Mann-Whitney U
    • Wilcoxon’s Signed Ranks
    • Spearman’s Rho
    • Pearson’s Chi Square
  • It will be possible to choose the number of decimal places to show in report tables and charts
  • SOFA will be able to display counts or percentage separately on pie charts
  • There will be better smoothed line will be displayed for line charts
  • Better visual separation of subtables
  • Charts will be able to show N
  • Improvements to darker themes
  • Numerous bug fixes

Under the hood, SOFA has had some major changes:

  • Python 3.6+ (Linux) / 3.7 (Windows)
  • wxPython GUI toolkit is 4.0 (up from 2.8)

Sadly, the 1.5.0 release will not include a Mac package but later versions might do depending on practical considerations and offers of packaging help from Mac users. A deb package is already generated for Ubuntu / Debian. A Windows package is nearly ready – SOFA works on Windows 10 and all the dependencies have been baked into an executable ready for the final stages of packaging.

It is expected there will be a few minor bugs slipping through given the scale of the changes underneath but the plan is to quickly release 1.5.1 with these mopped up.

Posted in developers, python, statistics, ubuntu | Comments Closed

What might be coming next

Wednesday, April 20th, 2016

Python 2 is reaching its End Of Life (EOL) in 2020 so sometime before then I will want to shift SOFA to Python 3. I much prefer Python 3 but the main thing will be the libraries SOFA relies on to operate – especially on Windows and Mac.

Speaking of Mac, I am finding it very time-consuming supporting the platform. Not to enable SOFA’s core functionality to work but for the image processing libraries (esp convert and gs). Along the way I have spent countless weekends compiling using homebrew etc. Slow, tricky, and often fruitless. And it is difficult to test. I only have access to a Snow Leopard machine (virtualised to allow revert to snapshot) and that is no longer very relevant to what people need for newer versions of OS X. Some very kind people have offered to help with testing (thanks!) but the problem seems to be the packaging steps. Maybe what I need to do is ask the people who volunteered if any of them are able to compile convert and gs for me on their machines. I can then just include those versions in my packages and hopefully everything works.

A final work item is to add a Fisher’s LSD test. A friend is helping with this.

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Calling Mac Users – Contact Me to Test Latest Greatest Version

Saturday, March 14th, 2015

Over the last year, work on SOFA has been focused on a difficult packaging issue – enabling a Mac version to be built which allows Mac users to export their charts and reports as PNGs and PDFs. That functionality is now working on Snow Leopard and hopefully newer versions as well. But it would be nice to check with some people running Mac. If you’d like to try out the latest version of SOFA Statistics, please drop me a line via http://www.sofastatistics.com/contact.php.

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SOFA Shows Support For Linux

Thursday, April 10th, 2014

SOFA works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. But Linux is especially important for the project because SOFA is developed on Ubuntu. So it made sense to support the Linux ecosystem by signing up with the Open Invention Network. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t be necessary to have anything to do with software patents. For various reasons, they’re a bad idea and function more to inhibit innovation than encourage investment in software research and development. But the Open Invention Network plays a protective function in a world where people who create and actually make things can be preyed upon by parasites who have been granted monopolies on ideas – the so-called patent trolls.

The group was created to defend Linux from patent trolls and other attacks from patent holders. It tries to do this with its own patents which are then available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux. While it hasn’t been done, these patents could also, in theory, be used by the OIN, or an OIN member, against a hostile company in a patent war.

Google joins Open Invention Network patent commons as a full member

Anyway, a range of companies and projects large and small (over 800 at present and growing) have signed up for the initiative including Google, Dropbox, IBM, Canonical, Mozilla, Twitter, Puppet Labs, Valve Software, Alfresco, NEC, Blender, OpenShot, Novell, Inkscape, Philips, Red Hat, CentOS, GNOME, Wikimedia, MariaDB Foundation, Rackspace, Moodle, Openstack, Slackware, Tor, and Sony. You get the idea.

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PortableApps version of SOFA (alpha only)

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2014

J. David Eisenberg has kindly made a PortableApps version of SOFA for Windows. It is an alpha release only but it works and feedback/assistance is welcome. Here is his announcement as posted on the Google Group:

I have used the PortableApps guidelines (correctly, I hope!) to create a version of SOFA Statistics that can be installed on a USB drive and will retain your data and settings.

You can download the installer at http://evc-cit.info/SOFAStatisticsPortable_1.4.3_English.paf.exe ; this is Windows only.

Known problem: If you add the results of a statistical test to a report, any graphs for that statistical test will show up as a “missing image” icon. The image will be in the report; it just won’t show up on screen.

I have not tried scripting to see if that works properly.

Any comments are welcome at the SOFA statistics Google Group

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Database?! But I just want to analyse my data!

Thursday, August 22nd, 2013

SOFA aims for ease of use as part of its “ease of use, learn as your go, beautiful output” mantra. But it confronts users with having to think about databases, even if just working with simple spreadsheets of data or some data entered by hand.

This was the usability problem brought to my attention by a member of the community, Jan Dittrich. Jan (http://mindthegap.blog.bau-ha.us/), is completing a Masters in Media Arts and Design at the Bauhaus University in Weimar/Germany. He mainly does user research and usability, but has an interest in statistics as well. When using SOFA he noticed that a “database” needs to be selected for most of the activities but that it might be a rather technical concept for some of those who use SOFA. He wrote me an email addressing the problem and we subsequently exchanged ideas.

So how to address this without removing one important ability of SOFA – namely the ability to connect directly to people’s data when it is in a database (e.g. MySQL).

We explored a few options …

Initial GUI ideas from Jan

… but ended up following the principle of “the least we could do” as recommended in the fantastic usability book “Rocket Surgery Made Easy” by Steve Krug.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy

As Krug notes, tweaking is usually better than redesigning because 1) it actually gets done; 2) larger changes are inevitably going to break some things (think months of squashing all the bugs out again); and 3) redesigns annoy a lot of existing users who have gotten used to the status quo (actually Krug has 9 reasons but these are my favourites).

Anyway, I had no enthusiasm for a major GUI overhaul but it did not make sense to leave a known usability problem in place. What Jan and I came up with was rather simple and elegant. SOFA only shows the Database label and drop-down if the user has configured SOFA to connect to any databases. Expect to see this change in the next version (1.3.5).

Database details only displayed when needed

Users who have database connections will notice no difference. But for everyone else the interface will be simpler and easier to use. Sometimes, less is more.

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Better Mac Testing of SOFA

Sunday, May 5th, 2013

SOFA Statistics has a Mac version so I need to be able to test and package SOFA on a Mac. I do this on my Ubuntu Linux host machine using VirtualBox which works pretty well. But until a few minutes ago, the VirtualBox instance of Mac I had running was squeezed into a somewhat restrictive screen resolution. No longer! Here are the two basic steps I followed to resolve this problem:

1) Add a new screen resolution to com.apple.Boot.plist as per How to Increase Mac OS X Snow Leopard Virtual Machine Screen Resolution on VirtualBox and VMware using Method #1 (but not from the /Extra folder – from the next bit):

Mac screen resolutions

2) Make screen resolution available from VirtualBox end as per Notes on setting 1680×1050 resolution on a Snow Leopard inside a VirtualBox

Resolutions from VirtualBox

And here is the result – a much more pleasant experience of testing SOFA on the Mac platform.

Better mac screen resolution for sofa
Next goal is to get some tricky graphics libraries I need working on the Mac.

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