There will be no Python 3.0.2 release or further 3.0.x maintenance/security releases. All users of Python 3.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Python 3.1.
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Python News
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Python 3.0 is an ex-release! Long live Python 3.1!
3 Jul 2009 | 8:00 am -
SciPy 2009 - Conference for Scientific Computing
30 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pmThe 8th annual SciPy Conference will be held at Caltech in Pasadena, California from August 18th to the 23rd. See the Call for Papers if you'd like to present. -
PyOhio Talks Schedule Posted
27 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pmThe preliminary schedule of talks for PyOhio has been posted, with twenty-five talks and tutorials planned on a variety of Python programming topics. PyOhio 2009 takes place July 25-26 in Columbus, Ohio, and is free of charge. See pyohio.org for more information and to register (registration opening soon). -
Python 3.1 released
27 Jun 2009 | 2:30 pmThe first production version of Python 3.1 is now available. -
PSF Community Awards go to Stephan Deibel & Sean Reifschneider
18 Jun 2009 | 5:30 amThe latest recipients of the Python Software Foundation Community Awards are Stephan Deibel and Sean Reifschneider (PSF blog announcement), in recognition of their significant contributions to the PSF, PyCon US, and the Python community. Congratulations and thanks!
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Python Software Foundation News
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Python 3.0 is an ex-release! Long live Python 3.1!
3 Jul 2009 | 8:03 amThere will be no Python 3.0.2 release or further 3.0.x maintenance/security releases. All users of Python 3.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Python 3.1. -
Second-Quarter Community Service Awards
18 Jun 2009 | 1:18 amThe Foundation tries to recognize those whose assistance has been significant in its growth and development as well as its day-to-day operations. This quarter's Community Service Award winners are two particularly noteworthy examples. Stephan Deibel Stephan was last year's outgoing chairman after four years in harness. This year Stephan has stepped down as a director, after helping to ensure that the Foundation's bylaws were reorganized. Stephan developed pythonology.com to promote Python, and his work as founder of Wingware and a developer of the Wing IDE has also had a significant… -
"conferences" new mailing list created
22 May 2009 | 1:58 pmThe conferences@python.org mailing list is for open discussion of issues related to Python conferences. All conferences are welcome: established and planned, worldwide. The archive is open to all. Subscribe here. Please spread the word to conference mailing lists and to anyone who would be interested. -
PSF Board & Members' meeting minutes available
14 May 2009 | 2:38 pmThe minutes of all 2009 meetings through April were approved at the May Board meeting, and are available here:12 January 2009 Board meeting9 February 2009 Board meeting12 March 2009 Board meeting27 March 2009 Members' meeting at PyCon27 March 2009 Board meeting at PyCon13 April 2009 Board meetingPrevious minutes: Board meetings, members' meetings -
PSF Community Awards - March 2009
2 Apr 2009 | 9:02 pmSunday, March 29th, at Pycon 2009 in Chicago: On behalf of the PSF Board of Directors, Python BDFL and PSF President Guido van Rossum announced two Python Software Foundation Community Awards. PSF Community Awards are given semi-regularly, several times each year, to people who have made significant contributions to the broader Python community, helping the Foundation to fulfill its mission. Each prize includes a free PyCon registration and $500 towards travel and hotel. This time we recognized two people who have helped to make PyCon possible: Mary Rush has given selflessly for four years…
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PyCon
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PyOhio schedule posted
27 Jun 2009 | 1:01 pmThe preliminary schedule of talks for PyOhio has been posted, with twenty-five talks and tutorials planned on a variety of Python programming topics. PyOhio 2009 takes place July 25-26 in Columbus, OH, and is free of charge. See pyohio.org for more information and to register (registration opening soon). -
EuroPython Starts Next Week
22 Jun 2009 | 3:40 pmEuroPython 2009 starts next week, on Tuesday 30th June in Birmingham, and is preceded by two days of Python tutorials.If you have not already booked your place there is still time to get in if you register although hotel rooms are disappearing fast.With over 400 delegates registered already and more than 100 talks and other events this is the biggest European Python event ever and is not to be missed by anyone interested in Python.There are keynotes by Professor Sir Tony Hoare, Cory Doctorow and Bruce Eckel, and a talk on Bletchley Park from Dr Sue Black, not to mention prizes including an… -
EuroPython Talk Schedule Online
27 May 2009 | 2:32 pmEuroPython 2009 is fast approaching. EuroPython is the officialcommunity conference for Python Programmers across Europe. This year it is being held in the Birmingham Conservatoire, United Kingdom, where previous UK Python events have been held. We are expecting 300-400 delegates from across Europe.The first two days, Sunday 28th June 2009 and Monday 29th June 2009, are tutorial days, including an introductory tutorial for those who have never programmed in Python before.The main conference, from the 30th June to 2nd July, has talks from the leading Python programmers from across Europe. -
"conferences" new mailing list created
22 May 2009 | 2:00 pmThe conferences@python.org mailing list is for open discussion of issues related to Python conferences. All conferences are welcome: established and planned, worldwide. The archive is open to all.Subscribe here.Please spread the word to conference mailing lists and to anyone who would be interested. -
PyCon France at the Cyberbase de la Villette
13 May 2009 | 8:34 amThe French Speaking Python user group (Afpy) is organizing Pycon FR again this year on May 30/31.Come to Paris, at the "Cyberbase de la Villette" and meet the French Speaking Python community!A lot of talks, tutorials and lightning talks will be given during this week-end, on all kind of topics.And the great news is that the whole conference is free, thanks to our sponsors.Schedule : http://pycon.fr/sessions Cyberbase location : http://pycon.fr/acces.html The French Python user group : http://afpy.org Follow the event on Twitter : #pycon-fr Sponsors : http://pycon.fr/partenaires.html
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Happenings in Python Usergroups
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pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, June, 10th, Announcement
9 Jun 2009 | 1:22 pmThe next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, June, 10thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda:Mercurial (ReimarBauer) 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)(Please note: Our usual web-address www.pycologne.de does not work at the moment for unknown reasons.) -
PyOhio CFP, May 15
14 May 2009 | 6:36 amA reminder: Proposals for PyOhio talks (tutorials, etc.) are due May 15 - tomorrow!PyOhio 2009, the second annual Python programming mini-conference for Ohio and surrounding areas, will take place Saturday-Sunday, July 25-26, 2009 at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. A variety of activities are planned, including tutorials, scheduled talks, Lightning Talks, and Open Spaces. PyOhio will be free of charge.PyOhio invites all interested people to submit proposals for scheduled talks and tutorials. PyOhio will accept abstracts on any topics of interest to Python programmers.Standard… -
pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, May, 13th, Announcement
10 May 2009 | 11:31 amThe next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, May, 13thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda:Code-Testing-Workshop including short presentations und discussion (RexTurnbull, Ralf Schönian, Andi Albrecht et al.) 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) -
TuPLE (Tucson, AZ) - April recap
24 Apr 2009 | 12:10 pmThe TuPLE (Tucson, AZ) group met on Monday, April 20th, attended by 10 members.We had some good conversation and it was great to see more new faces show up. Rich Saunders gave a presentation on Pycon 09, touching on some issues relevant to his work at Rincon Research. General discussion of Pycon structure (tutorials, general conference, sprints), Lightning Talks, and Open Spaces.3 of our members attended Pycon. Generally agreed the lightning talks and open spaces were popular and enjoyable conference additions.All pycon videos are available at http://pycon.blip.tv/ Pycon Tutorial… -
PyOhio: Call for Proposals
24 Apr 2009 | 3:09 amPyOhio 2009, the second annual Python programming mini-conference for Ohio and surrounding areas, will take place Saturday-Sunday, July 25-26, 2009 at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. A variety of activities are planned, including tutorials, scheduled talks, Lightning Talks, and Open Spaces. PyOhio will be free of charge.PyOhio invites all interested people to submit proposals for scheduled talks and tutorials. PyOhio will accept abstracts on any topics of interest to Python programmers.Standard presentations are expected to last 40 minutes with a 10 minute question-and-answer…
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ShowMeDo Blog » Python ShowMeDos
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Python Beginners - File Input/Output
19 Jun 2009 | 3:48 amFinally we’ve finished the Python Beginners über-series in our Club. In total the Club has 118 videos over 15 series all focused on teaching new Python skills. Now we’re done with Python beginners we’ll be expanding our scope. In just under 30 minutes in the File I/O Tutorial I cover reading text files, writing textfiles, using binary files (with Python Imaging Library as the example) and persisting data with the pickle module. Now that we’re finished with the raw episodes and our Learning Paths code is finished (it is hidden still…but not for much longer),… -
Visual Parallel Computing Using Python-based VISION/HPC
18 Jun 2009 | 10:44 amWe may not know much about the future of computer programming, but one thing we do know is that it is parallel and the biggest challenge facing software programmers and hardware designers is how to exploit all those multiple cores out there. So Unpingco’s new Python series is both fascinating and prescient. Oh and useful too. The chief impediment to widespread usage of parallel computing is the difficulty in programming HPCs. Furthermore, most users work from a Windows PC so that learning UNIX as a prerequisite to parallel programming is a further obstruction. What is needed is a smooth… -
Python 411 podcast interview - thanks Ron!
