IPython

• for installing iPython see here: http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/2/install/install.html
• start iPython notebook, run in a normal terminal

  ipython notebook --pylab inline

• for the command line version on Ubuntu go to the menu and start development>ipython
• run the code with <shift+enter>
• updating pandas (I had 0.7 installed but needed 0.9 for doing some str ops) simply type sudo pip install --upgrade pandas

ToDo

• check out GeoPandas (perhaps pysal) : http://github.com/geopandas/geopandas