Live from Cyberspace: I recognize the wisdom of Seth Lloyd's declaration that "one of my goals in life is to learn as few pieces of software as possible". Nevertheless, the Youngs now tell me that Python https://www.python.org is the wave of the future—specifically, a Python server connecting to a Jupyter Notebook https://jupyter.org client running inside a web browser.
But installing Python/Jupyter on my laptop made me remember an oddity of our culture once again. The experience of interacting with any UNIX system has a strong elective affinity with being a character in a fantasy novel—mysterious, incomprehensible forces and incantations that can go wrong in dangerous and inexplicable ways.
My notes on installation:
Existing MacOS Sierra 10.12.5 Python/Anaconda installation would not load pandas or plotly: upgrading...
Berkeley Python Practice: New to Python? Start here http://python.berkeley.edu/learn/ sends me to...
Continuum: Download Anaconda Now! https://www.continuum.io/downloads: the graphical installer https://repo.continuum.io/archive/Anaconda3-4.4.0-MacOSX-x86_64.pkg does not produce a usable framework on my Macintosh...
Continuum: Download Anaconda Now! https://www.continuum.io/downloads: the command-line installer https://repo.continuum.io/archive/Anaconda3-4.4.0-MacOSX-x86_64.sh does produce a usable framework. Go figure...
Framework working—but time for upgrade hygiene:
was temporarily inaccessible for some reason, which means that updates—"conda update condo", and "conda update anaconda"—would not work until the server came back up...
Framework working and upgraded to most recent version...
Jupyter notebook barfs trying to load plotly https://plot.ly...
plotly needed to be installed or reinstalled...
- "delong$ sudo pip install plotly" appears to have run successfully, but generated two copies of this (apparently harmless) error message:
- "The directory '/Users/delong/Library/Caches/pip/http' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and the cache has been disabled. Please check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag."
- "delong$ sudo pip install plotly" appears to have run successfully, but generated two copies of this (apparently harmless) error message:
Finally running...
- But "delong$ jupyter notebook" generates this (apparently harmless) error message:
- "execution error: 'http://localhost:8888/tree?token=dfcf8d5160e2496e14f7c610ce639c76df34763d44fc7705' doesn’t understand the 'open location' message. (-1708)"
- But "delong$ jupyter notebook" generates this (apparently harmless) error message:
All in all, a relatively painless UNIX system experience...