28 May 2009 | 12:41 pmRon Stephens, creator of the rather excellent Python411 podcast series was good enough to interview Kyran and myself a couple of weeks back: An interview with the founders of ShowMeDo: May 25, 2009 We cover the history of how we started ShowMeDo with Python screencasts, Kyran’s innovative Learning Paths (which caught MIT’s eye), the special learn-Python-quickly tutorials in our Club, our authors and the 1,000 educational screencasts we’ve built between us to date. We also discuss how you can share your own knowledge with 100,000 global viewers and end with a light chat about… -
Python Beginners - Club Collection Takes Shape
4 May 2009 | 6:25 pmHave finally got round to giving the Club videos a bit of presentational structure following Ian’s last file I/O series in his huge Beginner Programming With Python. Ian’s final series in Beginners brings the club total to 118 videos, 15 video-series and over 10 hours of Pythonic video demonstration <phew>. Ian’s beginner-sets were conceived as a whole, from introducing the look and feel of Python to covering, in quite a bit of detail, the general Python programming elements. With Lucas Holland’s introduction to the Python standard libraries we have a nice round… -
Scientific and Parallel Computing Using IPython
4 May 2009 | 6:09 pmWearing my research-scientist’s hat I can honestly assert that Python’s strength in scientific programming is one of its glories, and maybe less appreciated than it should be. That makes series like unpingo’s Scientific and parallel computing using IPython pure gold for its target audience. Combining the power and flexibility of the enhanced IPython interpreter with some of the industrial strength Python scientific, numeric and graphing libraries creates a superbly flexible and efficient scientific programming set-up. Check out these vids, rather superb as ever. The series…
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PyPy Status Blog
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EuroPython
23 Jun 2009 | 1:58 pmEuroPython is coming. We have two 30-minutes talks that we will present. In addition, the sprint takes place the 29th of June (there will be no-one from the team on the 28th of June), as well as on the 3rd and 4th of July. -
JIT progress
23 Jun 2009 | 12:56 pmIn the last days I finally understood how to do virtualizables. Now the frame overhead is gone. This was done with the help of discussion with Samuele, porting ideas from PyPy's first JIT attempt. This is of course work in progress, but it works in PyPy (modulo a few XXXs, but no bugs so far). The performance of the resulting code is quite good: even with Boehm (the GC that is easy to compile to but gives a slowish pypy-c), a long-running loop typically runs 50% faster than CPython. That's "baseline" speed, moreover: we will get better speed-ups by applying optimizations on the generated… -
News from the jit front
15 Jun 2009 | 3:59 pmAs usual, progress is going slower then predicted, but nevertheless, we're working hard to make some progress. We recently managed to make our nice GCs cooperate with our JIT. This is one point from our detailed plan. As of now, we have a JIT with GCs and no optimizations. It already speeds up some things, while slowing down others. The main reason for this is that the JIT generates assembler which is kind of ok, but it does not do the same level of optimizations gcc would do. So the current status of the JIT is that it can produce assembler out of executed python code (or any interpreter… -
ICOOOLPS Submissions
16 May 2009 | 2:24 amBoth of the papers that people from the PyPy team submitted to ICOOOLPS have been accepted. They are: "Faster than C#: efficient implementation of dynamic languages on .NET" (pdf1) by Armin, Anto and Davide Ancona, who is Anto's Ph.D. advisor "Tracing the Meta-Level: PyPy’s Tracing JIT Compiler" (pdf2) by Carl Friedrich, Armin, Anto and Maciek (the pdfs are obviously the submitted versions, not the final ones). This year ICOOOLPS (Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems) is being held on July the 6th at ECOOP 2009 in… -
4 weeks of GDB
30 Apr 2009 | 2:40 pmHello. So, according to our jit plan we're mostly done with point 1, that is to provide a JIT that compiles python code to assembler in the most horrible manner possible but doesn't break. That meant mostly 4 weeks of glaring at GDB and megabytess of assembler generated by C code generated from python code. The figure of 4 weeks proves that our approach is by far superior to the one of psyco, since Armin says it's "only 4 weeks" :-) Right now, pypy compiled with JIT can run the whole CPython test suite without crashing, which means we're done with obvious bugs and the only ones waiting for us…
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IronPython URLs
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IronPython in Action Goes to College
1 Jul 2009 | 10:13 amThanks to the wonder of Twitter I've heard about two different college courses that will be using IronPython in Action as course material next semester. One is Sargeant Reynolds College in America, with a course taught by Kevin Hazzard, and the other is Northtec in New Zealand with a course taught by Tony Meyer.IronPython is an ideal language for learning programming, it has the great combination of an easy to learn general purpose programming language (Python) with a programming environment which is widely used in commercial development (the .NET framework). Not only these factors, but it is… -
The IronRuby Tutorial
27 Jun 2009 | 6:43 amJimmy Schementi, program manager for the dynamic languages and Silverlight integration plus IronRuby developer, has pushed a new update to the IronRuby github repository.One of the major changes is improvements to the IronRuby tutorial app."The" IronRuby TutorialAs you can see from the screenshot this is a WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation - which means it won't run on Mono) application which combines a tutorial with an integrated interpreter (REPL) for actually trying out the code:Isn’t he/she/it a bute!? This app makes Ruby-based tutorials interactive, guiding you through the material… -
OS Jam at Google London: C# 4 and the DLR
27 Jun 2009 | 6:33 amJon Skeet, author of the well regarded C# in depth, did a five minute talk on C# 4.0 and the Dynamic Language Runtime at a recent Google Open Source Jam in London. The 'innovative' slides are online, and they touch on details like the dynamic keyword, binders and IDynamicMetaObjectProvider.OS Jam at Google London: C# 4 and the DLRThe fundamental point of the DLR is to handle call sites - decide what to do dynamically with little bits of code. Oh, and do it quickly. That's what the caches are for. They're really clever - particularly the L0 cache which compiles rules (about the context in… -
New JavaScript Implementation for the DLR
26 Jun 2009 | 11:40 amThe Dynamic Language Runtime was announced at the same time as Silverlight. Along with IronPython and IronRuby a third, Silverlight only, language was announced that ran on the DLR.This language was Managed JScript, an ECMA compliant version of Javascript that was touted as an easy way to port AJAX applications to run on Silverlight.Unfortunately as IronPython and the DLR developed Managed JScript stagnated. It was only ever released as binaries and hasn't been kept up to date with recent versions of the DLR. Someone called it the Bastard, red-headed step-child in the DLR.However, there is… -
Twisted on IronPython
26 Jun 2009 | 11:06 amOne of the big new features coming in IronPython 2.6 is optional support for Python stack frames (with a ~10% performance hit tracking the frames if it is enabled).With this in place Seo Sanghyeon, maintainer of FePy the community distribution of IronPython, has been looking at getting Twisted working with IronPython. Twisted is an open source event-driven networking engine written in Python.Seo posted this email to the IronPython mailing list:I have started porting Twisted to IronPython.Progress is to be tracked on this Trac ticket.There is a Buildbot running the Twisted tests with…
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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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AMK's Journal
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Losing our tree
