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PreviousNext: PowerBI Dashboard: Addressing content currency
Post co-authored with NSW Resources. A critical issue with the management of content currency on our Drupal website, nsw.gov.au/nswresources required an innovative solution to provide us with an automated content audit process.
by luhur.rizal / 6 November 2024Due to the complexity and size of our Drupal web presence, ensuring each page was up-to-date and reviewed by the appropriate business unit became increasingly challenging. We needed a tool to track how long it had been since a page was reviewed, set specific periods for future reviews and easily identify the page owners for each section of the website. Furthermore, with the required frequency of daily updates to the site, the solution had to be ‘live’ to accurately reflect these changes.
Choosing the right solutionTo tackle these challenges, we collaborated with our Drupal web development partner, PreviousNext, to create a live .csv file of all relevant web pages. This file included custom metadata detailing each page’s review frequency, page owner, date of last page update, date of last content review, publishing status and the next scheduled review date. By using this .csv file as a data source, we built a user-friendly content audit report dashboard in Microsoft Power BI.
The PowerBI dashboard provides executives with a high-level overview of which sections of the website are most in need of review. A complementary dashboard for ‘content champions’ offers a more granular view of the status of each individual page, enabling targeted content management.
Power BI implementationImplementing this solution involved several steps:
Internal stakeholder consultationWe engaged with the various business units in NSW Resources division to identify page owners and establish appropriate review periods for each section of the website.
Metadata assignmentMetadata bulk-uploaded to the pages included the custom metadata fields created for the project, such as review periods and page owners.
Data manipulation in PowerBIData from the .csv file was manipulated within PowerBI to ensure that columns were in the correct format. We created a 'Review status' column based on the next date of review to provide clear visibility. We also filtered out any unpublished or archived content to make it more streamlined.
PowerBI buildUsing the dataset from the website's metadata and Google Analytics, we built a comprehensive dashboard in PowerBI Desktop and then uploaded it to PowerBI Service for broader access. Live links to the web pages were integrated into the dashboards for easy navigation.
Executive overview reportWe developed a high-level summary report that shows how many pages each business unit is responsible for and includes Google Analytics page views from the past 30 days.
Content audit reportThis report provides filtering by review status and sub-areas within each business unit, offering direct links to the listed web pages and conditional formatting utilising a traffic light system for review status indicators.
Overall trackerDesigned to be used exclusively by the NSW Resources website team, this site-wide and document overview provides an overall tracker, including documents, events, and articles that are not part of other reports.
Internal integrationsPowerBI reports were integrated into Microsoft Teams and the SharePoint intranet, facilitating use across the business.
Internal work request formThe form was updated to distinguish whether a web update is part of a comprehensive content audit review, therefore requiring a review period reset, or just a minor adjustment that means the review status remains unchanged.
A content audit that works for everyoneThe project required extensive consultation to define the scope and needs of each business unit. Following this, identifying the correct page owners, along with setting appropriate review periods, posed significant challenges.
As business units sometimes want entire website sections to be marked as reviewed with a change in the review period, the Drupal-side dashboard allowed for bulk changes to both owners and review periods by uploading a revised version of the .csv file, saving substantial time.
Understanding the correct licensing requirements for PowerBI was another challenge. After consulting with our internal IT team, a group workspace was set up under an enterprise agreement, and an individual licence was obtained for the team member managing the dashboards.
Testing the PowerBI dashboardTo ensure effectiveness, the solution was initially tested in a development environment that mirrored the production site. This approach allowed us to test the limitations and user experience prior to going live. During this phase, we tested the bulk upload of the .csv file to update page metadata.
A soft launch of the content audit dashboard provided valuable insights, such as the realisation that a three-month review period was too short, given the number of pages each business unit manages.
As a result of this testing period, we made minor adjustments, such as requiring a defined review period for each page and allowing users to opt-out of updates considered a ‘review’ for reporting purposes. This might include, for example, correcting a typo, which doesn’t constitute a page review in the context of the content audit dashboard.
Transforming content auditingThis solution significantly enhanced reporting capabilities across NSW Resources, reducing the need for manual intervention. Now, page updates are easily reflected in the report dashboard automatically.
The PowerBI dashboards offer real-time updates and clear visibility of page ownership and review status, making it easier for business units to manage their content.
Business units can independently track the currency of their pages without needing data from the digital team, streamlining the process and increasing efficiency.
