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Python
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Python News
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PyPI poll on package comments
12 Nov 2009 | 11:20 pm -
PSF Community Awards go to Noufal Ibrahim & Barry Warsaw
8 Nov 2009 | 1:50 amThe latest recipients of the Python Software Foundation Community Awards are Noufal Ibrahim and Barry Warsaw (Oct. 25 PSF blog announcement). Congratulations and thanks! -
SciPy India Call for Papers
5 Nov 2009 | 3:46 pmSciPy India 2009 -- Call for Presentations The first Scientific Computing with Python conference in India has announced its Call for Presentations. The conference will be held at the Technopark in Trivandrum, Kerala, India from December 12th to 17th, 2009. -
RuPy '09 Conference - Schedule Posted
29 Oct 2009 | 7:45 amRuPy '09 has posted its schedule. The conference will take place November 7 & 8 in Poznan, Poland. (See the PyCon blog for more details.) -
Python 2.6.4 final released
25 Oct 2009 | 8:17 pmThe fourth maintenance release of the 2.6 series is available.
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Python Software Foundation News
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Third-Quarter Community Service Awards
25 Oct 2009 | 1:27 pmRegular readers will know that the Foundation periodically honors those who have made significant contributions to its mission. Often these people aren't even members of the Foundation, but this doesn't exclude them. At its recent meeting the PSF Board voted Community Awards to two people, one of whom isn't currently a member. Noufal Ibrahim Noufal was nominated for heading up the organizing team for the recent (and very successful) first PyCon India conference held on September 26 and 27 in Bangalore, attracting 450 delegates. Although Noufal was "first among equals" this award also… -
Reminder: 5 days left for PyCon US 2010 Proposals
25 Sep 2009 | 7:24 amOctober 1, the deadline for submitting PyCon talk proposals, is now just under a week away. If you're planning to present, you should submit your outline now! See the proposal instructions for guidance. -
Python at the 2009 Atlanta Linux Fest
23 Sep 2009 | 6:19 amWe should all give Brandon Rhodes a hearty "Thanks!" for doing a great job representing Python at the Atlanta Linux Fest on September 19th. You can read Brandon's account of the day for more details and his advice to anyone planning similar outreach activities. -
What modules need documentation work for Python 3.x?
21 Sep 2009 | 8:13 amAs part of ongoing preparations for GHOP, Titus Brown and the other organizers are soliciting feedback about what modules in the standard library need more documentation work. Are there any modules that lack useful examples? Or where the writing or examples could be clarified? Head over to this survey and give us your opinion today, or forever hold your tongue! -
Reminder: 14 Days left for PyCon US 2010 Proposals
17 Sep 2009 | 12:12 pmOctober 1, the deadline for submitting PyCon talk proposals, is now just under a month away. Start thinking about your outline now! See the proposal instructions for guidance.
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The PyCon blog
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PyCon poster session deadline: Nov. 30
19 Nov 2009 | 1:20 pmThe deadline for PyCon poster proposals is coming up soon - November 30!Poster Sessions are a new PyCon feature for 2010. Poster sessions provide an alternative presentation mechanism that facilitates more one-on-one communication between the presenter and the audience. Poster sessions are particularly suited for topics of interest to a subset of the community, and we anticipate these sessions will provide an "incubator" for further discussions.More information about the what, how, when, and why of poster sessions is at http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/posters/cfp/. -
Behind the Scenes at PyCon - Part I : Dessert Selection
17 Nov 2009 | 9:42 amLast week I met Van (PyCon Chair) and Ewa (PyCon Coordination Angel) in Atlanta to get more familiar with the Hyatt Regency floor plan and the sponsor coordination issues that I am responsible for this year. While I was there I got to participate in some behind the scenes meetings. I will blog about these issues in the following weeks.I will start with one of the really fun tasks - meeting the Hyatt Sous Chef ,who will be working on PyCon with us, and sampling the various choices for salads, entrees and desserts.I remember the 'good ol days' when we ate box lunches in DC that… -
PyCon 2010 talks announced
12 Nov 2009 | 4:52 pmThe PyCon program committee has announced an unprecedented program of 95 talks for PyCon 2010. Talk abstracts can be browsed at http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/talks/.With a record-breaking pool of submissions to choose from, the committee has assembled a program of enormous variety and quality, representing topics across the whole range of Python programming. Talks cover not just Python's traditional CPython implementation, but newer Python implementations on a variety of platforms, including Java, .NET, Parrot, and Python itself.As always, scheduled talks are only the tip of the PyCon… -
RuPy '09 Conference - Agenda is Complete
29 Oct 2009 | 7:36 amRuPy is the strongly dynamic conference concerning mostly Ruby and Python programming languages (7 & 8 November, in Poznan, Poland). Registration has been open for some time, and now we have also completed the agenda. There will be a load of talks and many stars of the geek world will come to talk about their experiences.After the first day of talks, we invite all attendees to join the Geek Party on Saturday night, where one can discuss Ruby and Python-related issues while holding a glass of cold beer.The list of speakers and talks include:Michael Dirolf - "An Introduction to… -
Invited speakers
19 Oct 2009 | 8:01 amThe vast majority of talks at PyCon go through a challenging submission process where they are weighed against the other submitted talks - 179 submissions this year. A few speakers, however, have been so consistently and overwhelmingly popular at previous PyCons that this year's program committee has invited them to skip the usual review process, reserving talk slots for topics of their choice.The PyCon 2010 invited speakers and their topics areIan Bicking, On The Subject Of Source CodeJeff Rush, Interfaces, Adapters and FactoriesJack Diederich, Python's Dusty CornersMike Fletcher, Debating…
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Happenings in Python Usergroups
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pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, November, 11th, Announcement
8 Nov 2009 | 2:28 amThe next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, November, 11thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda: Beyond MVC - The ZOPE-Component-Model (Charlie Clark) At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the evening in a nearby restaurant.Further information including directions how to get to the location can be found at:http://www.pycologne.de (Sorry, this page is in German only) -
pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, October, 14th Notes
18 Oct 2009 | 2:39 amThe Python User Group Cologne (pyCologne) met on October, 14th at the computer centre of the University of Cologne. The meeting was attended by 19 people. German speakers might want to refer to our wiki page which you can reach at moment only on http://wiki.python-forum.de/User Group Köln/This time we had two talks about Google Wave. Many thanks to Alexander Benker and Andi Albrecht:Overview of Google Wave (Alexander Benker)Alexander gave a detailed overview of Google Wave. He presented the elements of Google Wave (Wave, Wavelet, Blip) as well as its architecture. Furthermore, he described… -
pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, October, 14th, Announcement
11 Oct 2009 | 12:23 pmThe next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, October, 14thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda:Google Wave (Andi Albrecht, Florian Scheel) At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the evening in a nearby restaurant.Further information including directions how to get to the location can be found at:http://wiki.python.de/User_Group_Köln (Sorry, this page is in German only) -
pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, September, 9th, Announcement
7 Sep 2009 | 11:30 amThe next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, September, 9thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda:Hacking and reverse engineering with Python (Stefan Pielicke) Development status of moin-1.9 (beta3++) (Reimar Bauer) At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the evening in a nearby restaurant.Further information including directions how to get to the location can be found at:http://wiki.python.de/User_Group_Köln (Sorry, this page is in German only) -
pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, August, 12th Notes
30 Aug 2009 | 11:15 amThe Python User Group Cologne (pyCologne) met on August, 12th at the computer centre of the University of Cologne. The meeting was attended by 17 people. German speakers might want to refer to our wiki page http://www.pycologne.deFlyerThe pyCologne-Flyer is ready for print!!! Klaus Bremer introduces its contents:The three inner pages contain information about Python.The title page shows the pyCologne-Logo and short information about pyCologne.The remaining pages contain a short description of pyCologne and contact information.Please see the flyer on:…