20 Jun 2009 | 6:12 amThe homeowner's association sent us a note requesting we trim the cedar tree in front of our house. We consulted some landscapers, and their consensus was that the tree was slowly dying, so it seemed best to just remove it. Before: After: It's a pity the tree had to go, because it shaded the house and screened our bedroom window very nicely. If we're still living in the house next year, we'll probably get a replacement tree. -
Google Wave
31 May 2009 | 2:55 pmIt's probably a good time to reconsider the core of e-mail communication. Spam still appears an insoluble problem, and anti-spam measures have made e-mail unreliable; did that big attachment mean the message ended up in the spam folder? Using the web is an obvious idea for a replacement. Dan Bernstein proposed an Internet Mail 2000 protocol where messages would stay on the sender's server and be retrieved by the recipient, which is already pushing things in a more HTTP-like direction. Google Wave turns it all into a server-hosted web application. I like how Google Wave spans the different… -
New book on the Bach cello suites
20 Apr 2009 | 10:33 amToday I listened to an interview on CBC's 'The Next Chapter with Eric Siblin, author of "The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece". Siblin, a music critic formerly with the Montreal Gazette, became infatuated with the suites and wrote the book to trace their history: Bach's original writing of them, Pablo Casals's championing of the suites in the 20th century, and Siblin's own reactions to them. The 18Mb MP3 of the April 11 episode has the interview with Siblin; the interview is about 13 minutes of a 35-minute episode. -
Twitter exercise reporting
19 Apr 2009 | 1:33 pmI spent several hours this weekend writing a script to search a Twitter feed for posts describing a bike ride (or a walk, or a run) and summarizing the results. Here's the current output for my feed, stuck in an IFRAME element: Your browser does not support the IFRAME element. Barb suggested the original idea. The script searches a user's Twitter feed for tweets tagged with '#bike' or '#run' or '#walk'. Each tweet is scanned for a distance in the form 'N miles', 'N.N miles', 'N meters', or 'N km', and for a time in the form 'N.N hours' or 'N minutes'. The scanning script tries to be polite in… -
PyCon 2009 wrap-up: Organization
1 Apr 2009 | 5:58 pmThis year's PyCon was, I think, the smoothest-running conference yet, for as long as I've been involved. My province, registration, went smoothly; Yarko Tymciurak's new registration software had some rough edges but was reliable and its on-site registration process wasn't ideally quick but it functioned without glitches. Mary Rush handled reg. desk inquiries with aplomb, and Ken Whitesell, Ralph Green Jr., and Pat Campbell, volunteered for long hours. Wireless failures trigger instant complaints from attendees, but there were no widespread networking problems; I suspect most of the issues…
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Groovie
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Comments and Web Services
28 Jun 2009 | 7:30 pmI’m trying out Disqus for comments on the blog, for one main reason, I just didn’t feel like implementing comments myself. I am somewhat wary of services that seem integral to a blog, like where the comments are, which is why I’ve been leery of using services like this for some time. What happens if Disqus runs out of VC and goes belly-up? I’ve seen this with a few other web services, and no one using it is very happy when it occurs. On the other hand, I did find some irony in the fact that one of the features Disqus pitches users is, “Don’t lose your… -
Blog upgraded! Now running on Pylons + MongoDB
17 Jun 2009 | 12:00 amI’ve now updated the blog software powering my blog, which is very long overdue. In the past, this blog was run off Typo, which apparently now hosts their home site off the github (its moved a dozen times in the past 3+ years). Typo always worked moderately well for me, however, I found it sluggish (Prolly Rails there), and incredibly horrid on ram usage. It was not at all unusual to see it running past 700 megs of RAM after running for just a few weeks, which is a bit annoying as the machine only has 4GB total and is running quite a few things. After last weeks SF Python Meetup on… -
Making a better TextArea
30 May 2009 | 5:42 pmI’ve been working on some Javascript to enhance the TextArea elements on the PylonsHQ Snippets section, and have noticed that… well, TextArea’s suck. The hack I’ve seen is to use one of the newer features of browsers, the editable or 'design’ attribute’s for div elements I believe. This lets one build a very snazzy amount of features, such as syntax highlighting, code completion, etc., but I don’t think I needed to go that far. I only have one main design goal, this TextArea is for the user to enter RestructuredText so it’d be awesome if the… -
Beaker 1.3 is juicy caching goodness
22 Apr 2009 | 7:50 pmBeaker 1.3 is out, actually, its been out for awhile and I’m just not getting around to blogging the fact. It’s a shame I’ve been a bit too busy lately to blog this earlier because in addition to some bug fixes it has some nice new features that make it even easier to use in any Python script/application/framework. First, to air my dirty laundry, the important bug fixes in Beaker 1.3: Fixed bug with (non-cookie-only) sessions not being timed out Fixed bug with cookie-only sessions sending cookies when they weren’t supposed to Fixed bug with non-auto sessions not… -
Pylons 0.9.7 Released
23 Feb 2009 | 11:44 amI’m pleased to announce after a rather lengthy release candidate period, that Pylons 0.9.7 is finally out. Pylons 0.9.7 brings a good amount of changes to Pylons from 0.9.6 while still retaining a fairly hefty amount of backwards compatibility to ensure a mostly painless upgrade. Some helpful documentation on the new release: Upgrading to Pylons 0.9.7 Pylons 0.9.7 Documentation Pylons 0.9.7 Docs in PDF Pylons Book (Will be updated soon with the final copy from the printed book) Major changes in 0.9.7: Switched to using WebOb for the request/response object Various performance…
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Coder Who Says Py
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Python 3.1 is out
27 Jun 2009 | 3:46 pmAs Benjamin Peterson tweeted, Python 3.1 is now available. As always you can read about what's new. Anyone using Python 3 for anything should upgrade as there are some major performance improvements in 3.1 that will make your life better (that includes the new --with-computed-gotos configure flag).And just to remind people, PEP 370 exists to help you manage your Python installation. -
Lazy imports in 25 lines of code
2 Jun 2009 | 11:38 amFor some unknown reason to me, I found myself thinking about lazy importing on my way home from school. Now I have never actually dived into the topic before so I had no preconceived notions of how to solve the problem. I do know that people like to have imports be lazy so that the startup time of their applications are not dominated by imports of modules that they do not need immediately, if at all. Many projects have replicated their own solution to this problem such as bzr and hg. This has even gone as far as Greg Ewing proposing actual syntax support on python-ideas and Christian Heimes… -
The staleness of the standard library and adding new things
30 May 2009 | 1:37 pmIf you happen to follow certain members of python-dev on Twitter you may have noticed a discussion going on over Zed Shaw's "Curing Python's Neglect" post about inconsistencies in the language and the standard library, focusing mostly on the latter. This caused some people to say Zed should be lindberg'd (link is currently down) for complaining about the state of Python's standard library without offering solutions. This then led to Zed responding about how there is a double-standard for accepting changes between Python committers and everyone else which has led to crap making it into the… -
Month one of my python-dev sabbatical
8 May 2009 | 3:46 pmIt now has been roughly a month since I disabled subscriptions for practically every mailing list I belong to. Initially I had to get used to the fact that checking Gmail constantly for new mail was a fruitless exercise. Otherwise it's been nice.I definitely have more time on my hands. Python-dev has been my hobby for so long I had somewhat forgotten what it was like to just work on a coding project purely for fun and just for myself. Not having to answer to the Python community for the quality of my code or test coverage, not having to document everything, or have to argue for why I did… -
Does XHR lead to better testing/abstraction?
