Alltop

Python 3.0rc3 is now available.

Several machines on python.org (www, svn, pypi, wiki) will see maintenance this Saturday, starting from 8:00 UTC.

Python 3.0rc2 is now available.

The 1st PyArkansas Regional Conference will be held in Conway, AR on October 4th. A full day of scheduled talks, plenty of giveways and totally free.

Python 2.6 final is now available.

Stani Michiels: How to make money with free software... ["The Dutch Ministry of Finance organized an architecture competition for which a selected group of architectural offices (unstudio, nox, ...) and artists were invited, including myself. The goal of the competition was not to design a building, but the new 5 euro commemorative coin with the theme 'Netherlands and Architecture'. The winner will be rewarded with a nice price, but most of all with the honor: his design will be realized and will be a legal coin within the Netherlands."]

Ask a Google engineer: How would you sort 1 million 32-bit integers in 2MB of RAM using Python? [see also] [see also]

Eli Golovinsky: Unicode and permalinks ["The idea of a permalink is to take the title (of a blog post or a test) and replace any characters that aren't numbers or letters with an underscore or a hyphen. Using this simple scheme, 'Unicode and permalinks' becomes 'unicode-and-permalinks', which is quite suitable for use in a URL. The implementation is a simple regular expression /.../ While this code works perfectly for the English language, it doesn’t work at all if string is a Unicode string containing something in Hebrew, Russian or Polish - language that some of our customers use. And…

Rob Hudson: Introducing the Django Debug Toolbar ["The Django Debug Toolbar is a configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response. It is a small toolbar that, when activated, situates itself in the top-right location of the browser window. When particular panels are clicked, more details about that panel's content are displayed."]

Ronald Loui: In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism ["But there is emerging consensus in the scripting community that Python is the right choice for freshman programming. Ruby would also be a defensible choice. Python and Ruby have the enviable properties that almost no one dislikes them, and almost everyone respects them. Both languages support a wide variety of programming styles and paradigms and satisfy practitioners and theoreticians equally. Both languages are carefully enough designed that 'correct' programming practices can be demonstrated and high standards of code…

We are grateful to Greg Lindstrom for the following feedback on a recent successful regional event. Congratulations are due to the organizers. We held our 1-day "pyArkansas" conference on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas with 57 people attending. There was a surprising mix of beginners (which we expected) and experienced (which pleasantly surprised us). The first half of the day was dedicated to classes; Python 101 (Dr. Bernard Chen of UCA), Intermediate Python (Jeff Rush) and Python for System Administrators (Noah Gift). A way cool perk was that everyone attending the sys…

Minutes of Regular Meetings of the Board of Directors of the Python Software Foundation: May 12, 2008 June 16, 2008 July 14, 2008

At the July Board meeting of the PSF Board of Directors, PSF Community Awards were awarded to Georg Brandl and Brett Cannon. Georg has been an enthusiastic contributor to the core for several years, and a while ago stunned the Python development world by building the Sphinx documentation system as an alternative to the LaTeX-based system we had been using previously, and converting the Python documentation to use it. Brett has also been an active core developer for many years, but was nominated for his infrastructure work in migrating the Python bug-tracking system off of SourceForge to our…

PyCon UK takes place in Birmingham UK from 12th to 14th September 2008. A full programme includes a day of tutorials; bookings are being taken at http://www.pyconuk.org/booking.html. The early bird rate has been extended to 11th August. There will be plenary talks by Mark Shuttleworth, Ted Leung and Raymond Hettinger. You can see a list of already accepted talks at http://pyconuk.org/talk_abstracts.html and a schedule for the tutorial day is at http://pyconuk.org/timetable.html