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ShowMeDo Blog » Python ShowMeDos
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New Video Published: Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python and Parallel IPython
1 Nov 2009 | 7:14 pmShowmedo is proud to publish:[1439] Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python and Parallel IPython, a video-tutorial by unpingco This video is part of the series Scientific and parallel computing using IPython In this segment, we continue with the case study of robust regression methods, but here we show how to use generators and the parallel computing features of IPython to accelerate the computation. -
New Video Published: Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python continued
1 Nov 2009 | 7:14 pmShowmedo is proud to publish:[1438] Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python continued, a video-tutorial by unpingco This video is part of the series Scientific and parallel computing using IPython In this segment, we discuss how the least-median estimate can be computed from the sample dataset using generators. -
New Video Published: Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python
1 Nov 2009 | 7:14 pmShowmedo is proud to publish:[1437] Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python , a video-tutorial by unpingco This video is part of the series Scientific and parallel computing using IPython In this case study, we pull together everything we have learned so far in order to compute the least MEDIAN squared estimate of a line given data with outliers present. This segment describes the fundamental problem. -
New Video Published: Finer Control for Parallel Computing in IPython
1 Nov 2009 | 7:14 pmShowmedo is proud to publish:[1435] Finer Control for Parallel Computing in IPython, a video-tutorial by unpingco This video is part of the series Scientific and parallel computing using IPython In this segment, we discuss the push, pull, and push_function, features of IPython that allow finer control over individual namespaces of remote nodes and over the computations that run on them. -
New Video Published: Distributing Parallel Computations Using IPython
21 Oct 2009 | 7:56 pmShowmedo is proud to publish:[1434] Distributing Parallel Computations Using IPython, a video-tutorial by unpingco This video is part of the series Scientific and parallel computing using IPython In this segment, we discuss the map feature to distribute computations across the available nodes, how to use targets to specify which nodes to use, and how to use blocking to avoid waiting for long computations to finish.
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PyPy Status Blog
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Some benchmarking
18 Nov 2009 | 1:53 pmHello. Recently, thanks to the surprisingly helpful Unhelpful, also known as Andrew Mahone, we have a decent, if slightly arbitrary, set of performances graphs. It contains a couple of benchmarks already seen on this blog as well as some taken from The Great Computer Language Shootout. These benchmarks don't even try to represent "real applications" as they're mostly small algorithmic benchmarks. Interpreters used: PyPy trunk, revision 69331 with --translation-backendopt-storesink, which is now on by default Unladen swallow trunk, r900 CPython 2.6.2 release Here are the graphs; the benchmarks… -
Düsseldorf Sprint Report
13 Nov 2009 | 4:46 amWhile the Düsseldorf is dwindling off, we put our minds to the task of retelling our accomplishments. The sprint was mostly about improving the JIT and we managed to stick to that task (as much as we managed to stick to anything). The sprint was mostly filled with doing many small things. Inlining Carl Friedrich and Samuele started the sprint trying to tame the JIT's inlining. Until now, the JIT would try to inline everything in a loop (except other loops) which is what most tracing JITs actually do. This works great if the resulting trace is of reasonable length, but if not it would result… -
Düsseldorf Sprint Started
6 Nov 2009 | 1:23 amThe Düsseldorf sprint starts today. Only Samuele and me are there so far, but that should change over the course of the day. We will mostly work on the JIT during this sprint, trying to make it a lot more practical. For that we need to decrease its memory requirements some more and to make it use less aggressive inlining. We will post more as the sprint progresses. -
PyPy on RuPy 2009
3 Nov 2009 | 8:38 amHello. It's maybe a bit late to announce, but there will be PyPy talk at Rupy conference this weekend in Poznan. Precisely, I'll be talking mostly about PyPy's JIT and how to use it. Unfortunately the talk is on Saturday, at 8:30 in the morning. EDIT: Talk is online, together with examples Cheers, fijal -
Logging and nice graphs
1 Nov 2009 | 10:59 amHi all, This week I worked on improving the system we use for logging. Well, it was not really a "system" but rather a pile of hacks to measure in custom ways timings and counts and display them. So now, we have a system :-) The system in question was integrated in the code for the GC and the JIT, which are two independent components as far as the source is concerned. However, we can now display a unified view. Here is for example pypy-c-jit running pystone for (only) 5000 iterations: The top long bar represents time. The bottom shows two summaries of the total time taken by the various…
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IronPython URLs
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Face Detection with IronPython
21 Nov 2009 | 7:34 amFace detection in images is very cool (and perhaps a little bit scary), and with the help of Emgu CV it can be done from IronPython. Emgu CV is a cross platform .Net wrapper to the Intel OpenCV image processing library. Allowing OpenCV functions to be called from .NET compatible languages such as C#, VB, VC++, IronPython etc. The wrapper can be compiled in Mono and run on Linux / Mac OS X. This blog entry from Clark Updike shows how. Face Detection "Hello World" in IronPython using Emgu CV and OpenCV A couple notes compared to the Emgu wiki version--I was able to get everything working… -
Databinding and WCF Services with IronPython 2.6
21 Nov 2009 | 7:30 amOne of the important new features in IronPython 2.6 is the __clrtype__ metaclass.The __clrtype__ metaclass allows you to create a real .NET class that backs your Python classes. This is important because there are many .NET features that *require* a real .NET class: which includes databinding and implementing WCF services (Windows Communication Foundation). The problem with __clrtype__ is that it requires dealing with low level details; namely building the class yourself from IL bytecode. Harry Pierson and Shri Borde have been working on a library (clrtype.py) to make this simpler. Lukáš… -
IronPython 2.6 Release Candidate 3
20 Nov 2009 | 3:20 pmIronPython 2.6 is the up-and-coming version of IronPython targeting compatibility with Python 2.6. As well as the new features in Python 2.6, IronPython 2.6 has several important new features specific to IronPython. These include: The __clrtype__ metaclass for data binding and .NET attribute support Implementation of the ctypes module Support for Python stack frames and sys.settrace, which means the pdb debugger works Better performance through adaptive compilation Faster startup IronPython 2.6 Release Candidate 3 has just been released. The hope is that this will be the last release… -
Two Articles: IronPython 2.0 and WPF Error
20 Nov 2009 | 2:04 pmTwo more articles from Ibrahim Kivanc, the Turkish blogger who has written several articles on IronPython and Silverlight. Both of these articles are in English. IronPython 2.0 and Access to .NET Libraries IronPython 2.0 version now runs on DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime). DLR is a platform on .NET which is host Dynamicly typed languages on it. Now Dynamic Languages Communicate eachother and C#,VB, COM Objects, .NET Libraries. IronPython, with 2.0 version runs on DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime); it’s a platform like CLR architecture. It’s host for Dynamic Languages on .NET. With this… -
Embedding IronPython in Silverlight - Importing
15 Nov 2009 | 1:09 pmJimmy Schementi is the Microsoft program manager for the integration of dynamic languages (IronPython and IronRuby) and the Silverlight browser plugin. As well as dynamic languages, Silverlight applications can be written in .NET languages like C# and VB.NET - and these languages can embed IronPython. Although embedding IronPython in a C# Silverlight application is initially straightforward (although a bit more verbose than embedding using the normal .NET framework / Mono as the ScriptRuntime needs to be configured), it gets painful fast. This is especially true when the Python code you…
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Guido van Rossum's Weblog
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Goodbye Artima
It's been a good run, but the WYSIWIG editing facilities of Blogger have lured me away from Artima. -
Origin of BDFL
I believe I've tracked down the origin of the term Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) to a Python meeting in 1995. It's a blast from the past! -
Python 3000 and You
I've posted the slides from my PyCon 2008 keynote on python.org. Here are the URLs, plus a warning against the temptation of changing your APIs at the same time as porting to Py3k. This is really important! -
Python 3.0 alpha 2 Released!