4 May 2009 | 2:34 pmI was talking with a friend of mine who is a Ruby programmer who does Rails development and I asked her how best to handle a form submission that was malformed. I am thinking of the situation when I have a URL that accepts a POST from a web page and some argument is in the wrong format or an argument is entirely missing. I wanted some way to signal the POST submission was bad directly from the HTTP status code or something. I mean you should have some clear way to know that something failed along with a message as to why it failed.But she said it should return a 200 with response page…
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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: pyclbr
28 Jun 2009 | 6:02 ampyclbr – Python class browser supportPurpose:Implements an API suitable for use in a source code editor for making a class browser.Python Version:1.4 and laterpyclbr can scan Python source to find classes and stand-alone functions. The information about class, method, and function names and line numbers is gathered using tokenize without importing the code.The examples below use this source file as input:"""Example source for pyclbr."""class Baseobject """This is the base class. """ def method1self returnclass Sub1Base… -
PyMOTW: robotparser
21 Jun 2009 | 7:59 amrobotparser – Internet spider access controlPurpose:Parse robots.txt file used to control Internet spidersPython Version:2.1.3 and laterrobotparser implements a parser for the robots.txt file format, including a simple function for checking if a given user agent can access a resource. It is intended for use in well-behaved spiders or other crawler applications that need to either be throttled or otherwise restricted.NoteThe robotparser module has been renamed urllib.robotparser in Python 3.0.Existing code using robotparser can be updated using 2to3.robots.txtThe robots.txt file format… -
Exception Handling Techniques
19 Jun 2009 | 6:23 amLast week when a colleague was reviewing some code I had written, he had a few questions about an unusual exception handling technique I was using. I had been fixing a bug in which the cleanup code from one error was generating another error, and the second exception masked the first. I went through a few contortions before I came up with a solution that allowed the cleanup code to fail but still preserved the original error and traceback for the user.After our conversation, I decided to write up a quick example to share. I prefaced the description with some basic exception handling… -
PyMOTW: gettext
14 Jun 2009 | 8:47 amgettext – Message CatalogsPurpose:Message catalog API for internationalization.Python Version:2.1.3 and laterThe gettext module provides an all-Python implementation compatible with the GNU gettext library for message translation and catalog management. The tools available with the Python source distribution enable you to extract messages from your source, build a message catalog containing translations, and use that message catalog to print an appropriate message for the user at runtime.Message catalogs can be used to provide internationalized interfaces for your program, showing… -
installing GNU gettext for use with Python on OS X
14 Jun 2009 | 5:39 amI've been working on my blog post about Python's gettext module for the past couple of mornings, and ran into a snag. The documentation claims that the Python source distribution includes all the tools you'll need, but when I got to the point where I wanted to write examples of internationalizing plural strings, pygettext.py wasn't working.It worked great for extracting individual string messages up to that point, but refused to extract messages wrapped in the ungettext() call, even when I used what seemed to be the appropriate command line options. I ended up installing the GNU gettext tools…
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Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.
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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… -
PyCon Progress Report
19 Mar 2009 | 6:52 amPyCon is less than a week away. Where has the time gone? Registration Online registration is closed. The full count is not determined yet (due to sponsor passes, financial aid, and a few minor issues) but attendance will be around 850, but could be as high as 900. We had 400 people in ‘06, 600 in ‘07, and bearly broke 1K in ‘08. With the dramatic downturn in the economy and corporations removing all travel and conference expenses, this is astounding! Initially we were planning on about 1200 (plan made back in April last year), and some believed halving that number would be a…
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me->flub
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Singletons in a Python extension module
23 Jun 2009 | 12:46 amIf you want a singleton in a C extension module for CPython you basically have to do the same as when doing this in plain Python: the .__new__() method needs to return the same object each time it is called. Implementing this has a few catches though. static PyObject * MyType_new(PyTypeObject *type, PyObject *args, PyObject *kwds) { static MyObject *self = NULL; if (self == NULL) self = (MyObject *)type->tp_alloc(type, 0); Py_XINCREF(self); return (PyObject *)self; } Then assign this function to the tp_new slot in the type. There's two things of interest in this function: self is declared as… -
Voting and identification in the UK
7 Jun 2009 | 4:27 amLast Thursday I had the pleasure of being able to vote for the local council as well as for the European Parliament. Since I'm a Belgian citizen living in the United Kingdom this involved convincing the officials at the voting office to re-read their instructions (at first they only allowed me to vote for the local council but not for Europe, I think they must have realised how silly that sounded) but otherwise was quite easy. Too easy. When I went to the polling station I forgot my poll card, but my colleagues at work said that would be fine (not that going home to pick it up was very far)… -
Raising exceptions in threads
6 Jun 2009 | 5:05 amIt's not simply raising an exception in a thread that I want. I want to raise an exception in a thread from another thread. It's like sending signals to threads, only signals in pyhon can only be delivered to the main thread (for portability). But Python has a other asynchronous signaling system: exceptions. I'd like to be able to do something like: for t in threading.enumerate(): thread.raise(MyAppDoesntWantYouAnymoreError) Is this possible? Are there other ways to do this sort of thing? Alternatively I might be happy with a fix for issue1856, but I do think it might be nice to be able to… -
New home for PSI
30 May 2009 | 7:04 amPSI, the Python System Information package that pulls interesting information from the kernel and makes it available in a nice Python API, has a new home at bitbucket. This means that the source conde now lives inside a mercurial repository instead of subversion. This actually happened about a week ago, but better announce it late then never... -
Python System Information 0.3b1^W0.3b1.1
21 May 2009 | 2:04 amShort summary: PSI is alive and we've just released the first beta of a much improved upcoming 0.3 release! Back in 2007 Chris Miles announced PSI - Python System Information, a Python extension module to provide access to some system information not normally available to Python. Most notably it allows you to look at all processes on the system and get details like memory usage, cpu usage, users and many more things the kernel knows about a process. And all this in a pythonic way! At the time the implementation was not perfect (when will an implementation ever be?), it had many memory leaks…
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Frank Wierzbicki's Weblog
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Jython 2.5.0 Final is out!
16 Jun 2009 | 11:10 amOn behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5.0 final is available for download. See the installation instructions.Jython 2.5.0 brings us up to language level compatibility with the 2.5 version of CPython. This release has had a strong focus on CPython compatibility, and so this release of Jython can run more pure Python apps then any previous release. Please see the NEWS file for detailed release notes.I want to thank all of the amazing people who have contributed in large and small ways to this important Jython release. For the first time in a long time… -
Jython 2.5.0 Release Candidate 4 is out!
8 Jun 2009 | 11:58 amOn behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5rc4 is available for download. See the installation instructions.This is the fourth and probably final release candidate of the 2.5.0 version of Jython. If no major bugs are found in rc4, we will relabel it as 2.5.0 final. With this version, all of the regression that we follow on Windows now pass.Please try this out and report any bugs that you find. -
Jython 2.5.0 Release Candidate 3 is out!
26 May 2009 | 12:52 pmOn behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5rc3 is available for download. See the installation instructions.This is the third release candidate of the 2.5 version of Jython. It fixes some threading issues and partially fixes JLine on Cygwin.Almost every release in the past year has been followed shortly by another release to fix a windows bug. Today I finally got off of my butt and installed Windows on a VM and spent the day testing, so hopefully this one will not follow that pattern.Please try this out and report any bugs that you find. -
Jython 2.5.0 Release Candidate 2 is out!
11 May 2009 | 11:57 am[Update:A bug in our build process and jline support caused windows failures, so we have released an rc2 and changed the download link below to point there]On behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5rc2 is available for download. See the installation instructions.It contains bug fixes and polish since the last beta. One especially nice bit of polish is that JLine is enabled by default now, and so using up and down arrows should work out of the box. If no major bugs are found this release will get re-labeled and released as the production version of… -
Jython 2.5 Beta 4 Released
28 Apr 2009 | 10:39 amJython 2.5b4 is available for download. See the installation instructions.While no new features have been added since Beta 3, we have fixed a number of bugs. One of the bugs prompted an almost total re-write of our Tuple and List implementations, which is the reason that this is another beta and not a release candidate. Expect a release candidate real soon now.We also applied a patch that allows Jython to function in a system that does not have write access to the filesystem so that Jython can run unpatched in Google App Engine.This is a beta release so be careful.
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The Third Bit
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Cross-Canada Undergrad Projects
30 Jun 2009 | 5:37 pmSince 2002, I have run a course at U of T in which teams of senior undergraduate students do projects for clients from local startups, non-profits, university departments, and the research hospitals. Last year, as an experiment, I took on students from other universities as well, including Waterloo, Lakehead, Alberta, and Havana. Colleagues from several Canadian universities are joining with me this fall to scale up this effort [1]. We plan to have 20-25 students from half a dozen schools work on a handful of open source projects. Students will register in the appropriate course at… -
Where Is Your (Country’s) Money Going?