Future plans for the dashboardThe solution will continue to evolve. We plan to use the work done on the PowerBI integration to inform future website improvements with the potential for further Google Analytics data integration.
A document audit is currently a separate and opt-in process for business units, but future plans may involve greater integration.
ConclusionOverall, this innovative solution addresses a critical need for NSW Resources by providing a robust, automated and user-friendly content audit process that adapts to the dynamic nature of our Drupal website.
PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #654 (Nov. 5, 2024)
#654 – NOVEMBER 5, 2024
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What goes into building a spreadsheet application in Python that runs in the browser? How do you make it launch quickly, and where do you store the cells of data? This week on the show, we speak with Chris Laffra about his project, PySheets, and his book “Communication for Engineers.”
REAL PYTHON podcast
Python 3.13 included a new version of the REPL which has the ability to define keyboard shortcuts. This article shows you how to create one and warns you about potential hangups.
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Say goodbye to managing failures, network outages, flaky endpoints, and long-running processes. Temporal ensures your code never fails. Period. PLUS, you can get started today on Temporal Cloud with $1,000 free credits on us →
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To better understand just where the performance cost of running tests comes from, Anders ran a million empty tests. This post talks about what he did and the final results.
ANDERS HOVMOLLER
Currently, CPython signs its artifacts with both PGP and Sigstore. Removing the PGP signature has been proposed, but that has implications: Sigstore is still new enough that many Linux distributions don’t support it yet.
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In this video course, you’ll learn what magic methods are in Python, how they work, and how to use them in your custom classes to support powerful features in your object-oriented code.
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As GenAI and LLMs rapidly evolve, the impact of data leaks and unsafe AI outputs makes it critical to secure your AI infrastructure. Learn how MLOps and ML Platform teams can use the newly launched Guardrails Pro to secure AI operations — enabling faster, safer adoption of LLMs at scale →
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In the real world, things decay over time. In the digital world things get kept forever, and sometimes that shouldn’t be so. Designing for deletion is hard.
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Bite code! does their monthly Python news wrap-up. Check out stories on 3.13, proposed template strings, dependency groups in pyproject.toml, and more.
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This project uses computer vision solution to automate doing inventory of products in retail, using YOLOv8 and image embeddings for precise detection.
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Context managers enable you to create “template” code with initialization and clean up to make the code that uses them easier to read and understand.
JUHA-MATTI SANTALA
This post celebrating ten years of Django Girls talks about how it got started, what they’re hoping to do, and how you can get involved.
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This quick TIL post talks about five useful pytest options that let you control what tests to run with respect to failing tests.
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This post shows you how to return values from coroutines that have been concurrently executed using asyncio.gather().
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This list contains the recorded talks from the PyBay 2024 conference.
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Happy Pythoning!
This was PyCoder’s Weekly Issue #654.
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Droptica: Product Search Engine in Drupal with Apache Solr Integration - How-to Guide
Product search is a key function in e-commerce today. This article will show how to create an advanced product search engine based on Drupal and its integration with Apache Solr. By combining Drupal, Droopler installation profile, and Solr, a powerful tool can be created to make it easier for customers to navigate and search large data sets faster. I encourage you to read the blog post or watch the video in the “Nowoczesny Drupal” series (the video is in Polish).
FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, November 8, starting at 12:00 EST (17:00 UTC)
Real Python: Introduction to Web Scraping With Python
Web scraping is the process of collecting and parsing raw data from the Web, and the Python community has come up with some pretty powerful web scraping tools.
The Internet hosts perhaps the greatest source of information on the planet. Many disciplines, such as data science, business intelligence, and investigative reporting, can benefit enormously from collecting and analyzing data from websites.
In this video course, you’ll learn how to:
- Parse website data using string methods and regular expressions
- Parse website data using an HTML parser
- Interact with forms and other website components
[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]
Specbee: How to fix SEO rankings after your Drupal website migration
Real Python: Quiz: Variables in Python: Usage and Best Practices
In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Variables in Python: Usage and Best Practices.
By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how to create and assign values to variables, change a variable’s data type dynamically, use variables to create expressions, counters, accumulators, and Boolean flags, follow best practices for naming variables, and create, access, and use variables in their scopes.