Another milestone in Python 3000 development: alpha 2 is released. Now with immutable bytes! -
Google Highly Open Participation Contest
The Google Open Source Office is outdoing itself with a new contest aimed at a younger generation of coders: students ages 13 or older.
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Only Python
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Google Wave Fun
15 Nov 2009 | 11:45 amAfter a long time waiting, I finally got an Google Wave invitation this week - just as I was starting to look forward to a work slowdown so I could start programming again in the evenings. The call of playing with a new toy was enough motivation to overcome inertia and spend a few hours, here and there in the evening, in order to create a new "gadget". Google Wave Gadgets are actually fairly easy to create. The only downside (from my point of view) is that they have to be written using javascript instead of Python. Since this blog is called "Only Python", you may… -
Live preview of reStructuredText to HTML conversion in your browser
13 Sep 2009 | 1:21 pmI've implemented a new plugin for Crunchy which may be of interest to some: a reStructuredText editor with live preview inside the browser window. Each time a key is pressed in the editor (html textarea), an ajax request is sent to the Python backend with the entire content of the editor. This is processed by docutils with the result sent back to the browser as a full html page displayed inside the browser as illustrated below.I expected this to be slow (make that very slow) and for the first prototype I wrote, I only sent the ajax request when "enter" was pressed. After… -
Something I am working on...
3 Sep 2009 | 10:08 amComing soon ... with "live" preview ... -
Upcoming Pycon and crst2s5
2 Sep 2009 | 4:15 pmIn a few months, many pythonistas will be converging to Atlanta to take part in the next Pycon. I'm hoping to be able to attend it as I have been really inspired by the many people I met in two previous conferences. While I most likely won't be presenting anything this time, I thought I would try to contribute to some presentations in an indirect way.A while ago, Ned Batchelder wrote about presentation tools - more specifically about how he found all of them lacking. In the comments section, many people made various suggestions - including one suggestion by Steve Holden… -
New plugin for Crunchy ... and bug fixes
23 Aug 2009 | 5:56 pmCrunchy has a new plugin: getsource. What it does is enable a tutorial writer to embed a "link" to a python module inside an html file, or a class within that module, or a function or method, and have the source code being extracted by the inspect module and inserted within the html page. Crunchy being Crunchy, it can also embed an interpreter or an editor right below the code source so that a user can interact with it.And since not everyone likes to write documentation using straight html, a custom docutils directive is supported so that it works from reStructuredText files too.The docutils…
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Coder Who Says Py
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PyCon talk decisions have been made
4 Nov 2009 | 3:20 pm[edit: nixed a paragraph by request] [edit: link to accepted talks and thank Doug] I want to say three things in this post. One is that the PyCon program committee has finished making there decisions of which 95 talks out of the 179 submissions we received. I should also admit that my talk (#9 in the list) was accepted although I actually missed the part of PC meetings where it was so I didn't officially find out until everyone else did. Second, I wanted to publicly thank Jesse Noller and the other members of the pycon-pc for their hard work (with special honorable mention to Doug Napoleone… -
Submit a poster for PyCon 2010
20 Oct 2009 | 7:27 pmThe PyCon organizers are trying something new for PyCon 2010: posters. Basically there is a plenary session where people have posters about something and they stand there talking to whomever comes by (if you have been in academia you know what these can be like). In my time doing posters at academic conferences I have found that at the larger conferences a poster can be worth your time. You end up with enough people coming by talking to you that you get valuable feedback and contacts. Plus a poster is a lot less stressful to do compared to a full talk and allows for more detail than a… -
I ♥ jQuery (UI)
14 Oct 2009 | 7:59 pmI had this grand plan for a blog post comparing the various JavaScript GUI libraries, which in the end ended up being this blog post stating how I like jQuery UI. If you don't care about reading a "love letter" to jQuery UI, then you can stop reading now. Since I was planning on refreshing the old online UI for Oplop I figured this was as good a chance as any to see what the various libraries offered. I knew that I wanted a wizard-like interface for Oplop's pasword hash generation workflow where users couldn't skip steps (see the FAQ if you want to know how Oplop works). This led me to think… -
Everyone should switch to Distribute and off of setuptools
5 Oct 2009 | 12:39 pm[edit: mention how the fix in Python 2.6.3 may have not belonged in 2.6.3 since it is a micro release] Python 2.6.3 has a couple of bugs still lingering that warrant a brown bag 2.6.4 release (should be out before the end of the month). One of the "bugs", and the entire reason I am doing this blog post, involves distutils and setuptools. Turns out that for Python 2.6.3 a change was made to distutils that broke setuptools for building extension modules. While the change that broke setuptools is being viewed as improper for a micro release (code shouldn't break in a micro release unless it… -
Adding structural consistency to exceptions
29 Sep 2009 | 4:35 pmWhen I wrote PEP 352: Required Superclass for Exceptions one of the hopes I had was it would lead to some sanity when it came to attaching information to exceptions. As it stands now everything is stored under BaseException.args which is not exactly structured, and so I wanted to clean that situation up. Unfortunately this got derailed because of backwards-compatibility issues (and for those of you being bitten by the BaseException.message deprecation, Python 2.6.1 has a fix to make it saner). But today a tweet from Jacob Kaplan-Moss reminded me why exceptions need to be cleaned up. If…
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David Goodger's Weblog
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Podcasts I listen to
A list of what & why. Mostly tech-oriented 'casts, with the odd, odd exception. -
Go see "Speed Racer" -- what a blast!