30 Jun 2009 | 10:35 amThe newly-launched Federal IT Dashboard shows where and how the US government is spending money on information technology. I want one for Canada—and for the City of Toronto. -
Firefox 3.5
29 Jun 2009 | 6:37 pmCongratulations to the whole Firefox team on the occasion of their latest release — and double that for welcoming students with open arms. W00t! -
Who’s Getting My Business
29 Jun 2009 | 5:58 pmWe get our electricity from Bullfrog, which supplies power from renewable sources. I recently found their “Bullfrog Powered” list and their Green Directory, both of which list Bullfrog’s customers. It’s cool, but what I really want is a downloadable list that I can throw onto a Google Map. Nice to have either way, though; we’ll be checking the list before shopping in the months to come. -
The War Child Night Shift
29 Jun 2009 | 7:28 amFor the duration of the garbage strike in Toronto, the staff of War Child Canada will be doing pickups at $10/bag or 6 for $50. All the proceeds go to helping young victims of war. Hard to think of a better cause…
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Agile Testing
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Dark launching and other lessons from Facebook on massive deployments
2 Jul 2009 | 2:29 pmI came across this note from the Engineering team at Facebook which talks about how they managed to smoothly launch their recent 'pick a username' feature. The title of the note is, appropriately enough, 'Hammering usernames' -- this is of course because they were expecting their infrastructure to be hammered.In the note I saw for the first time a name for a strategy that teams I've been involved with have applied before: 'dark launching'. Essentially, dark launching is releasing a new feature to a subset of your users, mostly with no UI changes, but otherwise exercising all the parts of your… -
A redbot from mnot
30 Jun 2009 | 11:38 ammnot == Mark Nottingham (RESTful Web Services guru and blogger)redbot == Resource Expert Droid == a testing tool written in Python that "checks HTTP resources to see how they use HTTP, makes suggestions, and finds common protocol mistakes"Use this tool if you want to see how well your Web application does in terms of HTTP connections, content negotiation, caching and validation. Very useful both for traditional Web sites and for Web services. -
Presentations from AWS Start-Up Event
29 Jun 2009 | 5:11 pmOpenX was invited to present as part of the AWS Start-Up Tour 2009, which stopped in Los Angeles on June 15th. John Linden, our CTO, gave a presentation on the ways we use EC2 here at OpenX. He got a lot of questions, which means people were awake and alert ;-)Until John's slides are posted to Slideshare, here are 2 other presentations, one from eHarmony on the way they use Elastic MapReduce, and one from Amazon's own Jinesh Varia on 'Architecting for the AWS cloud'. Interesting stuff. Check out this Slideshare page for more links to other AWS-related presentations. -
The Second Law of Automated Testing
21 May 2009 | 1:30 pmI was invited by Paul Moore and Paul Hodgetts to give a presentation at the Agile/XPSoCal monthly evening meeting, which happened last night in Irvine, at the Capital Group offices. The topic of my presentation was 'How to Get to "Done" - Agile and Automated Testing Techniques and Tools'. I think it went pretty well, there were 30+ people in attendance and I got a lot of questions at the end, which is always a good sign. Here are my slides in PDF format. I presented a lot of tools as live demos outside of the slides, but I hope that the points I made in the slides will still be useful to some… -
MySQL fault-tolerance and disaster recovery techniques
15 May 2009 | 1:17 pmAny non-trivial MySQL installation needs to be protected against failures, and especially so in a 'cloud' environment, where failure should be expected. I've had bad experiences with MySQL clustering (I tenderly refer to it as MySQL clusterf**k), so I'm going to talk about MySQL replication in this post.The most common fault-tolerance scenario in a MySQL environment is to have a master database server and a pool of load-balanced slave database servers. Hopefully your application is configurable so it can write to the master DB and read from the slave DB pool. If it is not, you can still use…
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Labix Blog » Python
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Screwing up Python compatibility: unicode(), str(), and bytes()
2 Jul 2009 | 8:50 amBackwards and forwards compatibility is an art. In the very basic and generic form, it consists in organizing the introduction of new concepts while allowing people to maintain existing assets working. In some cases, the new concepts introduced are disruptive, in the sense that they prevent the original form of the asset to be preserved completely, and then some careful consideration has to be done for creating a migration path which is technically viable, and which at the same time helps people keeping the process in mind. A great example of what not to do when introducing such disruptive… -
Changing people or changing rules
16 May 2009 | 6:02 amIn my previous post I made an open statement which I’d like to clarify a bit further: (…) when the rules don’t work for people, the rules should be changed, not the people. This leaves a lot of room for personal interpretation of what was actually meant, and TIm Hoffman pointed that out nicely with the following questioning in a comment: I wonder when the rule is important enough to change the people though. For instance [, if your] development process is oriented to TDD and people don’t write the tests or do the job poorly will you change them then? This is indeed a nice… -
Class member access control: enforcement vs. convention
15 May 2009 | 2:26 amFor a long time I’ve been an advocate of Python’s notion of controlling access to private and protected members (attributes, methods, etc) with conventions, by simply naming them like “_name”, with an initial underline. Even though Python does support the “__name” (with double underscore) for “private” members (this actually mangles the name rather than hiding it), you’ll notice that even this is rarely used in practice, and the largely agreed mantra is that convention should be enough and thus one underscore suffices. This always… -
Wiki + Spreadsheet
12 Aug 2008 | 12:46 amThe underlying concept is very simple: spreadsheets are a way to organize text, numbers and formulas into what might be seen as a natively numeric environment: a matrix. So what would happen if we loosed some of the bolts of the numeric-oriented organization, and tried to reuse the same concepts into a more formatting-oriented environment which is naturally collaborative: a wiki. While I do encourage you to answer this with some fantastic new online service (please provide me with an account and the best e-book reader device available once you’re rich) I had a try at answering this… -
Watch out for list(dict.keys()) in Python 3
27 Jun 2008 | 2:57 pmAs everyone is probably aware by now, in Python 3 dict.keys(), dict.values() and dict.items() will all return iterable views instead of lists. The standard way being suggested to overcome the difference, when the original behavior was actually intended, is to simply use list(dict.keys()). This should be usually fine, but not in all cases. One of the reasons why someone might actually opt to perform a more expensive copying operation is because, with the pre-3.0 semantics, the keys() method is atomic, in the sense that the whole operation of converting all dictionary keys to a list is done…
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James Tauber's Blog
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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… -
Pinax Video and Move to GitHub
7 Apr 2009 | 12:27 pmThe audio isn't great (they didn't seem to be directly recording the mic I was holding) and it got cut short, but for what it's worth, here's the video of my talk on Pinax at PyCon 2009: http://blip.tv/file/1952623 Following the conference proper, we had a great sprint that got us within a stone's throw of a 0.7 beta release. One of the first things we did was move from svn at Google Code Project Hosting to git at GitHub. The new home of the Pinax source code is now: http://github.com/pinax/pinax/ We also moved our wiki and task tracking off Google Code Project Hosting to our own, Pinax-based… -
The Long Pay Off: Battlestar Galactica and Lost
20 Mar 2009 | 9:50 amNOTE: This may contain SPOILERS for Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica and Lost. I'm a big fan of episodic television with long arcs. I love pay-offs that are separated by months or even years from their initial set up, where you can go back and watch earlier episodes and see things you never noticed before. Back when I was watching the X Files, it was always the so-called "myth arc" episodes I liked and never the "monster of the week". But it eventually became clear that even the myth arc episodes in the X Files were being made up as they went along. I felt duped. So it was… -
Eldarion Logo
1 Mar 2009 | 4:50 pmFor years, I've had "Eldarion" in the back of my mind as a name I'd like to use for some creative endeavour. It is a reference to Tolkien: Eldarion was the son of Aragorn and Arwen and the Second High King of the Reunited Kingdom. Much to my surprise, the domain was available when I checked back in 2002, so I registered it immediately. At first I thought I'd use the name for my film and music endeavours. When I attended SXSW Film and Music in 2005, I actually had business cards printed that said "Eldarion". They were black cards with white writing, a reference to the…
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Compound Thinking » Python
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TurboGears 2.0.1 now available on pypi
22 Jun 2009 | 1:21 pmSince the beginning (nearly) of TurboGears 2.x development we use a private index to store all our dependencies and point people to it for installation. This was nice because it helped us control our dependency tree and make sure installation of our unstable software was as easy as possible. Since we had released a stable 2.0 version, followed by a 2.0.1 bugfix, we really were lacking a real pypi install mechanism. This is now a thing of the past! You can install a full blown TurboGears2 environment in one simple command: easy_install tg.devtools and this will fetch everything using normal… -