[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]
Performance of data import in LabPlot
In many cases, importing data into LabPlot for further analysis and visualization is the first step in the application:
LabPlot supports many different formats (CSV, Origin, SAS, Stata, SPSS, MATLAB, SQL, JSON, binary, OpenDocument Spreadsheets (ods), Excel (xlsx), HDF5, MQTT, Binary Logging Format (BLF), FITS, NetCDF, ROOT (CERN), LTspice, Ngspice) and we plan to add support for even more formats in the future. All of these formats have their reasons for existence as well as advantages and disadvantages. However, the performance of reading the data varies greatly between the different formats and also between the different CPU generations. In this post, we’ll show how long it takes to import a given amount of data in four different formats – ASCII/CSV, Binary, HDF5, and netCDF.
This post is not about promoting any of the formats, nor is it about doing very sophisticated measurements with different amounts and types of data and extensive CPU benchmarking. Rather, it’s about what you can (roughly) expect in terms of performance on the new and not so new hardware with the current implementation in LabPlot.
For this exercise, we import the data set with 1 integer column and 5 columns of float values (Brownian motion for 5 “particles”, one integer column for the index) with 50 Millions of rows which results into 300 Millions of numerical values:
We take 6 measurements for each format, ignore the first measurement, which is almost always an outlier due to the disk cache in the kernel and results in faster file reads on subsequent accesses, and calculate the averages:
As expected, the file formats that deal with binary representation internally (Binary, HDF5, NetCDF) provide significantly better performance compared to ASCII, and this difference becomes larger the slower the CPU is. The performance of HDF5 and NetCDF is almost the same because the newer version of NetCDF is based on HDF5.
The implementation in the data import code is straightforward. Ignoring for a moment the complexity with the different options affecting the behavior of the parser, different data types and other subleties, once everything is set up it’s just a matter of iterating over the data, parsing it and converting it into the internal structures. The logic inside the loop is fixed, and a linear behavior with respect to the total number of values to read is expected. This expectation is confirmed using the same CPU (we took the fastest CPU from the table above) and varying the total number of rows with the fixed number of columns:
The performance of the import is even more critical when dealing with external data that is frequently modified. In order to provide a smooth visualization in LabPlot for such “live data”, it’s important to optimize all steps involved here, like the import of the new data itself, as well as the recalculation in the algorithms (smoothing, etc.) and in the visualization part. For the next release(s), we’re now working to further optimize the implementation to handle more performance-critical scenarios in the near future. The results of these activities, funded by the NLnet grant, will be the subject of a dedicated post soon.
Talk Python to Me: #484: From React to a Django+HTMX based stack
Tryton News: Tryton Release 7.4
We are proud to announce the 7.4 release of Tryton .
This release provides many bug fixes, performance improvements and some fine tuning.
You can give it a try on the demo server, use the docker image or download it here.
As usual upgrading from previous series is fully supported.
Here is a list of the most noticeable changes:
Changes for the User ClientsThe Many2Many widget now has a restore button to revert the removal of records before saving.
The CSV export window stays open after the export is done so you can refine your export without having the redo all of the configuration.
It also supports exporting and importing translatable fields with a language per column.
The error messages displayed when there is a problem with the CSV import have been improved to include the row and column number of the value that caused the error.
The management window for the favourites has been removed and replaced by a simple “last favorite first” order.
The focus goes back to the search entry after performing a search/refresh.
You can now close a tab by middle clicking on it (as is common in other software).
Web ClientThe left menu and the attachment preview can now be resized so the user can make them the optimal size for their screen.
AccountingThe minimal chart of accounts has been replaced by the a universal chart of accounts which is a good base for IFRS and US GAAP.
It is now possible to copy an accounting move from a closed period. The closed period will be replaced by the current period after accepting the warning.
The payments are now numbered to make it easier to identify them inside the application.
An option has been added to the parties to allow direct debits to be created based on the balance instead of the accounting lines.
We’ve added a button on the Stripe payments and Stripe and Braintree customers to allow an updated to be forced. This helps when fixing missed webhooks.
When a stock move is cancelled, the corresponding stock account move is now cancelled automatically.
But it now no longer possible to cancel a done stock move which has been included in a calculation used for anglo-saxon accounting.
It is now possible to deactivate an agent so that they are no longer used for future orders.
CompanyIt is now possible to add a company logo. This is then displayed in the header of generated documents.
IncotermA warning is now raised when the incoterm of a shipment is different from the original document (such as the sale or purchase).
PartyWe’ve added more identifiers for parties like the United Kingdom Unique Taxpayer Reference, Taiwanese Tax Number, Turkish tax identification number, El Salvador Tax Number, Singapore’s Unique Entity Number, Montenegro Tax Number and Kenya Tax Number.