A couple weeks ago I saw Speed Racer with my wife and kids. Lots of fun was had by all in this action-packed animé brought to hyper-real life. -
Unicode misinformation
It's great that Google is moving to Unicode 5.1 and that UTF-8 is so popular, but I wish they'd get their terms straight! -
Polyform Puzzler Talk Video (Montreal Python)
Video of my February 7 talk at the Montreal Python users group meeting is now up on the web. It was a lot of fun, and the group seemed to enjoy it too. -
Python 3000 podcast interview with DDJ
An interview I did recently with Mike Riley of Dr. Dobb's Journal has been released: http://www.ddj.com/architect/205918857 (click through for a live hyperlink).
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Doug Hellmann
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PyMOTW: sys, Part 6: Low-level Thread Support
15 Nov 2009 | 7:12 amLow-level Thread Supportsys includes low-level functions for controlling and debugging thread behavior.Check IntervalPython uses a form of cooperative multitasking in its thread implementation. At a fixed interval, bytecode execution is paused and the interpreter checks if any signal handlers need to be executed. During the same interval check, the global interpreter lock is also released by the current thread and then reacquired, giving other threads an opportunity to take over execution by grabbing the lock first.The default check interval is 100 bytecodes and the current value can always… -
PyMOTW: sys, Part 5: Tracing Your Program As It Runs
8 Nov 2009 | 7:47 amTracing Your Program As It RunsThere are two ways to inject code to watch your program run: tracing and profiling. They are similar, but intended for different purposes and so have different constraints. The easiest, but least efficient, way to monitor your program is through a trace hook, which can be used for writing a debugger, code coverage monitoring, or many other purposes.The trace hook is modified by passing a callback function to sys.settrace(). The callback is passed three arguments, frame (the stack frame from the code being run), event (a string naming the type of notification),… -
PyMOTW: sys, Part 4: Exception Handling
1 Nov 2009 | 12:14 pmException Handlingsys includes features for trapping and working with exceptions.Unhandled ExceptionsMany applications are structured with a main loop that wraps execution in a global exception handler to trap errors not handled at a lower level. Another way to achieve the same thing is by setting the sys.excepthook to a function that takes three arguments (error type, error value, and traceback) and let it deal with unhandled errors.import sysdef my_excepthooktype value traceback print 'Unhandled error:' type valuesysexcepthook my_excepthookprint 'Before exception'raise… -
PyMOTW: sys, Part 3: Memory Management and Limits
25 Oct 2009 | 7:50 amMemory Management and Limitssys includes several functions for understanding and controlling memory usage.Reference CountsPython helps you manage memory with garbage collection. An object is automatically marked to be collected when its reference count drops to zero. To examine the reference count of an existing object, use getrefcount().import sysone print 'At start :' sysgetrefcountonetwo oneprint 'Second reference :' sysgetrefcountonedel twoprint 'After del :' sysgetrefcountoneNotice that the count is actually one higher than expected because there is a temporary… -
PyMOTW: sys Part 2: Runtime Environment
18 Oct 2009 | 4:04 pmRuntime Environmentsys provides low-level APIs for interacting with the system outside of your application, by accepting command line arguments, accessing user input, and passing messages and status values to the user.Arguments to Your ProgramThe arguments captured by the interpreter are processed there and not passed along to your program directly. Any remaining options and arguments, including the name of the script itself, are saved to sys.argv in case your program does need to use them.import sysprint 'Arguments:' sysargv$ python sys_argv.pyArguments: ['sys_argv.py']$ python…
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Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.
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POE – Only Pain
19 Nov 2009 | 1:29 amVery busy, but stumbled across something which made me cry with joy (really). I have noticed that one of my favorite groups of all time POE has been featured in a some commercials recently (Iron Chef and Ford) Then I found this ‘hidden’ gem: http://www.repoezessed.com/movs/teaserfinal.mp4 -
Picnic Table: Part 0, wood issues
14 Jun 2009 | 1:06 amI am planning on building a picnic table, and to build it with my son. I have been looking for plans for one that I like for quite some time. All have similar problems, in that they are too small, or I do not trust, or require lumber of dimensions which require building out of pressure treated materials1. I was looking at some octagonal models, which are pretty nice, then the latest issue of Wood Magazine arrived with, a picnic table, made with dimensional lumber. It is huge, with a near 5′ square top, seats 8 large adults comfortably, is easy to build, and looks.. well look at it. The… -
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Season 2!!
21 May 2009 | 7:33 pmI love anime. Not your normal anime. 99% of what hits the US and 99% of what ends up on US TV is utter crap. The exceptions are “Ghost in the Shell”, and some of the very old stuff from my childhood (Macross). I would say that 80% of what is shown on TV in even Japan is crap. So I become very excited when something great is announces or is comes out. The second season of “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya“ is one of those. It has quite the cult following. I would not say that this is the best anime in the world, but it does hit all my buttons. There is a well trodden… -
Trademarks [by them selves] are NOT a Menace to Open Source
10 May 2009 | 12:06 amI should be asleep, but I accidentally came across this article calling Trademarks a hidden menace to Open Souce. At it’s heart I agree that Trademark law is not properly understood by the community at large and could be a major problem for some projects. Beyond that it’s is just a mess. The start of this polite rant was that he is the author of a commercial Unbuntu book, and he made a website to support the book. He was clear in the use of the trademark ownership, but did not get permission first from Unbuntu. During conversations with Connonical it was mentioned that he might… -
PyCon 2009 Voting Raw Data
31 Mar 2009 | 10:00 pmThis year we tried something new to get feedback from attendees this year. After a talk you would put little plastic bingo chips into one of three buckets to vote. We also have a talk interest system on the schedule where we get a count on what talks people are selecting. I captured the data just before and after the conference along with other metrics. All this data I have compiled into a massive raw data dump on google docs. It’s a firehose of information, you have been warned. Check the second and third sheets for details on the data. I would like to boil this data down into…
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me->flub
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New Python System Information release!
21 Nov 2009 | 7:59 amI've just released a new version of PSI! PSI is a cross-platform Python package providing real-time access to processes and other miscellaneous system information such as architecture, boottime and filesystems. Among the highlights of this release are: Improved handling of time: We now have our own object to represent time. This may seem silly at first but it actually makes it easier to use all the normal ways of representing time easily as well as provide the highest possible accuracy. Improved handling of process names and arguments: There is an entire wiki page dedicated to this, but… -
Synchronous classes in Python
16 Nov 2009 | 5:39 amWhat I'd like to build is an object that when doing anything with it would first acquire a lock and release it when finished. It's a pattern I use fairly-regularly and I am getting bored of always manually defining a lock next to the other object and manually acquiring and releasing it. It's also error prone. Problem is, I can't find how to do it! The __getattribute__ method is bypassed by implicit special methods (like len() invoking .__len__()). That sucks. And from the description of this by-passing there seems to be no way to get round it. For this one time where I thought I found a use… -
Python modules and the GPL: I still don't get it
3 Nov 2009 | 2:59 pmI've never understood if you can use GPL python modules (or packages) in GPL-incompatibly licensed code. Today I re-read the GPL looking for this and am tempted to think yes, you can. The GPL says: 1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it [...] This is simple enough, what if you need to change it? This gets more interesting: 2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, [...] provided that you also meet all of these conditions: b) You must cause any work that you… -
Delny 0.4.1
24 Oct 2009 | 12:59 pmA little while ago I released a new version of Delny (my python wrapper around Qhull for Delaunay triangulations), the main purpose to use numpy instead of numeric. Impressively enough people actually seemed to care and I got a few bug reports and hints for improvements. So I just released 0.4.1 with some of these updated: I forgot to change some python code to numpy, so was still importing numeric Use numpy.get_include() to find the numpy header files At the same time I fixed the 2D square issue by using the Qz option and removing the extra point from all output. Finally fixing a… -
No permission to see Ubuntu bugs?