TurboGears 2.0 presentation video
15 Jun 2009 | 1:29 amIn the last post I said we presented TurboGears 2.0 at the Pycon FR event. We have received the video feeds from the organization. This is a French presentation, sorry for the non-french speakers. As a reminder the code of application we presented is available on bitbucket. -
TurboGears 1.x to Turbogears 2.0
12 Jun 2009 | 3:50 amTwo weeks ago we (Jonathan Schemoul, Thomas Zaffran and me) animated a TurboGears 2.0 presentation (in french) and workshop at PyconFR 2009. PyconFR is an annual French Python event organized by the AFPY. The presention was separated in two phases. The first part covered an history of the project and a technical overview. The second part was a live coding session during which we created a small todolist application to show-off the new TurboGears 2.0 features. At the end of this presentation, one of the attendees came to us and gave us a nice remark that I would like to share with you here:… -
27 May 2009 | 11:21 am
27 May 2009 | 11:21 amThe long wait is finally over! I am happy to announce the release of TurboGears 2.0 final. This release is the product of a lot of work by the whole TurboGears team, and we’re very happy to have a final stable release. TurboGears 2.0 final includes all kinds of goodies for those making web applications, from one of the most powerful and flexible Object Relational Mappers available in any language, to a powerful and flexible template system. But just as important as the quality of the parts, is the out-of-the-box integration to help get you started quickly: We have quickstart template… -
Working at SourceForge
9 Apr 2009 | 7:20 amI’ve been at SourceForge for a couple of months now, it’s been great, the work is surprisingly fun and rewarding. There’s a local office, and so I actually get to g and hang out with smart people whenever I want. I can still work from home, but having someplace to go in to has been a refreshing change. I haven’t gotten to know many people outside the engineering team in Dexter, but they are great guys. There’s lots of good stuff happening here, support for bazar, mercurial, git, trac, and other options on SourceForge itself, improved feeds, and other API’s…
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Ned Batchelder's blog
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Conover Plastics
26 Jun 2009 | 4:38 amOn my dresser was one of those little plastic hangers that socks are sold on. I was about to throw it away when I noticed it had an 800 number molded onto it. I was curious to see what would be at the other end of that number, so I asked Google about it. It lead me to Conover Plastics, whose home page claims,Conover Plastics, Inc. is the leading manufacturer and supplier of sock hangers. With over 30 years of experience making sock hangers, Conover has a great assortment of sock hangers. We have many standard sock hangers in stock - ready to ship the same day we receive your order.Every once… -
Cog 2.2
25 Jun 2009 | 6:04 pmI've updated my code generation tool, Cog. It's now supported on Jython 2.5, and I've removed the handyxml module it used to ship with, since most Cog users have no need of it. There's no functional changes. Cog does one thing well: find snippets of Python code in text files, and run them, capturing the output and splicing it into the file. It can be used for all sorts of code generation and preprocessing tasks.The irony of Cog is that I wrote it back when I worked in C++ and needed to generate code. Now that I work in Python, I don't need it, or so I thought. But this winter when I was… -
Bare-bones basic Mercurial for Subversion users
19 Jun 2009 | 8:03 amA friend was getting started with Mercurial, and asked me for a few equivalents to commands he used in Subversion. I tried pointing him to a tutorial online that would provide the Subversion/Mercurial rosetta stone, and was surprised to find that there wasn't one I could recommend. So I wrote it: Bare-bones basic Mercurial for Subversion users. -
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16 Jun 2009 | 4:46 amMe, that is.One thing social networks do very well is keep people connected together who may not have been connected at all before. It used to be that only those closest to you would know when your birthday was. Now entering it into your Facebook profile means that all sorts of people that you're just a little connected to know it. Some people criticize social networks for replacing significant connection with trivial ones, that they're the fast food of relationships, edging out meaningful interactions with empty friendship calories. I find them instead to be a supporting structure: the… -
Bathsheba and Bulatov
15 Jun 2009 | 4:41 amBathsheba Grossman and Vladimir Bulatov make wonderful art objects. They're math-inspired, but you don't need a PhD to appreciate their beautiful organic forms. They're made with a 3D metal-printing technique that produces intricate sculptures impossible with other techniques: I've blogged about Bathsheba before, but I just spent at least an hour poring over these artworks, and following connections from Bulatov's photos on flickr, so I thought I would share again. Also, Bathsheba has some models in plastic which reduces the cost.
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Phil Hassey » python
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Galcon Flash has arrived ..
23 Jun 2009 | 2:39 pmSo .. Yeah. Check it out. Realtime multi-player game .. in flash! So on a more technical note .. The game involves quite a number of technologies! AS3 - of course - for the Flash client itself C++ - for the server PHP - for the web API and rankings system python - for the bots If I did the project over, I’d probably do the server in python as well. But all in all the project went pretty well. After things were done, it only took me a morning to write up the python client. There’s a very good chance I’ll release that code in a few weeks and let people try making… -
I can has flash?!
12 Mar 2009 | 6:34 pmSo .. who thinks flash + Galcon = win? I don’t know yet, but I’m giving it a try. I’m not actually developing the flash version. An awesome friend of mine has been doing the time on this one. Though I’ll probably be doing the LAMP end of the deal. At present the game is non-networked, but we’re been considering the possibilities. A TCP/IP edition of the game could be made, but I wonder if that would end in tears. TCP/IP isn’t ideal for gamedev IMO. Flash doesn’t support UDP as-of-yet. This isn’t the first time Galcon has reared… -
Beast for the iPhone / iPod touch
23 Feb 2009 | 9:09 amToday marks the release of my first iPhone game release in five months. It’s about time I got going on dev again. I’ve been in the midst of many transitions in both of my businesses, so I decided to start out with something short-n-sweet. The game is called Beast. Beast is a re-make of an ancient MS-DOS game that I played ages ago (and I’ve re-made several times). The original is here. You may have followed my progress on twitter. Here are some interesting “factoids” about the game dev. The original game is pretty tough to play, if you have dosbox and… -
Can’t do everything ..
18 Feb 2009 | 8:00 pmAlas, I’m not going to be able to make PyCon this year .. Because I’m a finalist in the IGF Mobile competition And the GDC is happening the same week as PyCon. Oh well, can’t do everything. I wish I could go to both, PyCon was a blast last year! That said, some of us tinypy folks might do a tinypy sprint at the same time as the PyCon sprints. So if there are any people at PyCon who want to sprint on tinypy, get in touch and we can all work together in #tinypy somewhere. Further news about this sprint will be available in the tinypy mailing list. tinypy has… -
From python to C++
13 Feb 2009 | 10:10 pmI think I wrote an article a few months ago comparing C and python. I’m doing some new iPhone games now, and this time I’m using C++. I found not having classes was getting to be too painful for me, so I’m trying out C++. Here are a few things I’ve observed: (As a side note - I’m writing my games /almost/ the same way I’d write them in python. So if you’ve seen my game code, I’m doing almost the same stuff, except in C++.) As usual, not having memory management is a bit of bother. Fortunately, I’ve found there are only a few…
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Entity Crisis
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Holy Cow, Galcon runs in Flash!
23 Jun 2009 | 3:33 pmPhil Hassey, noted Python/Pygame enthusiast has ported his Award Winning Galcon game to Flash! Awesome!I'd recommend limiting yourself to 1 match per day, else you'll be joining me at Galcon Anonymous meetings. -
Stackless vs GIL: It's a draw, cont.
15 Jun 2009 | 8:57 amI decided to double check my assumptions about Stackless and the GIL on a multicore machine, using the same example provided by David Beazley in his slides, which highlights the GIL contention issue. It's probably a better example than my previous test.import stacklessimport timeimport threadingdef count(n): while n > 0: n -= 1 T = time.clock()count(100000000) count(100000000) print time.clock() - T>>> 17.37A normal sequential execution takes about 17 seconds.T = time.clock()t1 = threading.Thread(target=count,args=(100000000,)) t1.start() t2 = threading.Thread(target=count,args=(100000000,))… -
Stackless vs GIL: Benchmarks.
13 Jun 2009 | 10:32 amFollowing on from my last post, I decided I should check my assertion that "Stackless will outperform CPython, even with CPU bound tasks." I'm not saying the GIL is bad, I'm just pointing out how the same behavior can be achieved with Stackless. If these tasks called some random C function which blocked, but still yielded the GIL, it is likely that CPython would come out on top.import timefrom threading import Threadimport stacklessdef factorial(c): T = 1 for i in xrange(1, c): T *= i return T#Benchmark stackless using 500 tasklets T = time.clock()for i in xrange(500):… -
Stackless vs GIL: It's a draw.