ProductWe’ve added a wizard to manage the replacement of products. Once there is no more stock of the replaced product in any of the warehouses, all the stock on all pending orders are replaced automatically.
A description can now be set for each product image.
There is now a button on the price list form to open the list of lines. This is helpful when the price list has a lot of lines.
ProductionIt is now possible to cancel a done production. All its stock moves are then cancelled.
The Bill of Materials now have an auto-generated internal code.
PurchaseThe wizard to handle exceptions has been improved to clearly display the list of lines to recreate and the list of lines to ignore.
The menu entry Parties associated to Purchases has been removed in favour of the per party reporting.
The purchase amendment now supports amending the quantity of a purchase line using the secondary unit.
QualityIt is now no longer possible to delete non-pending inspections.
SaleThe wizards to handle exceptions have been improved to clearly display the list of lines to recreate and the list of lines to ignore.
The menu entry Parties associated to Sales has been removed in favor of the per party reporting.
A warning is now raised when the user tries to submit a complaint for the same origin as an existing complaint.
The reporting can be grouped per promotion.
From a promotion, it is now possible to list of the sales related to it.
The coupon number of promotion can now be reused once the previous promotion has expired.
The sale amendment now supports amending the quantity of a sale line using the secondary unit.
StockIt is now possible to cancel a done shipment. When this happens the stock moves of the shipment are cancelled.
The task to reschedule late shipments now includes any shipment that is not yet done.
The supplier shipments no longer have a default planned date.
The customer shipments now have an extra state, Shipped, before the Done state.
The lot trace now shows the inventory as a document.
The package weight and the warehouse are now criteria that can be used when selecting a shipping method.
Changes for the System AdministratorThe clients automatically retry 5 times on a 503 Service Unavailable response. They respect the Retry-After value if it is set in the response header. This is useful when performing short maintenance on the server without causing an interruption for the users.
The scheduled tasks now show when they are running and prevent the user from editing them (as they are locked anyway).
We also store their last duration for a month by default. So the administrator can analyze and find slow tasks.
It is now possible to configure a license key for the TinyMCE editor.
Also TinyMCE has been updated to version 7.
It is now possible to configure the command to use to convert a report to a different format. This allows the use of an external service like document-converter.
AccountingThe Accounting Party group has been merged into the *Accounting" group.
We now raise a warning when the user is changing one of the configured credentials used on external services. This is to prevent accidental modification.
Document IncomingIt is now possible to set a maximum size for the content of the document incoming requests.
Inbound EmailIt is now possible to set a maximum size for the inbound email requests.
Web ShopThere is now a scheduled task that updates the cache that contains the product data feeds.
Changes for the Developer ServerThe ORM supports SQL Range functions and operators to build exclusion constraints. This allows, for example, the use of non-overlapping constraints using an index.
On PostgreSQL the btree_gist extension may be needed otherwise the ORM will fallback to locking querying the table.
The SQLite backend adds simple SQL constraints to the table schema.
The relational fields with a filter are no longer copied by default. This was a frequent source of bugs as the same relational field without the filter was already copied so it generated duplicates.
We’ve added a sparkline tool to generate textual sparklines. This allows the removal of the pygal dependency.
The activate_modules from testing now accepts a list of setup methods that are run before taking the backup. This speeds up any other tests which restore the backup as they then do not need to run those setup methods.
The backend now has a method to estimate the number of rows in a table. This is faster than counting when we only need an estimate, for example when choosing between a join and a sub-query.
We’ve added a ModelSQL.__setup_indexes__ method that prepares the indexes once the Pool has been loaded.
It is now possible to generate many sequential numbers in a single call. This allows, for example, to number a group of invoices with a single call.
The backend now uses JSONB by default for MultiSelection fields. It was already supported, but the database needed to be altered to activate the feature.
You can now define the cardinality (low, normal or high) for the index usage. This allows the backend to choose an optimal type of index to create.
We now have tools that apply the typing to columns of an SQLite query. This is needed because SQLite doesn’t do a good job of supporting CAST.
The RPC responses are now compressed if their size if large enough and the client accepts it.
The ModelView._changed_values and ModelStorage._save_values are now methods instead of properties. This makes it is easier to debug errors because AttributeError exceptions are no longer hidden.
The scheduled task runner now uses a pool of processes for better parallelism and management. Only the running task is now locked.
We’ve added an environment variable TEST_NETWORK so we can avoid running tests that require network access.