22 Oct 2009 | 3:47 pmSo I'm looking at the release notes for Ubuntu 9.10 and am interested in the hibernation issue. Naturally I follow the link to the bug report. First I need to log in to launchpad. That's weird, since when do I need to log in simply to view bugs? But after logging in I see this: Not allowed here Sorry, you don't have permission to access this page. You are logged in as Floris Bruynooghe. Since when is Ubuntu hiding bugs? Sure security bugs might need to be hidden for a while but you could be more descriptive about that. And surely you shouldn't be linking to such bugs? Just weird.
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Frank Wierzbicki's Weblog
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Leaving Sun
4 Nov 2009 | 11:05 amI've always regarded working full time on Jython at Sun as a miraculous sabbatical that might come to an end at any moment. Sadly that time has come. I've worked with many amazing people and had a great time: Sun provided me with one of the greatest professional experiences I have had, for which I will always be grateful.I'm very pleased with how far Jython has come during my tenure at Sun. Jython is now a modern version of Python, and has the momentum to continue its growth. A far larger group of developers than ever before contribute regularly, making Jython a very healthy project. Jython… -
Jython 2.5.1 Final is out!
26 Sep 2009 | 11:36 amOn behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5.1 final is available for download. See the installation instructions.Jython 2.5.1 fixes a number of bugs, including some major errors when using coroutines and when using relative imports, as well as a potential data loss bug when writing to files in append mode. Please see the NEWS file for detailed release notes.Please report any bugs that you find. Thanks! -
Jython 2.5.1 Release Candidate 3 is out
23 Sep 2009 | 6:54 pmOn behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5.1rc3 is available for download. See the installation instructions.I didn't really want to have an RC3, I was hoping to have a final by now, but a data loss bug was discovered in RC2 and that prompted one more RC. I'm hoping that this is the last one and that we'll have a final shortly. Please see the NEWS file for detailed release notes.Please report any bugs that you find. Thanks! -
PyCon 2010 Call For Talks Ends Soon!
16 Sep 2009 | 5:20 pmIf you where thinking about submitting a talk to PyCon 2010 you should do it now! -
Jython 2.5.1 Release Candidate 2 is out!
12 Sep 2009 | 12:04 pmOn behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5.1rc2 is available for download. See the installation instructions.Jython 2.5.1rc2 fixes bugs that we found when testing rc1, including some db, codec, and locking issues. Please see the NEWS file for detailed release notes.Please report any bugs that you find. Thanks!
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The Third Bit
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Special Issue
18 Nov 2009 | 10:32 amA special issue of Computing in Science & Engineering that Andy Lumsdaine and I edited, devoted to software engineering in computational science, is now available. We’d like to thank everyone who contributed: Report on the Second International Workshop on Software Engineering for CSE, by Jeffrey Carver (University of Alabama) Managing Chaos: Lessons Learned Developing Software in the Life Sciences, by Sarah Killcoyne and John Boyle (Institute for Systems Biology) Scientific Computing’s Productivity Gridlock: How Software Engineering Can Help, by Stuart Faulk (University of… -
What He Said
18 Nov 2009 | 5:36 am‘Nuff said… -
I’m Just Not Very Creative
17 Nov 2009 | 2:56 pmAt least, not by comparison with this. -
Evolution in Action
17 Nov 2009 | 8:15 amIt turns out that a human lifetime may in fact be long enough to see a new species emerge. Cool. -
Why Am I Not Surprised…
16 Nov 2009 | 11:10 am…that Lego would be a leader in augmented reality?
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Agile Testing
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5 years of blogging
19 Nov 2009 | 10:02 amToday marks the 5th anniversary of my blog. It's been a fun and rewarding experience, and I hope to never run out of interesting topics to post about ;-)As a sort of retrospective, I was curious to see which of my blog posts have been getting the most traffic. Here's the top 10 over the last 9 months, according to Google Analytics:1. Performance vs. load vs. stress testing (as an aside, I think this has been wildly popular because I inadvertently hit on a lot of keywords in the title)2. Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC23. Ajax testing with Selenium using… -
Monitoring multiple MySQL instances with Munin
17 Nov 2009 | 12:01 pmI've been using Munin for its resource graphing capabilities. I especially like the fact that you can group servers together and watch a common metric (let's say system load) across all servers in a group -- something that is hard to achieve with other similar tools such as Cacti and Ganglia.I did have the need to monitor multiple MySQL instances running on the same server. I am using mysql-sandbox to launch and manage these instances. I haven't found any pointers on how to use Munin to monitor several MySQL instances, so I rolled my own solution.First of all, here is my scenario: server… -
Behaviour Driven Infrastructure
17 Nov 2009 | 10:28 amI just read a post by Matthew Flanagan on Behaviour Driven Infrastructure or BDI, a concept that apparently originates with Martin Englund's post on this topic. The idea is that you describe what you need your system to do in natural language, using for example a tool such as Cucumber. What's more, you can then use the cucumber-nagios plugin to express the desired behaviour of the new system as a series of Nagios checks. The checks will initiall fail (just like in a TDD or BDD development cycle), but you will make them pass by deploying the appropriate packages and applications to the system. -
Great series of posts on Tokyo Tyrant
13 Nov 2009 | 12:07 pmMatt Yonkovit has started a series of posts on Tokyo Tyrant at Percona's MySQL Performance Blog. Great in-depth analysis of the reliability and performance of TT.Part 1: Tokyo Tyrant -- is it durable?Part 2: Tokyo Tyrant -- the performance wallPart 3: Tokyo Tyrant -- write bottleneck(parts 4 and 5, about replication and scaling, are hopefully coming soon) -
Google using buildbot for Chromium continuous integration
10 Nov 2009 | 4:48 pmVia Ben Bangert, this gem of a page showing the continuous integration status for the Chromium project at Google. It's cool to see that they're using buildbot. But just like Ben says -- I wish they open sourced the look and feel of that buildbot status page ;-)
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James Tauber's Blog
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Information Architecture On This SIte
16 Nov 2009 | 6:16 pmIt seems such a shame to have done so much musing about this site and its contents over the last 13 years and then not to blog about it here. So here is today's effort for my site sprint: http://journeymanofsome.com/information_architecture/ -
Site Sprint
15 Nov 2009 | 7:10 amI've been thinking about re-doing this site for a while, so I've decided to do it as part of SiteSprint II. My goals are to: freshen up the design rethink the information architecture of my site adapt to the shifting role blogging now has for me explore some new technologies like HTML5 and typekit rewrite the underlying code and make it more reusable I'll be prototyping the new site over at http://journeymanofsome.com during the sprint and then will move it over to jtauber.com before the end of the year. I'll be making daily changes there so you might want to check it out often! In other… -
DjangoCon Talks on Pinax
