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Python for Power Systems A blog for power systems engineers to learn Python.

Run PSSE from Python and not the other way around

What this, the Slashie, mean is you consider me the best actor slash model and not the other way around.
FabioZoolander

How do you run your Python scripts on PSSE? Do you open the PSSE program and run from the “Run Program Automation File..” menu? I know some of my colleagues have created macro buttons that sit on their customised toolbar. The macro button is linked to a Python file and when you click the button that Python file runs.

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Learn Python for PSSE

The whit team have developed a new training course specifically designed for power systems engineers to get a better handle on the Python language.
During the two or three day course you will learn advanced Python usage with examples and lessons featuring the PSSE package.
We run a maximum of 5 courses a year. Most events are for Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane
Check out our dedicated training site for Python PSSE training.

Update:
For a brief introduction to getting started with Python for PSSE, check out our post on how to run PSSE from Python and not the other way around. Check out our other psse and python blog posts for inside information, tips and secrets that have never before been published.

whit now hosts a Python for PSSE Question and Answer forum. It is free and does not require you to sign up to ask, read or answer questions. We welcome you to come along and have a look around.

Patching ancestor revisions in Mercurial

Yesterday a bug was discovered in one of our production sites. The production site runs many Mercurial revisions behind the current preproduction head. We needed a way to fix the bug for the production site without requiring it update any further than that commit.

This post explains how we accomplished this task, which for some is a daily routine.

Mercurial graphlog extension

When running Mercurial from a terminal, the bundled graph log extensionis our favourite way to see an ascii drawing of our commit history. It really is a great extension to the default log command.

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Letter pressed business cards have arrived

The whit. business cards were designed by our user experience lead Hima.

The letter press process required three passes over the design. One for each of the two colours and one for the blind stamp

Blind stamping is where the letter press plate has no ink and simply makes an indentation into the paper

a letter pressed whit. business card

Menu with a difference

ngenworks' menu runs on an increasing angle throughout their site

This approach works well for sites that do not have a secondary menu link and is an example of how to incorporate corporate branding with angles into design

The site uses the ff-tisa-web-pro font, which is a popular serif font

BackType makes sense of billions of tweets

Backtype (edit: they have since pivoted it seems) uses a good visual hierarchy to draw attention to the important data

Large row of numbers at the top provide important easy to digest stats like number of followers

Each of the charts, while useful on a web browser can only show so much information. The BackType team has included a link to download the data for every chart. Customers could then post process this using any tool they wanted.

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Add a foreign key to forms.Form

How do you get that standard ForeignKey select box with the “+” add another icon next to it on your form? This post will take you through the steps that I took to get the ForeignKey working like it does in the Django admin.

How does the Django admin create a ForeignKey select field

Django creates a forms.ModelChoiceField with queryset and to_field_name arguments as the default form field for a foreignkey. To see for yourself, have a look at django.db.models.fields.related.py under the ForeignKey class and method formfield here.

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Python based link checker

I recently needed a link checker to create a csv formatted list of all links (especially hosted pdfs) on a client site.

There is a tool called webcheck by arthur de jong which does a great job of checking all of the links on a website and creating a pretty html report.

This got me most of the way there, I could see that in the output there was a page dedicated to a list of every url that was encountered during the search, which looked like what I wanted but was formatted as html

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IE7 bug - absolute div inside relative div

This is a short post to document a problem I was having displaying a side bar in Internet Explorer 7.

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Progress Update for the Dailie website

Our website entry for the Victorian Government App My State competition has been completed. Dailie, the public events sharing system is an experimental site that allows users to view festivals in Victoria that are scheduled to occur during the following week. Users can select and save details about the festivals that they would like to remember and then share those details as a calendar reminder on Google Calendar. 

The website is novel in that there is no requirement at any stage during this process for a user to sign up. Why should a user be required to fill out a sign up form to use the website? Our unique system automatically creates an account for the user, so that their selections can be saved for when they return to the site. All of this occurs without the need for any personal information. There is an option for a user to sign up for an account if they wish to use multiple computers, but this is not actively encouraged by the website. 

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