13 Jun 2009 | 9:18 amAfter thinking some more about David Beazley's research into the GIL, I realized the gravity of his comment that the GIL provides "Basically a kind of "cooperative" multitasking". I've spent 10 minutes knocking up some code in Stackless that demonstrates something similar to what David describes. I doubt many people knew Stackless has this capability.import stackless#A contrived CPU bound taskdef factorial(c): T = 1 for i in xrange(1, c): T *= i return T#create two taskletsstackless.tasklet(factorial)(512)stackless.tasklet(factorial)(1024)#used to track of how many task switches… -
CPython Threading is Fundamentally Broken.
12 Jun 2009 | 9:30 amMost Python coders know that the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in CPython effectively serializes execution of threaded programs, even on systems with multiple CPU cores.Despite this, Python threads are still useful in some situations, especially when working with blocking IO. Or so we thought.The GIL problem is much, much worse than I expected.David Beazley has published some slides which summarize his research into the GIL, which demonstrate how the implementation is fundamentally broken. The slides are clear and easy to understand and it is definitely worth taking the time to read and…
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For Some Value of "Magic"
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Another United Web Screw-Up
27 Jun 2009 | 4:29 amSo, wanting to answer a question about my flight times for EuroPython I clicked on an email link to "My Itineraries". Thanks, United, this couldn't be clearer. -
Links for 2009-06-25 [del.icio.us]
Priming the pump of efficiency An interesting take on change and inertia -
My God, I Have Fans
23 Jun 2009 | 7:56 pmI've been putting out links on delicious.com for a while now (when I started it was del.icio.us, which I personally still prefer as a domain name, though probably it was too esoteric for the non-geeks). It's a great system, and I have a program that searches my feed for the last seven items I tagged with "python" and makes those the front-page news item on holdenweb.com.Most of my interactions with delicious go through the Firefox add-on, so I was a little surprised today to discover that my delicious network page shows that my feed has 44 fans. This means I now have a bunch of feeds to start… -
What Would We Do ...
19 Jun 2009 | 3:09 pm... without the EFF? -
Technology for Keeping People Honest?
18 Jun 2009 | 10:45 amSimon Willison and his team at the Guardian in the UK have brought a dream a step nearer to becoming true for me with his new Investigate Your MP's Expenses site. After looking at government profligacy in the USA I decided the only thing to do was to open up public accounts to public scrutiny.Simon's site (quite independently conceived) is a practical demonstration of the idea's feasibility on a large scale. All we need now is a sponsor with deep pockets and an interface to Mechanical Turk. The next election is going to be interesting.
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Fetchez le Python
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Distutils nighlty builds
3 Jul 2009 | 6:57 amIf you want to work (or try to find some bugs in it to help out) with the latest bleeding-edge Distutils trunk version that will be shipped with Python 2.7 and Python 3.2, you can do it now ! I am creating a nighlty build every day here now : http://nightly.ziade.org/ This distribution can be installed in your existing Python 2.6 installation, and will probably work with 2.5. I’m not planning to publish standalone versions yet, except nighlty build, at least until 2.7 and 3.2 are starting to be released as alphas. -
Dropping PEP 386 (versions comparison)
3 Jul 2009 | 6:44 amAs you might know, we are working hard on Distutils side for Python 2.7 and 3.2 upcoming releases. The biggest work is on PEP 376, that will introduce among other things a uninstaller function and functions to query installed distributions. The other “big” work is on PEP 345. We want to introduce a new metadata field called “install_requires” to be able to express requirements. That’s from the setuptools project and is quite used by the community. Notice that there were several attempts to define requirements in the past in Distutils, but none of them really made… -
mod_ntlm in FreeBSD
30 Jun 2009 | 6:39 amWe had to install mod_ntlm under a FreeBSD 6.4 server with a colleague, but the port for this package seems broken at least for FreeBSD 6.2 and 6.4. It just doesn’t work when it initiates an NTLM session through SMB, and it seems to be compiled without the log support so the last log you get doesn’t give any useful hint on what’s wrong. So we had to recompile it to activate the log and try understand what the problem was. But Apache doesn’t not support threaded mode under FreeBSD 6.x (or I couldn’t manage to make it work howsoever), so mod_ntlm failed to compile… -
Smoke testing in Distutils
28 May 2009 | 8:38 amI am not really sure smoke testing is the best name to describe what I am trying to set up. Wikipedia says: In computer programming and software testing, smoke testing is a preliminary to further testing, which should reveal simple failures severe enough to reject a prospective software release. In this case, the smoke is metaphorical. But I think it describes well the need I have : being able to test the output of several releases of Distutils, without relying on unit tests for that. Simply because they did not exist on early versions of Distutils. Why do I need “smoke tests”… -
Monitoring a Zope 2 application
19 May 2009 | 2:29 amWe have a simple need for a customer project that runs a Zeo server and a few Zeo clients : being able to check the status of every Zeo client, and monitor what they are doing. DeadlockDebugger almost provides this feature since it is able to produce a dump of the execution stack for every thread a Zope instance is running. Based on this tool, I have developed ZopeHealthWatcher, that provides a console script to query a Zope instance, and get back a status for every running thread. It tells you if the thread is idling or if it’s running some code. The script also returns an exit code…
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Ted Leung on the Air
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Bar Camp Seattle 2009
17 Jun 2009 | 10:58 pmThis past Saturday I hopped over to Seattle for Bar Camp Seattle 2009. I wasn’t able to make it to last year’s event, and since we haven’t had many Bar Camp’s in Seattle, I wanted to see what was happening. As usual, there was a wall where the schedule was developed as the day went on. I was happy to see that there were a number of people involved in organizing the event. Those folks were easily distinguishable by their red and yellow propellor beanies. The Bar Camp / Foo Camp structure for a conference is pretty liberating when compared to the usual pre-planned, eyes… -
Thoughts on WWDC
9 Jun 2009 | 6:25 pmSome thoughts on yesterday’s announcements: MacBook Pros The laptop refresh was a surprise to me. I wasn’t expecting anything until Intel’s Nehalem based laptop CPU’s and chipsets hit the market late summer or early fall. The basics of the machines haven’t improved that much, and won’t until that happens. I’m wary of the unibody built in battery – I had to have my MacBook Pro batteries replaced recently, and the built-in battery would make that a lot harder. As a photographer, I like the wider color gamut of the LCD, but I don’t like the… -
CommunityOne / JavaOne 2009
8 Jun 2009 | 4:39 pmThis was my second year attending these events as a Sun employee. Everything in software at Sun seems to revolve around these two events. For quite some time before the show, people are working away furiously getting things ready to be unveiled, myself included. CommunityOne For me, the big theme at CommunityOne was cloud computing. Sun itself was emphasizing cloud stuff and the latest release of OpenSolaris, 2009.06, which were the main topics of the CommunityOne general session. The Sun Cloud is due out sometime this summer, so much of the cloud part of the session was having partners come… -
CommunityOne and JavaOne
1 Jun 2009 | 8:59 amI’m here in San Francisco for CommunityOne and the first 3 days (Tuesday through Thursday) of JavaOne. Today at CommunityOne I’ll be giving a talk called “Programming Languages for the Cloud“. This is an exploration of areas where programming languages might intersect cloud computing. Tuesday afternoon at JavaOne Ashwin Rao and i I will be giving a talk called “Seeding the Cloud“, where we’ll be giving a developer centric view of cloud computing and cloud computing issues. We’ll also have demos of some of the cloud developer stuff we’ve… -
On Twitter Data
26 May 2009 | 9:23 amI’ve been getting various kinds of private communication about this, so it’s probably worth some commentary… For some time now, I’ve been wondering when someone would start to use systems like Twitter as a way to deliver information between programs. A few weeks ago, Todd Fast, a colleague at Sun gave me a preview of what is now the Twitter Data proposal. Todd and Jiri Kopsa have done all the heavy lifting on this, so if you have substantive comments or requests, they are really the people you should be dealing with. They were kind enough to recognize me as a reviewer…
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The Voidspace Techie Blog
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Open Source Licensing and Contributions
2 Jul 2009 | 8:59 amThere have been discussions on the issues of licensing and accepting contributions to open source projects on the Python-dev and the testing in Python mailing lists. This is an area that can be very confusing, and potentially problematic for open source projects. ... [376 words] -
Exception handling and duck typing
1 Jul 2009 | 10:50 amExceptions are one of the great features of high level languages that making coding less tedious. Instead of manually checking for possible errors and returning error codes we can use exceptions. ... [675 words] -
Movable IDLE for Python 2.5 on Windows
24 Jun 2009 | 1:38 pmMovable IDLE is a standalone version of the IDLE Python IDE. Movable IDLE is part of the Movable Python project and can be run (Windows only I'm afraid) from a USB memory stick and without installing Python. ... [114 words] -
The Python Object Model Revisited (data descriptors)
22 Jun 2009 | 3:08 pmA few weeks ago I demonstrated the complexity of the Python object model by fetching docstrings from objects. A while after posting it I thought of a bug - or at least a way in which it could return the wrong result when looking up an attribute on an object. ... [661 words] -
discover: Test discovery for unittest backported to Python 2.4+
20 Jun 2009 | 11:35 amI kind of promised you no more entries on unittest for a while, but oh well. I've backported the test discovery in Python-trunk, what will become Python 2.7 & Python 3.2. ... [586 words]
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Daily Life in an Ivory Basement
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A great list of testing anti-patterns
10 Jun 2009 | 5:07 pmThis TDD anti-pattern catalogue is truly excellent! --titus -
Seeking: independent study student for tech reporting on Python
3 Jun 2009 | 7:12 amI'd like to find an MSU student to report semi-monthly on python-dev. The student would be responsible for monitoring the python-dev mailing list and active PEPs, summarizing substantive discussions in a public forum, and integrating feedback from the community. This would be a 1 credit CSE independent study course (CSE 490). Additional effort (for more credits) could be applied towards building and maintaining a CMS site to store and reference past and present summaries, or integrating reviews of new modules. The ideal student would be someone who communicates well in writing, is interested… -
Hey look, it works!