11 Aug 2009 | 6:26 amDjangoCon is on next month in Portland Oregon and the initial talk schedule has just gone up. There are three talks on Pinax I'm directly involved with (and maybe others that will touch on Pinax): an introductory tutorial for Pinax beginners a short talk on how to contribute to Pinax a general State of Pinax talk If you're new to Pinax, you should consider attending the first talk. If you're already using Pinax you may still learn some stuff but we'll definitely tread some ground that would already be familiar to you. The second talk is just a brief introduction to our development process… -
Eldarion Launched
29 Jun 2009 | 12:18 pmWith my visa finally getting processed, me being able to be employed by the company I helped found and my return to the US, I am delighted to be able to announce that we've launched the Eldarion website and with it, the company. http://eldarion.com/ Just a single page at the moment, but I think it's a good start. Thanks to Ryan Berg for turning my initial design into something good looking. And of course thanks to Greg Newman for the logo, which I've previously talked about. -
Affianced
24 Jun 2009 | 5:00 pmWell, it's been a two-and-a-half month blog drought but it's worth breaking for this news. Two weeks ago, the love of my life, Lisa, and I got engaged in Paris. Of course if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you knew that at the time (or shortly thereafter) but it felt like it should be declared here too! I first met (and fell for) Lisa in 1992 although didn't see her again until 1996. People often ask me what took me so long to ask. Truth is, I would have proposed in 1996 (okay, maybe 1997) if I thought she would have said yes. I guess entrepreneurs and lawyers have different risk…
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jessenoller.com
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PyPI Poll: Comments and Ratings
12 Nov 2009 | 8:05 pmThere is a Poll running on the front of the PyPI page – you have to log in to see it/vote. This poll is asking a question about the new feature(s) of allowing users to comment/5-star-rate a given package in the index. Some of the Pros/Cons have already been added to the python wiki here, as well as this bug report here. The catalog-sig has some of the discussion as well. This poll was created in part by this Python-Dev thread. I obviously make my opinion known. Given my vehemence in the python-dev thread; I’d like to point out I am not against giving package consumers a voice… -
PEP 3003: “Python Language Moratorium” – Accepted
9 Nov 2009 | 10:47 amPEP 3003: “Python Language Moratorium” has been accepted. After several weeks of discussion, Guido switched the bit this morning. This PEP effectively freezes the syntax and following items: New built-ins General language semantics New __future__ imports This does not apply to the standard library; adding methods to builtins, or bug fixes to existing things. I know there’s opinions on both sides, but I see this as a Good Thing(tm) – this hopefully frees up core-dev to work on the standard library, tests, the interpreter, docs, etc – basically everything… -
PyCon 2010: Talks are live!
4 Nov 2009 | 6:08 pmThe official talk list for PyCon 2010, happening in February in Atlanta Georgia is now live: http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/talks/ My thanks go out to every author, and person involved in getting us this far. With out the hard work of a lot of people, this would not have been possible. -
Dive Into Python 3: The Foreword
25 Oct 2009 | 7:47 amSeveral months ago; Mark Pilgrim contacted me, asking if I would be interested in writing the foreword to Dive Into Python 3 – the latest revision to his seminal book Dive Into Python. After I was done being flabbergasted, and after I picked myself off the floor, I gladly accepted. What follows is what I wrote, and what will appear in the print edition of Dive Into Python 3 (amazon link). I wanted to convey my passion for both the language, the community – for everything involved in this. I wanted to explain why I, as just another developer see Python 3 as critical to the… -
Python 3to2: Go check it out.
27 Aug 2009 | 6:26 pmEarlier this week – Joe Amenta shot an email to the Python-Dev mailing list announcing the completion of the Google Summer of Code project he had be working on – a Python 3 to Python 2 translation tool. This is something which, when discussed at the Python Language Summit at PyCon 2009 was met with much “yes please make this” – but not a lot of people could allocate the time. In fact, when asked who could at least help drive it forward, I was lame^H^H^H awesome enough to raise my hand. In true upper management style, I discussed it, and promptly delegated it to…
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Ned Batchelder's blog
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On business English
20 Nov 2009 | 2:43 amI've noticed in the office, people often refer to meetings with just an adjective phrase, letting "meeting" be implied: "I have to go, I have a 2:00". Why don't we carry this to its logical extreme? Let's just say things like, I have to get ready for the weekly. Lunch has to be quick, I have to get back for a boring. I think I'm going to skip the pointless. -
Ditaa: DIagrams Through Ascii Art
17 Nov 2009 | 3:35 amDoes ditaa do the impossible, or the unnecessary? It converts ASCII-art block diagrams into nice pictures. As the author puts it:… -
Coverage v3.2b1: branch coverage!
10 Nov 2009 | 6:58 pmCoverage.py v3.2 beta 1 is available, and it's got a big new feature: branch coverage. It's been a long time coming, but I'm pretty pleased with the results. I'm very interested to hear whether this is useful, and what could be improved.Branch coverageCoverage.py now supports branch coverage measurement. Where a line in your program could jump to more than one next line, coverage.py tracks which of those destinations are actually visited, and flags lines that haven't visited all of their possible destinations.For… -
Left vs. right, diagrammed
10 Nov 2009 | 3:44 amI'm sure this will be controversial: an infographic summarizing the differences between the political Left and the political Right: (keep clicking through to get to a full-size readable version).Probably both sides will find things to complain about, though I suspect the right will be more upset. The terms used there seem negative to me, or is that just because I'm on the left?Interesting that they made a "US" version, which simply has the colors reversed! I knew our settling on blue for left was a recent innovation, I hadn't realized that the rest of the world long ago settled on the… -
Lego pop-up temple
9 Nov 2009 | 7:54 pmOK, this is really astounding: first, it's a Lego kit box made out of Lego, not sure why it hasn't been done before. But then he opens the box, and inside is a pop-up temple: Bravo!
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Entity Crisis
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A Geek Lounge?
17 Nov 2009 | 9:46 pmAfter chatting briefly with chrism (who is now back in Perth, w00T!) we lamented the lack of a good place for Geeks to meet up in Perth, and hack on game code, art, music whatever. Perhaps something like the Linux Caffe in Toronto.Who owns a cafe that we can hijack? :-)Any other ideas? -
Go vs Stackless
15 Nov 2009 | 9:04 pmAndrew Dalke compares Go and Stackless Python and gets some very interesting results.I'd like to see answers to some of the questions he raises.Why does Pike emphasize the performance of Go's goroutine creation and channel communication when it seems to be slower than Stackless and definitely is not an order of magnitude faster?Why indeed? Please answer us Google Engineers!Update:Just for fun, I ran the benchmarks myself, and added a benchmark for Fibra, because I wrote it, and I know that it is pretty slow. :-)Go...wdgt:tmp simon$ time ./6.out 100000real 0m1.147suser 0m0.646ssys… -
Python 3, is it doomed?
