A short demonstration using pkg-json with GNU Octave to plot a simplified two dimensional political “World Map” from public available JSON data provided by the NASA. The following code can be used, to easily visualize data divided by countries (e.g. population densities, health data, economic figures, tax, export, etc.).

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020 is over and I had the pleasure to mentor Abdallah Elshamy, who enriched Octave with the jsondecode() and jsonencode() functions. A remaining issue was the translation of the Octave function matlab.lang.makeValidName to the C++ language. This is now accomplished and the overall results are great.

Using rsync instead of Buildbot’s own file transfers, which are known to be slow, significantly reduced the file transfer time between the Buildbot Workers and the Buildbot Master from 25.5 hours to about 18 minutes (-98%). This improvement, and a few others, enables a single “strong” Worker to build and publish Octave and all MS Windows installers within 24 hours or with four parallel Workers within 6 hours.

The octave-buildbot Server and Worker matured a lot in the past two months since I wrote about them in August. Finally, the system is capable of delivering once per day a “fresh brewed” stable Octave release (tarballs, all flavors of MS Windows installers, and the Doxygen documentation). See it yourself on https://octave.space.

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020 will end with this August. I had the pleasure to mentor Abdallah Elshamy working on the implementation of the jsondecode() and jsonencode() functions for Octave. These function allow to convert JSON data strings to Octave Objects and vice versa.