Yesterday at OSCON I had the pleasure of announcing the 2008 Frank Willison award. This was instituted by O'Reilly in memory of their editor in chief, whose "Frankly Speaking" column was a regular joy on the web: guaranteed to entertain and inform. Frank was a great supporter of Python, and a believer in the value of communities. Martin von Löwis continues to be a tireless worker on behalf of the Python community. He has been a long-term contributor to the Python core, and regularly answers questions on both the python-dev list and the comp.lang.python newsgroup. A PSF director since 2002 he…

The next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, November, 12thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda:The GUI-Toolkit pyGTK (Andi Albrecht) Network- and Server-Programming with Python (Klaus Bremer)Discussion about our this year's christmas party :-)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)

The next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, October, 8thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda:Introduction into wxPython (Rebecca Breu) Examples for Applications of wxPython: Vocabulary-Trainer (Ralf Schönian) Sudoku (user defined cell-renderer for the Grid-Widget) (Rebecca Breu)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…

The next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, September, 10thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda:Discussion of the idea to create a pyCologne-Yearbook (2007/) 2008 containing all the events and talks.Python 3.0 (3000) Workshop with debate about changes and new features of the Python-Programming-Language e.g.: Strings. Everyone is invited to participate and to provide a little introduction into a Python 3000-Topic.At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the…

The Python User Group in Cologne met at the computer centre of the University of Cologne. The meeting was attended by 16 people. German speakers might want to refer to our wiki page: http://www.pycologne.de.This time we had as a special guest Guy Kloss, who introduced the New Zealand Python User Group (NZPUG)and held his talk about Python/C++-Integration:Thinking Hybrid - Python/C++ Integration (Guy Kloss)The slides can be found at SlideShare: Thinking Hybrid - Python/C++ IntegrationSource-Code and Examples:Examples: PyNativeIntegration-examples.tar.gzNaSt2D (2D Fluid-Dynamics-Solver):…

The next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, August, 13thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda:Discussion of the idea to create a pyCologne-Yearbook (2007/) 2008 containing all the events and talks.Python 3.0 (3000) Workshop with debate concerning changes and new features within the Python-Programming-Language e.g. Strings.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…

On my personal blog I have written a long entry on Making Python math 196* faster with shedskin. I compared stock Python 2.5, Psyco and ShedSkin output on an artificial neural network problem. The goal was to quickly estimate how fast a C version might solve the problem without having to actually write C (thus saving hours, sweat and tears).  ShedSkin converts Python code to C++ for compilation with g++. Psyco speeds things up by a factor of 2.6, ShedSkin by a super-impressive 196 times. Leonardo Maffi has continued the benchmarks and shows that hand-coded C is between 1.5 and 7 times faster…

Python Beginners - Functions teaches you how to write and call your own functions in Python. We cover how to write functions, argument passing, scoping, gotchas and nested functions. “I like the beginner videos, because you are confident on what the student must prepare to accept initially as dogma, and suggest to trust you for later explanation and pragmatize the knowledge-gaps.  You also show the PEPs, as a great way of showing how software is maintained when tens of thousands of people are behind it.” - Gasto These videos are aimed at new Python programmers who want to…

One of my jobs as co-founder is to work to get kudos for our authors.  Authors put many hours into creating the free ShowMeDo screencasts that educate thousands and I love to see them get recognised. Ron Stephens of awaretek and the Python 411 podcasts interviewed me last week (30 minute mp3).  Sadly our Skype connection wasn’t great so I’m somewhat garbled (but still understandable!). Ron mentions the videos of some of our authors, I’m happy to say that Florian’s advanced Python and decorators series is mentioned, along with ericflo and Eric Holscher’s two…

Lucas’ Club series for Python beginners which introduces the Python standard library is now complete. Batteries Included - The Python Standard Library has 9 episodes for Club-subscribers which introduce the core elements of file-system access, using the shell, regular expressions, math, dates and talking to websites. “I will thank you for getting this in-depth basic explanation of the basic modules. It really fills in some missing holes on my knowledge of using this.” - JZA Each video is around 5 minutes long and includes examples of normal use. Episodes: Series overview The…