12 Nov 2009 | 6:58 amWhy would I ask that question? Python 3 has been available for some time now, yet uptake is slow. There aren't a whole lot of packages in the package index shop for Python 3. It seems there just isn't a demand for Python 3 libraries.Google have released a new language, even though they hired the BDFL, and started the Unladen Swallow project (which coincidentally, does not target Python 3). Why?Finally, despite my best efforts to move a project across to Python 3 from Python 2.6, I've been sabotaged by undocumented differences in the behaviour of the select module. I've decided to move back to… -
How PC games should be played...
11 Nov 2009 | 8:04 amBeer + Air Conditioning + High Back Recliner + 42 inches of 1920x1080 LCD.Awesome. -
GameRanger - Perth Game Company
10 Nov 2009 | 11:33 pmI just found out about (via a random google search) GameRanger, a company based in Perth that builds software which seems similar to GameSpy. It appears that they are willing to work with developers too. Cool.
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For Some Value of "Magic"
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Links for 2009-11-20 [del.icio.us]
Starting 2010 With a Bang: Classes in New York Time in the big apple *and* training? What more could a geek want? Everything you ever wanted to know about Twitter Encyclopedic twitter resource Know where you're going You just might already be there Eight ways to kill an idea Worth thinking about -
Starting 2010 With a Bang
20 Nov 2009 | 6:18 pmHolden Web's first one-day workshop was, thanks to Jacob Kaplan Moss, a sell-out success. As a result, and partially due to some excellent feedback from the New York City Python Meetup group, we will be running the same workshop in New York on January 22, again with Jacob presenting. We are also offering a one-day IronPython workshop presented by Michael Foord on January 21.Since the three-day Introduction to Python classes have been well-received in Virginia we are also offering that class in New York on January 18-20.To try and make things easier for those attending and smooth out our… -
Links for 2009-11-18 [del.icio.us]
Events organized by Holden Web, LLC January will be a busy month in New York -
Links for 2009-11-17 [del.icio.us]
Debugging in Python Great article for beginners by Steve Ferg For Some Value of "Magic": Two Thousand Posts Behind Python is still amazing What Information Should a Project Page Contain? Useful collection by James Tauber - guidance for open source projects -
Two Thousand Posts Behind
17 Nov 2009 | 7:39 pmWhile recording material for the first three episodes of a new Python podcast (you'll have to wait*) I realized that I've been less in contact with the doings of the Python community than usual over the last six months, due to project and teaching work.When I am in "less busy" mode and have some spare time I often follow the comp.lang.python newsgroup, offering advice and opinion when the occasion allows. I also find the time to track the Planet Python newsfeed, which is full of interesting (and often detailed) information about what various Python personalities have been up to. When I get…
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Fetchez le Python
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Distutils and Distribute status (part #1)
18 Nov 2009 | 1:36 amSomeone told me on IRC that it’s currently hard to follow what’s going on in the packaging front. The truth is that it’s almost impossible if you don’t read all mails posted in Distutils-SIG. So here’s a quick wrap-up that can save you some time if you are not reading Distutils-SIG. PEP 345 – Metadata 1.2 We are almost done with the update of PEP 345. This PEP is describing the Metadata fields for a distribution, that get added in the file named PKG-INFO. This file is inserted in all your distribution and also published at PyPI. It’s the ID card of… -
virtualenv and zc.buildout now with Distribute included
6 Nov 2009 | 5:36 pmWe are still actively working in fixing all the remaining bugs in Distribute (our Setuptools fork). But we have reached an important milestone this week: both virtualenv and zc.buildout now comes with an option to switch to Distribute. In virtualenv: $ virtualenv --distribute ENV In zc.buildout, using its bootstrap.py file: $ python bootstrap.py --distribute Enjoy ! For those who may wonder why they should switch to Distribute over Setuptools, it’s quite simple: Distribute 0.6.x is a drop-in replacement for Setuptools Distribute is actively maintained, and has over 10 commiters… -
First Distribute mini-sprint (online)
16 Oct 2009 | 12:36 pmWhile we are working at fixing bugs in 0.6.x, we are organizing a first online coding sprint for the 0.7.x series, and for various community tasks. What are we going to do ? We need to finalize the 0.7.x renaming and splitting work We also need to define a more detailed roadmap for each splitted package (new features, deprecations, etc.) We need to build a better test environment, and see if we can set up a buildbot for our work We need to write a tutorial explaining how Distribute can be used in a project. (Python 3 support, Moving from Setuptools to Distribute, etc) Who can join ? There are… -
top-posting, mobile devices, mail threads and semantics
11 Oct 2009 | 3:55 amThere’s an interesting discussion on python-dev about how hard it is to follow a thread when people are starting to top-post, meaning they are answering by quoting the whole text and putting their answers at the top. I even got bitten by someone once because I was top-posting (don’t get me wrong, he was right about it, I was just not fully aware of the problem) First of all, if you use a mobile device, there are good chances that the mail application you are using doesn’t give you the choice : it will quote the text for you and will let you answer at the top. That’s… -
Distribute 0.6.4 released – zc.buildout support
10 Oct 2009 | 3:53 pmWe’ve juste released Distribute 0.6.4. This version is now fully compatible with zc.buildout, meaning that you can use Distribute in your buildout transparently as long as you use our special zc.buildout bootstrap file located here : http://nightly.ziade.org/bootstrap.py. We’ve also added in Jannis’ upload_docs command, that allows a project to upload its Sphinx based documentation to PyPI. As a matter of fact, Distribute is using it now and you can reach its documentation at : http://packages.python.org/distribute. If you have any feedback, or want to help around, drop us a…
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Ted Leung on the Air
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ApacheCon US 2009
16 Nov 2009 | 5:22 pm[This post is late because I came down with the flu right after I got back from ApacheCon. I guess next year I will get a flu shot] Talks This year I was unable to attend all of the conference due to some scheduling problems, so I can’t give an in depth report on talks. I used some of the time that I might normally have spent in talks to catch up with people that I haven’t seen in a while. I was able to attend a good number of the talks in the Hadoop track. The track was larger than last year’s track (due in part to a larger room), but I felt that last year’s track was… -
10 Years of Apache
30 Oct 2009 | 3:27 pmNovember is just around the corner, which means that once again it’s time for ApacheCon US. This year is a special year for the Apache Software Foundation – its 10 year anniversary. Since I got involved with Apache just a few months after the foundation was created, it is also my 10 year anniversary of being involved in open source software. This year I am going to be speaking twice. On Wednesday I’ll be speaking on the Apache Pioneers Panel, and on Thursday I’ll be giving a talk titled How 10 years of Apache has changed my life. I owe a huge professional debt to the… -
The LumaLoop
29 Oct 2009 | 10:53 pmBack in September, my friend James Duncan Davidson stopped to visit me and the family here on Bainbridge Island. Duncan has been working on a new design for a camera strap, and during that visit he showed me one of the prototypes of the LumaLoop. I spent a good portion of our time playing with the strap, and was quite taken with the design. Needless to say, I didn’t really want to give it back to him when it was time for him to go. The following week at DjangoCon, I lost the strap portion of my Upstrap quick release strap. I liked the Upstrap, but it wasn’t ideal. The Upstrap was… -
Concurrency => Parallelism
6 Oct 2009 | 11:44 pmI wanted to clarify a point from my post The Cambrian Period of Concurrency. I made the statement From where I sit, this is all about exploiting multicore hardware because I’ve seen a pile of actor and other concurrency libraries which have not taken parallel execution of the concurrent program seriously. If I am going to go to the trouble of writing a concurrent program, then I want that execution to be parallel, especially in a multicore world. Simon Marlow from the GHC team said that if programming multicore machines is the only goal we ought to be looking at parallelism first and… -
The Cambrian Period of Concurrency
5 Oct 2009 | 9:33 amBack in July, I gave an OSCON talk that was a survey of language constructs for concurrency. That talk has been making the rounds lately. Jacob Kaplan-Moss made referred to it in a major section of his excellent keynote Snakes on the Web, and Tim Bray has cited it as a reference in his Concur.next series. It seems like a good time for me to explain some of the talk content in writing and add my perspective on the current conversations. The Cambrian The Cambrian period was marked by a rapid diversification of lifeforms. I think that we are in a similar situation with concurrency today.
