added code format/style test and fixed up code

I converted all instances of `'''` to `"""` because PEP267 uses the double-quotes.

I also moved the param types into the `:param <type> <name>:` format.

Fix PEP8 things in a few places.
The travis file can install the package providing the lint functionality and run the script to perform the check. For now that would still be a checkout of a package (since we don't have Debian packages yet).

If it should be accessible to users these steps could be embedded in a nosetest in order to run the linting whenever a developer invokes nosetest.