Scott Gorlin

After receiving threatening letters from my webhost for storing too many photos online, I decided to move the photo backend of this site to Zenfolio.com.  I really enjoy the sophistication of their service in terms of privacy settings per photo and group, the ability to manage photos in folder-like objects (in a much better manner than Smugmug), direct printing, and unlimited storage for a fairly low price.  Even better, they gave me a free account when I told them I’d be writing Python code for it!

The end result of my switch is that I have wrapped their public API in Python.  I have made three packages available:

• zenapi, a proper Python interface to Zenfolio which exposes their API in clean Python objects
• zensync, a service built on zenapi which synchronizes a local directory with Zenfolio
• djzen, a Django plugin built on top of zenapi which mirrors a Zenfolio account into a Django database for all the Web 2.0 you can get.  This plugin is currently running on this site and providing all the integration between my Photos page and my Zenfolio account.

I have just returned from a week of overhauling the world’s most popular machine learning suite.  PyMVPA is an extremely powerful and flexible toolset for machine learning research and applications in Python, and although the 0.4x release is stable and wonderful enough for my own research, the upcoming 0.5 release features some amazing core improvements that will reset the standards for multivariate data analysis.  Seriously, if you aren’t using PyMVPA for your own work, start now.

New domain name for life!

Watch Dr. Sinha’s lecture on Project Prakash to the MIT Alumni Association.

I won the Angus MacDonald Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching!  Many thanks to the MIT community and my 2008 Sensation and Perception class for the nomination.  See the press release and other award-winners at the MIT news office.