2 Jun 2009 | 7:57 pmApparently the ipaddr module in Python 3.1 is disliked by some, and there was a reasonably robust discussion on python-dev about how it's wrong, wrong, wrong. Guido finally ruled: ixnay on the addr-pay. This is pretty relevant given the twitstorm caused by Zed Shaw's ludicrously self-confident rants about how he always knows best and is a kickass programmer and oh, by the way, the Python stdlib is kinda lousy in places. I think the thing to take away from Zed's rant is that the Python module addition process is, in fact, moderately FUBARed, with some people able to add perhaps ill-considered… -
Upgrading PlanetPlanet.
17 May 2009 | 12:53 pmOK Folks, I know that planet.python.org and planetpython.org underwent a merger, and during the merger a new, or patched, or somehow upgraded version of planet went into effect on both. However, I cannot find a link to the info post any more. I would like to put the latest stable version of PlanetPlanet into effect on the Google Summer of Code/Python site but I am wary of using the devel repo without any inside info. (I am currently running 2.0, which is the latest official release.) Should I use the dev repo, or should I track down whatever version planet.python.org is using? thanks! --titus -
Easily Accessible Web-Based Tools For Analyzing Next-Generation Sequencing Data From Agricultural Animals
15 May 2009 | 9:34 pmJust submitted this on Thursday: Next generation sequencers are beginning to impact agricultural biology. Over the next few years, next generation sequencing will produce incredibly large datasets that will address structural (e.g., SNPs, CNVs, indels, methylation, translocations) and functional (e.g., RNA expression, transcription factor binding sites) variation in genomes that will provide detailed insights that could explain phenotypic variation. Despite this immense power, next generation sequencing in agricultural animals will not be used effectively due to the lack of easy-to-use…
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Will's blog
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Miro 2.5 schedule, translations, and Launchpad griping
2 Jul 2009 | 1:23 pmMiro is nearing a 2.5 release candidate. There are only a couple of things we're waiting on now like a VLC 1.0 release. I'm hoping for a release candidate as late as next week and a final a week or two after that depending on how well the release candidate works for people. If you're a Miro translator, the strings are frozen and we sure could use your help getting up-to-date accurate translations for Miro 2.5. If you know someone who's done Miro translations in the past, let them know that we're rapidly approaching the 2.5 release. As a reminder, Miro 2.5 is the "trunk series" on Launchpad. -
Thoughts after commenting on someone's frustrations in Fedora bug 494505
30 Jun 2009 | 1:01 pmI'm subscribed to all downstream Miro bugs in the Fedora bug-tracker. I'm also subscribed to all downstream Miro bugs in the Debian bug tracking system. It helps a lot to triangulate issues with external component versions and the myriad of other problems that come with developing an application that runs on Linux distributions. Today, Rudd-O, who I've never met, ranted on the state of the Miro codebase in bug 494505 in the Fedora bug-tracker. I responded with this https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=494505#c13. I thought I should blog about that since I really don't blog enough about… -
Adopted a line
23 Jun 2009 | 2:55 pmI adopted a line of Miro code today. Her name is Zowwee Kahn-Greene. She's pretty cute. :) If you want to adopt-a-line, you can do so at the Miro Adoption Center. -
Open Video Conference was awesome!
22 Jun 2009 | 4:33 pmI just got back from the Open Video conference and it was really inpsiring and really awesome. From when I arrived in NYC late Thursday night to when I left this morning, the time flew by. I met a variety of people who have a stake in the Open Video game: producers, directors, creators, distributors, publishers, companies, representatives, individuals, codec hackers, renderer hackers, player hackers, site builders, community builders, independent journalists, movers, shakers, ... I met a co-worker I've worked closely with for some months, but never met (and didn't realize who he was until… -
When git-svn is painfully slow...
19 Jun 2009 | 8:58 pmWhen I upgraded from Intrepid to Jaunty, I noticed that git svn things were painfully slow. I had looked into this before, but couldn't remember how I found the answer or what it was. After skimming through thousands of lines of IRC logs, I re-rediscovered what I discovered the first time. rm -rf .git/svn git svn rebase --all I found it at this site (oebfare.com).
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t+1: Matt Wilson's blog » Python
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Is this pylint error message valid or bogus?
19 Jun 2009 | 8:37 amThe vast majority of pythoners use None, but I prefer descriptive strings for default values, like this: from datetime import datetime, timedelta def midnight_next_day(initial_time="use today's date"): if initial_time == "use today's date": initial_time = datetime.now() return initial_time.date() + timedelta(days=1) Pylint doesn’t like it though: $ pylint -e f.py No config file found, using default configuration ************* Module f E: 10:midnight_next_day:… -
Which code layout do you like more?
18 Jun 2009 | 8:52 amI can lay out the same function in two ways. Which one is better? One return statement and a mutable temporary variable def f(a, b): temp = g(a) if b: temp = h(temp) return temp Two return statements and everything uses single assignment def f(a, b): if b: return h(g(a) else: return g(a) I prefer the second approach. Ever since I… -
Some notes on nosetests and coverage
13 May 2009 | 8:51 amI use Nose to run my automated tests. It can report on code coverage like this: $ nosetests --quiet --with-coverage --cover-package pitz Name Stmts Exec Cover Missing ------------------------------------------------------------… -
Need help with data files and setup.py
21 Apr 2009 | 8:00 pmI’m working on a package that includes some files that are meant to be copied and edited by people using the package. My project is named “pitz” and it is a bugtracker. Instead of using a config file to set the options for a project, I want to use python files. When somebody installs pitz, I want to save some .py files somewhere so that when they run my pitz-setup script, I can go find those .py files and copy them into their working directory. I have two questions: Do I need to write my setup.py file to specify that the .py files in particular directory need to be treated… -
I submitted my proposal for PyOhio 2009
20 Apr 2009 | 7:36 pmHere it is: Clever uses for metaclasses SUMMARY This talk introduces metaclasses and attempts to “defang” them, showing what they are good for, and when they are silly. Metaclasses can reduce redundancy in code but can be very confusing, so in this talk, I will walk through several examples of how to use metaclasses to solve problems. I plan to cover (at least) these examples: Add extra methods and attributes to a class after its definition. Verify a class correctly implements a specification. Give a subclass its own class-variables rather than sharing them with the parent class.