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The Voidspace Techie Blog
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Django json support
15 Nov 2009 | 5:54 pmAs I mentioned in my last entry I'm now working on a Silverlight application with Django on the backend. This means that we're using Django to serve json to the Silverlight application, so whilst we're using the Django ORM, url routing and authentication we aren't using its templating. ... [713 words] -
New Job with Django and IronPython
14 Nov 2009 | 12:22 pmBig personal news; I've changed jobs. After more than three years working with Resolver Systems I felt it was time to broaden my development experience. ... [347 words] -
IronPython in Action Second Quarter Sales
22 Oct 2009 | 11:42 amTech publishing has been in the geek news recently, with a couple of stories making the front page of Slashdot: Beginning Ruby: What I've earned and learned The author of Beginning Ruby wanted to make the ebook free. Apress refused and the author, noting that he still owned the copyright (whilst Apress have sole right to publish) says he would have no problem with his readers distributing an 'unauthorised' free ebook version. ... [458 words] -
Northampton Geek Meet
22 Oct 2009 | 8:41 amWell, last night was the inaugural meeting of the Northampton Geek Meet. Nine geeks from around Northamptonshire (in the UK) got together in the King Billy pub to partake of the real ale and geek talk. ... [298 words] -
Testing File Access with storage.py
16 Oct 2009 | 5:00 amSo in my last blog entry I introduced storage.py and discussed how it could simply testing file access. What I didn't do is show you how. ... [185 words]
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Will's blog
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Reducing complexity for 2.6
18 Nov 2009 | 3:31 pmWe've been working on reducing the complexity of the code for Miro 2.6. We've done this in a few different ways and I want to summarize them here. moved binary kit stuff to separate repositories This dropped the size of the git repository for miro a lot. Cloning the repository is much faster now. Plus it's easier to build Miro on Windows and OSX from the source tarball. moving libtorrent out of portable On Linux, this allows us to rely upon Linux distributions to have packages for libtorrent (the Rasterbar version) and the Python bindings. We don't need to compile libtorrent as part of the… -
Dev call 11/18/2009 minutes
18 Nov 2009 | 8:22 amminutes 2.5.4 status Ben made some fixes for 12301, those will get merged in. Need to sync translations A new set of branch builds today and a release at the end of this week or early next week subtitle support status Luc has it implemented for OSX. Still need implementations for Linux and Windows. Will's working on the Windows implementation. Ben's going to look into moving the menu/submenu code to portable. Either Ben or Will will work on the Linux implementation when their plates clear. Ben: spent a while working on bug 12301. bunch of fixes that'll go into 2.5.4. researched "pumping up… -
git repository is now http
16 Nov 2009 | 4:33 pmWe switched the miro repository url from https://git.participatoryculture.org/miro/ to http://git.participatoryculture.org/miro/. If you were using https, then you should switch the origin url in the .git/config file. It's unlikely that's the case, though, since it's been broken for over a month now. -
gnome.mirocommunity.org
12 Nov 2009 | 7:34 pmA little over a week ago, I started Gnome Miro Community. I'm a Miro developer and we use a ton of Gnome stuff in the application. The site will index Gnome related videos from around the Internet. I hope it'll aid Gnome development. I started a few categories: gnome-shell, gstreamer, and GUADEC 2009. I'll be adding to these going forward. One of the big things that I did was to bulk load the GUADEC 2009 videos into Gnome MC. I built an RSS feed, populated it with descriptions of the talks from the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit wiki pages, and pulled it all into Gnome MC. Today I pulled down… -
Binary kits are no longer in the repository
11 Nov 2009 | 4:20 pmI finished the work to remove the binary kit data from the miro repository today. Removing the binary kit data from the repository changed all the shas. To alleviate the problems this causes, I did the following: Ran a git filter-branch --commit-filter that added a line to the end of every commit message stating what the original commit sha was. The shas are referenced in Bugzilla, so this maintains the papertrail. Moved the "old git repository" to miro.old. If you're building Miro versions prior to Miro 2.6, it'll probably be easier to do that in the old git repository because the binary kit…
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t+1: Matt Wilson's blog » Python
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pitz has a CLI
17 Nov 2009 | 6:32 pmI’ve exposed lots and lots of pitz functionality as command-line scripts. Here’s the list so far: $ pitz-help pitz-abandon-task Abandon a task pitz-add-task Walks through the setup of a new Task. pitz-components All components in the project… -
Help me rewrite some repetitive scripts
18 Oct 2009 | 4:36 pmI have about a dozen functions (that are run as scripts) that have very similar sections interleaved with specialized code. I copied two of the scripts below. Here’s the first: def pitz_estimate_task(): p = optparse.OptionParser() p.add_option('--version', action='store_true', help='Print the version and exit') # This script requires these arguments. p.set_usage("%prog task [estimate]")… -
Why I’m hooked on parameters
14 Oct 2009 | 7:09 pmI have this need to make everything into a parameter. Here’s some code I wrote recently: import subprocess, tempfile def edit_with_editor(s=None): """ Returns the text typed in the editor, after running strip(). """ with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as t: if s: t.write(str(s))… -
How to download photos from phone over bluetooth with ubuntu
3 Oct 2009 | 7:11 amI have a samsung sync phone. It is about two years old now. It isn’t fancy, but it has a camera and a bluetooth device. I wrote a python script to copy photos from my phone to my laptop. Any time I take a bunch of pictures, I just run $ getpics.py and if my phone is anywhere nearby, my computer will pull all the photos off my phone. Bluetooth is a great little tool and I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on more with people like us. I’ve been able to access my phone from my laptop when I’m on the second floor and the phone is across the house and downstairs, still in… -
virtualenvwrapper postactivate and screen is a wonderful combination
16 Aug 2009 | 8:52 amI switched to virtualenvwrapper from plain old virtualenv a while back because I found out that virtualenvwrapper has a postactivate hook I can define. Now when I do $ workon pitz to start my work day, I get a customized work environment exactly the way I want it. In addition to activating a virtualenv named pitz, the postactivate script changes me into the top of my pitz checkout directory and then it starts up or reattaches a screen session customized just for pitz. Setting this up was trivially easy. Here’s what my postactivate script looks like: $ cat…
