making posters with LaTeX, rendering matplotlib images of right size

I'm doing a poster presentation next week in a conference, and I didn't want to use our default poster templates -- they just don't look pretty enough for me. So, I cooked my own, or rather lobotomised the baposter template by Brian Amsberg. It's quite customisable and well-documented. I was a web developer once so I get some masochistic satisfaction out of positioning, aligning and resizing stuff anyway.
Some things I learned underway, from matplotlib cookbook mostly:
For an A0 poster, getting image sizes and font sizes right is important. While compiling my .tex document, I inserted

\showthe\linewidth

command next to relative to text scaled images. It made LaTeX print out the image size in points in its hilarious output stream.

fig_width_pt = 628.62  # Get this from LaTeX using \showthe\columnwidth
inches_per_pt = 1.0/72.27               # Convert pt to inches
golden_mean = (sqrt(5)-1.0)/2.0         # Aesthetic ratio
fig_width = fig_width_pt*inches_per_pt  # width in 
fig_height = fig_width*golden_mean+0.3       # height in inches
fig_size = [fig_width,fig_height]    
print fig_size

fig_size was later set as a matplotlib parameter. If you specify .pdf as the filename extension, matplotlib generates a crisp file to be used as an image by LaTeX.