Justin Lilly has created a 3-part series on using Vim macros, Vim is a powerful editor that has a bit of a learning curve. “Thanks! Learning by looking over the shoulder is really a great addition to the help files.” Screencasts make it easier to see what’s going on for the new user: An Introduction to Vim Macros Vim Selections Vim % operator These videos form a part of our 330 Python tutorial screencasts.  Most are free, some are a part of our Club which focuses on carefully planned tutorials for Python beginner/intermediate programmers. Other recent videos include Making…

In my previous post, we saw that PyPy JIT generator can produce huge speedups when applied to the tlc toy language. In this post we will dive a bit into the internals of PyPy JIT, to see how it manages to do so. Note that this is a very high level overview of how the JIT works, and applies to all backends. Then, in the third post of this series, we will look closer at the CLI JIT backend, seeing how it works around some .NET limitations and how the generated code looks like. PyPy JIT for dummies As you surely know, the key idea of PyPy is that we are too lazy to write a JIT of our own: so,…

As the readers of this blog already know, I have been working on the CLI JIT backend for some months: last Friday, it reached an important milestone, as it is now able to produce huge speedups for a little dynamic language. To know how huge the speedup is, read on :-). The goal of PyPy JIT generator is to take an interpreter and, with the help of few annotations, automatically generate a JIT compiler for it. In this post, we will talk about the tlc virtual machine: while tlc it is just a toy language, it contains some features that make it an interesting target for our JIT generator. The tlc…

Last Friday the PyPy Status Blog had its first anniversary. Yay! After not really buying into any of this new-fangled "blog" stuff for a long time we just bit the bullet and got started. Totally surprisingly it even worked. We posted 76 post in the last year, more than one per week. By now we have more than 800 subscribers (according to feedburner), which is quite cool for a rather niche blog. To make our blog even more interesting, I would like to ask for some feedback via the comments: Which posts did you like in particular? What sort of posts would you be interested in getting…

Background Finally, the JIT post :-). First some background: Despite our plans at the end of the EU period, PyPy's Python interpreter didn't get a good and widely applicable JIT in the last year. The reason for that was that we discovered that although the basic idea to generate JIT compilers is good, the concrete prototype made during the EU period is basically flawed. It could have been pushed a bit farther, but would have run into deep troubles eventually. One of the problems would have been performance instability: change a seemingly unrelated bit in your source program, and the…

At the beginning of this year, PyPy grew ctypes support, thanks to generous support by Google. This made it possible to interface with C libraries from our Python interpreter, something that was possible but rather tedious before. What we are lacking so far is a way to interface to large C++ libraries (like GUI libraries). During the sprint we had a brainstorming session about possible approaches for fixing this shortcoming.For CPython there are a number of approaches in common use: SIP, mainly used for PyQT SWIG Boost.Python Those all have the property that they produce some code that is…

More IronPython and DLR related stuff collected over the last few weeks.IronPython en Madriva 2009This looks like a very interesting blog entry, and the only reason it is here rather than having a post to itself is that it is in Spanish and so I can't tell you much about what it says... It is by Jacobnix and about using IronPython with Mandriva Linux and Mono.PATCH: System.Type.FindMembers return typePATCH: System.IO.TextReader.Null implementationTwo patches to Mono (by Bill Holmes) allowing you to compile and use recent versions of IronPython 2. This is great news as the version of…

My backlog includes a lot of interesting snippets and blog entries that probably don't warrant a whole entry to themselves. There's a lot of good stuff in them, so I'm splitting them out into two separate entries.Calling IronPython Functions from C#A blog entry on using the IronPython 1 hosting API to call functions - including embedding it in ASP.NET pages.Microsoft Announces Windows HPC Server 2008Windows High Performance Computing Goes MainstreamThis happened a while ago, but I missed it. Windows High Performance Computing Operating System is out (HPC Server 2008) - and it includes…