There is now a command line option for exporting translations and storing them as a po file in the corresponding module.
Tryton sets the python-format flag in the po file for the translations containing python formats. This allows Weblate (our translation service) to check if the translations keep the right placeholders.
The payment amounts are now cached on the account move line to improve the performance when searching for lines to pay.
The payment amounts now have to be greater or equal to zero.
Only purchase lines of type line can be used as an origin for a stock move.
SaleOnly sales lines of type line can be used as an origin for a stock move.
The fields from the Sale Shipment Cost Module are now all prefixed with sale_.
StockCancelled moves are no longer included in the shipment and package measurements.
2 posts - 1 participant
Django Weblog: Django bugfix release issued: 5.1.3
Today we've issued the 5.1.3 bugfix release.
The release package and checksums are available from our downloads page, as well as from the Python Package Index. The PGP key ID used for this release is Mariusz Felisiak: 2EF56372BA48CD1B.
KDE Plasma 6.2.3, Bugfix Release for November
Tuesday, 5 November 2024. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.2.3.
Plasma 6.2 was released in October 2024 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds two weeks' worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:
- Bluedevil: Correct PIN entry behavior. Commit.
- KWin: Backends/drm: don't set backlight brightness to 1 in HDR mode. Commit. Fixes bug #495242
- KDE GTK Config: Gracefully handle decoration plugin failing to load. Commit.
Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #474 - Revolt Event Loop
Today we are talking about the revolt event Loop, what it is, and why it matters with guest Alexander Varwijk (farvag). We’ll also cover IEF Complex Widget Dialog as our module of the week.
For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/474
Topics- What is an event loop
- Why does Drupal need an event loop
- What will change in core to implement this
- What problem does this solve
- Does this make Cron cleaner and long running processes faster
- What impact will this have on contrib
- How would contrib use this loop
- What does this mean for database compatibility
- What inspired this change
- Test instability
- Why Revolt
- Will this help with Drupal AI
- Adopt the Revolt event loop for async task orchestration
- revoltphp/event-loop was added as a dependency to Drupal Core
- Add "EventLoop::run" to Drupal Core
- Migrate BigPipe and the Renderer code that's currently built with fibers
- Revolt Playground that shows converting some Fiber implementations from Drupal to the Event Loop
- DrupalCon Barcelona Talk about "Why Async Drupal a Big Deal Is"
- Async PHP libraries
Alexander Varwijk - alexandervarwijk.com Kingdutch
HostsNic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Joshua "Josh" Mitchell - joshuami.com joshuami
MOTW CorrespondentMartin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
- Brief description:
- Have you ever wanted to use Inline Entity Forms but have the dependent form open in a dialog? There’s a module for that.
- Module name/project name:
- Brief history
- How old: created in Mar 2020 by dataweb, though recent releases are by Chris Lai (chrisck), a fellow Canadian
- Versions available: 2.1.1 and 2.2.2, the latter or which is compatible Drupal 8.8 or newer, all the way up to Drupal 11
- Maintainership
- Actively maintained, latest release in the past month
- Number of open issues: 4 open issues, none of which are bugs against the current version
- Usage stats:
- 273 sites
- Module features and usage
- When you install the module, your Inline Entity Form widget configuration will have a new checkbox, to “Enable Popup for IEF”
- Includes specialized handling for different kinds of entities, like nodes, users, taxonomy terms, and users
- Will handle not just the creation forms, but editing entities, and also duplicating or deleting entities
- Not something you would always need, but can be very useful if the form you want to use for entity or even parent forms that are complex
- I should also add that IEF supports form modes, so often I’ll create an “embedded” form mode that exposes fewer elements, for example hiding the fields for URL alias, sticky, and so on. So I would start there, but if the content creation experience still feels complex, then IEF Complex Widget Dialog might be a nice way to help
Ravi Dwivedi: Asante Kenya for a Good Time
In September of this year, I visited Kenya to attend the State of the Map conference. I spent six nights in Nairobi, two nights in Mombasa, and one night on a train. I was very happy with the visa process being smooth and quick. Furthermore, I stayed at the Nairobi Transit Hotel with other attendees, with Ibtehal from Bangladesh as my roommate. One of the memorable moments was the time I spent at a local coffee shop nearby. We used to go there at midnight, despite the grating in the shops suggesting such adventures were unsafe. Fortunately, nothing bad happened, and we were rewarded with a fun time with the locals.
The coffee shop Ibtehal and me used to visit during the midnight Grating at a chemist shop in Mombasa, KenyaThe country lies on the equator, which might give the impression of extremely hot temperatures. However, Nairobi was on the cooler side (10–25 degrees Celsius), and I found myself needing a hoodie, which I bought the next day. It also served as a nice souvenir, as it had an outline of the African map printed on it.
I bought a Safaricom SIM card for 100 shillings and recharged it with 1000 shillings for 8 GB internet with 5G speeds and 400 minutes talk time.
A visit to Nairobi’s Historic Cricket GroundOn this trip, I got a unique souvenir that can’t be purchased from the market—a cricket jersey worn in an ODI match by a player. The story goes as follows: I was roaming around the market with my friend Benson from Nairobi to buy a Kenyan cricket jersey for myself, but we couldn’t find any. So, Benson had the idea of visiting the Nairobi Gymkhana Club, which used to be Kenya’s main cricket ground. It has hosted some historic matches, including the 2003 World Cup match in which Kenya beat the mighty Sri Lankans and the record for the fastest ODI century by Shahid Afridi in just 37 balls in 1996.
Although entry to the club was exclusively for members, I was warmly welcomed by the staff. Upon reaching the cricket ground, I met some Indian players who played in Kenyan leagues, as well as Lucas Oluoch and Dominic Wesonga, who have represented Kenya in ODIs. When I expressed interest in getting a jersey, Dominic agreed to send me pictures of his jersey. I liked his jersey and collected it from him. I gave him 2000 shillings, an amount suggested by those Indian players.
Me with players at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club Cricket pitch at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club A view of the cricket ground inside the Nairobi Gymkhana Club Scoreboard at the Nairobi Gymkhana cricket ground Giraffe Center in NairobiKenya is known for its safaris and has no shortage of national parks. In fact, Nairobi is the only capital in the world with a national park. I decided not to visit a national park, as most of them were expensive and offered multi-day tours, and I didn’t want to spend that much time in the wildlife.
Instead, I went to the Giraffe Center in Nairobi with Pragya and Rabina. The ticket cost 1500 Kenyan shillings (1000 Indian rupees). In Kenya, matatus - shared vans, usually decorated with portraits of famous people and play rap songs - are the most popular means of public transport. Reaching the Giraffe Center from our hotel required taking five matatus, which cost a total of 150 shillings, and a 2 km walk. The journey back was 90 shillings, suggesting that we didn’t find the most efficient route to get there. At the Giraffe Center, we fed giraffes and took photos.
A matatu with a Notorious BIG portrait. Inside the Giraffe Center Train ride from Nairobi to MombasaI took a train from Nairobi to Mombasa. The train is known as the “SGR Train,” where “SGR” refers to “Standard Gauge Railway.” The journey was around 500 km. M-Pesa was the only way to make payment for pre-booking the train ticket, and I didn’t have an M-Pesa account. Pragya’s friend Mary helped facilitate the payment. I booked a second-class ticket, which cost 1500 shillings (1000 Indian rupees).
The train was scheduled to depart from Nairobi at 08:00 hours in the morning and arrive in Mombasa at 14:00 hours. The security check at the station required scanning our bags and having them sniffed by sniffer dogs. I also fell victim to a scam by a security official who offered to help me get my ticket printed, only to later ask me to get him some coffee, which I politely declined.
Before boarding the train, I was treated to some stunning views at the Nairobi Terminus station. It was a seating train, but I wished it were a sleeper train, as I was sleep-deprived. The train was neat and clean, with good toilets. The train reached Mombasa on time at around 14:00 hours.
SGR train at Nairobi Terminus. Interior of the SGR train Arrival in Mombasa Mombasa Terminus station.Mombasa was a bit hotter than Nairobi, with temperatures reaching around 30 degrees Celsius. However, that’s not too hot for me, as I am used to higher temperatures in India. I had booked a hostel in the Old Town and was searching for a hitchhike from the Mombasa Terminus station. After trying for more than half an hour, I took a matatu that dropped me 3 km from my hostel for 200 shillings (140 Indian rupees). I tried to hitchhike again but couldn’t find a ride.
I think I know why I couldn’t get a ride in both the cases. In the first case, the Mombasa Terminus was in an isolated place, so most of the vehicles were taxis or matatus while any noncommercial cars were there to pick up friends and family. If the station were in the middle of the city, there would be many more car/truck drivers passing by, thus increasing my possibilities of getting a ride. In the second case, my hostel was at the end of the city, and nobody was going towards that side. In fact, many drivers told me they would love to give me a ride, but they were going in some other direction.
Finally, I took a tuktuk for 70 shillings to reach my hostel, Tulia Backpackers. It was 11 USD (1400 shillings) for one night. The balcony gave a nice view of the Indian Ocean. The rooms had fans, but there was no air conditioning. Each bed also had mosquito nets. The place was walking distance of the famous Fort Jesus. Mombasa has had more Islamic influence compared to Nairobi and also has many Hindu temples.
The balcony at Tulia Backpackers Hostel had a nice view of the ocean. A room inside the hostel with fans and mosquito nets on the beds Visiting White Sandy Beaches and Getting a HitchhikeVisiting Nyali beach marked my first time ever at a white sand beach. It was like 10 km from the hostel. The next day, I visited Diani Beach, which was 30 km from the hostel. Going to Diani Beach required crossing a river, for which there’s a free ferry service every few minutes, followed by taking a matatu to Ukunda and then a tuk-tuk to Diani Beach. This gave me an opportunity to see the beautiful countryside during the ride.
Nyali beach is a white sand beach This is the ferry service for crossing the river.During my return from Diani Beach to the hostel, I was successful in hitchhiking. However, it was only a 4 km ride and not sufficient to reach Ukunda, so I tried to get another ride. When a truck stopped for me, I asked for a ride to Ukunda. Later, I learned that they were going in the same direction as me, so I got off within walking distance from my hostel. The ride was around 30 km. I also learned the difference between a truck ride and a matatu or car ride. For instance, matatus and cars are much faster and cooler due to air conditioning, while trucks tend to be warmer because they lack it. Further, the truck was stopped at many checkpoints by the police for inspections as it carried goods, which is not the case with matatus. Anyways, it was a nice experience, and I am grateful for the ride. I had a nice conversation with the truck drivers about Indian movies and my experiences in Kenya.
Diani beach is a popular beach in Kenya. It is a white sand beach. Selfie with truck drivers who gave me the free ride Back to NairobiI took the SGR train from Mombasa back to Nairobi. This time I took the night train, which departs at 22:00 hours, reaching Nairobi at around 04:00 in the morning. I could not sleep comfortably since the train only had seater seats.
I had booked the Zarita Hotel in Nairobi and had already confirmed if they allowed early morning check-in. Usually, hotels have a fixed checkout time, say 11:00 in the morning, and you are not allowed to stay beyond that regardless of the time you checked in. But this hotel checked me in for 24 hours. Here, I paid in US dollars, and the cost was 12 USD.
Almost Got Stuck in KenyaTwo days before my scheduled flight from Nairobi back to India, I heard the news that the airports in Kenya were closed due to the strikes. Rabina and Pragya had their flight back to Nepal canceled that day, which left them stuck in Nairobi for two additional days. I called Sahil in India and found out during the conversation that the strike was called off in the evening. It was a big relief for me, and I was fortunate to be able to fly back to India without any changes to my plans.
Newspapers at a stand in Kenya covering news on the airport closure Experience with localsI had no problems communicating with Kenyans, as everyone I met knew English to an extent that could easily surpass that of big cities in India. Additionally, I learned a few words from Kenya’s most popular local language, Swahili, such as “Asante,” meaning “thank you,” “Jambo” for “hello,” and “Karibu” for “welcome.” Knowing a few words in the local language went a long way.
I am not sure what’s up with haggling in Kenya. It wasn’t easy to bring the price of souvenirs down. I bought a fridge magnet for 200 shillings, which was the quoted price. On the other hand, it was much easier to bargain with taxis/tuktuks/motorbikes.
I stayed at three hotels/hostels in Kenya. None of them had air conditioners. Two of the places were in Nairobi, and they didn’t even have fans in the rooms, while the one in Mombasa had only fans. All of them had good Wi-Fi, except Tulia where the internet overall was a bit shaky.
My experience with the hotel staff was great. For instance, we requested that the Nairobi Transit Hotel cancel the included breakfast in order to reduce the room costs, but later realized that it was not a good idea. The hotel allowed us to revert and even offered one of our missing breakfasts during dinner.
The staff at Tulia Backpackers in Mombasa facilitated the ticket payment for my train from Mombasa to Nairobi. One of the staff members also gave me a lift to the place where I could catch a matatu to Nyali Beach. They even added an extra tea bag to my tea when I requested it to be stronger.
FoodAt the Nairobi Transit Hotel, a Spanish omelet with tea was served for breakfast. I noticed that Spanish omelette appeared on the menus of many restaurants, suggesting that it is popular in Kenya. This was my first time having this dish. The milk tea in Kenya, referred to by locals as “white tea,” is lighter than Indian tea (they don’t put a lot of tea leaves).
Spanish Omelette served in breakfast at Nairobi Transit HotelI also sampled ugali with eggs. In Mombasa, I visited an Indian restaurant called New Chetna and had a buffet thali there twice.
Ugali with eggs. Tips for Exchanging MoneyIn Kenya, I exchanged my money at forex shops a couple of times. I received good exchange rates for bills larger than 50 USD. For instance, 1 USD on xe.com was 129 shillings, and I got 128.3 shillings per USD (a total of 12,830 shillings) for two 50 USD notes at an exchange in Nairobi, compared to 127 shillings, which was the highest rate at the banks. On the other hand, for each 1 USD note, I would have received an exchange rate of 125 shillings. A passport was the only document required for the exchange, and they also provided a receipt.
A good piece of advice for travelers is to keep 50 USD or larger bills for exchanging into the local currency while saving the smaller US dollar bills for accommodation, as many hotels and hostels accept payment in US dollars.
Missed Malindi and LamuThere were more places on my to-visit list in Kenya. But I simply didn’t have time to cover them, as I don’t like rushing through places, especially in a foreign country where there is a chance of me underestimating the amount of time it takes during transit. I would have liked to visit at least one of Kilifi, Watamu or Malindi beaches. Further, Lamu seemed like a unique place to visit as it has no cars or motorized transport; the only options for transport are boats and donkeys.
Python Engineering at Microsoft: Announcing GitHub Copilot in Data Wrangler
AI did not write this blog post, but it will make your exploratory data analysis with Data Wrangler better!
Today, we’re excited to introduce our first step of integrating the power of Copilot into Data Wrangler.
With this first integration of Copilot with Data Wrangler, you’ll be able to:
- Use natural language to clean and transform your data
- Get help with fixing errors in your data transformation code
An example of using Copilot in Data Wrangler to filter for listings that allow dogs/cats
A common limitation of using AI tools for exploratory data analysis tasks today is the lack of data context provided to the AI. Responses are typically more generalized and not tailored to the specific task or data at hand. In addition, there’s always the manual and tedious task of verifying the correctness of the generated code.
What makes Copilot with Data Wrangler different is twofold. First, this integration allows you to choose to provide Copilot with your data context, enabling it to generate more relevant and specific code for the exact dataset you have open. Second, you get to preview the exact behavior of the code on your dataset with the Data Wrangler interface to visually validate Copilot’s response, along with all the benefits that the Data Wrangler tool provides.
Data transformationsWith Copilot in Data Wrangler, you can ask it to perform ambiguous, open-ended transformations or a specific task you have in mind. Below we’ve included three examples of the many possibilities you can achieve with Copilot in Data Wrangler:
Formatting a datetime column
Removing any column(s) with over 40% missing values
Fixing an error in a data transformation
Getting started todayTo use Copilot with Data Wrangler, you will need the following 3 prerequisites.
- You must have the Data Wrangler extension for VS Code installed.
- You must have the GitHub Copilot extension for VS Code installed.
- You must have an active subscription for GitHub Copilot in your personal account, or you need to be assigned a seat by your organization. Sign up for a GitHub Copilot free trial in your personal account.
Follow these steps to Set up GitHub Copilot in VS Code.
Once the prerequisites are met, you will see the Copilot interface within Data Wrangler by default (customizable in the Data Wrangler settings) when you are in Editing Mode. You can then either select the input box or use the default Copilot keyboard shortcut of CMD/CTRL + I.
Responsible AIAI is not perfect (neither are we!) and it will improve over time. Microsoft and GitHub Copilot follow Responsible AI principles and employ controls to ensure that your experience with the service is appropriate, pleasant, and useful. We understand there is hesitation and concern surrounding the rapid expansion of AI’s capabilities, and fully respect those who don’t want or can’t use Copilot.
If you have any feedback around the Copilot experience in Data Wrangler, please file an issue in our Data Wrangler public GitHub repository here.
Next StepsWe are just getting started. This is the first experience in Data Wrangler that we are enhancing with Copilot. Stay tuned for more AI-powered experiences in Data Wrangler to help with your data analysis needs soon!
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