The dynamic languages team at Microsoft are relatively small, but have an extremely high proportion of bloggers! (The obvious conclusion is that dynamic language enthusiasts tend to be better communicators...)Oleg Tkachenko lists them on his blog:The Microsoft Dynamic Languages Team BlogrollFor the record, they are: John Lam – IronRuby PMHarry Pierson – IronPython PMJimmy Schementi – PM for Silverlight integration Shri Borde – dev lead for the teamDave Remy – PM lead fro the teamOleg Tkachenko – Visual Studio integrationDave Fugate – IronPython testerCurt Hagenlocher -…

Well my backlog is logged so far back that I haven't even blogged about the final release of Silverlight 2.In case you've been living under a rock for the last year, Silverlight 2 is a browser plugin from Microsoft. It is similar to Flash (aimed at games, media streaming and rich internet applications) and is cross-platform (Mac OS X and Windows - the officially blessed Linux port Moonlight by the Mono guys is making good progress though) and cross browser (IE 7+, Safari & Firefox 2+). Unlike Flash it can be programmed with a choice of languages, and through the Dynamic Language Runtime…

Saveen Reddy has posted examples of automating Visio from three different languages - C#, F#, IronPython. The code samples are short, and remarkably similar. The examples all do the same thing: launch Visio 2007, create a new doc, and draw a rectangle with the text “Hello World”.Visio Automation: Three Hello World Samples – C#, F#, and IronPythonThe IronPython is:import sysimport clrimport Systemclr.AddReference("Microsoft.Office.Interop.Visio")import Microsoft.Office.Interop.VisioIVisio = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Visiovisapp = IVisio.ApplicationClass()doc = visapp.Documents.Add("")page…

It's been a good run, but the WYSIWIG editing facilities of Blogger have lured me away from Artima.

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!

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!

Another milestone in Python 3000 development: alpha 2 is released. Now with immutable bytes!

The Google Open Source Office is outdoing itself with a new contest aimed at a younger generation of coders: students ages 13 or older.

One of my retirement accounts has a small investment in Cohen & Steers Quality Income Realty Fund. It's an REIT and has had an absolutely disastrous autumn: It dropped by 50% in the first week of October, and in November it dropped another 66% from that level.I can't figure out why the drop is so precipitous. There doesn't seem to be any news specific to this fund that accounts for it. The fund has a lot of holdings in commercial real estate (CRE), and retailers haven't been doing very well; a number of chains have gone bankrupt already and there will probably be more. Stores that go…

A very good lesson tonight, though Alexandria traffic made me half an hour late and we had to shorten it by 15 minutes. We therefore skipped playing the etude completely and concentrated on the two pieces. The two lines of the Bach "Bourée" were in excellent shape: rhythm good, intonation correct, and a low error rate. Then I played through the "Cinquantaine" for the last time and went through it almost straight through, again with only a few re-takes. (For some reason, I was sight-reading really well tonight.) The "Cinquantaine" was replaced with the remaining four lines of the…

Inspired by a post on Coding Horror about touch-typing, I went and took this online typing test. I got 82 words/minute with no mistakes, using my quirky variation of touch-typing. For some reason, I'm most comfortable making my left hand do most of the work; my right hand often handles the keys from the U-J-M column to the right, but I'll do the Y-H-N column with my left hand instead of my right, as proper touch-typing would demand.

A while ago, I saw someone's graphic showing the social web sites they use. I can't find that person's weblog entry now to link to it, which is a pity; their graph was very complicated and involved over a dozen sites. Here's my graph. I have an account on the sites at the bottom, but practically never use them. identi.ca is gatewayed to Twitter, but everyone I know is on Twitter and no one I know is on identi.ca, so Twitter wins. Pownce doesn't gateway to Twitter (or at least it didn't), so again I never log in. My book diary has an RSS feed, but I don't syndicate it to anywhere.

There’s a nutty side to libertarians, starting with the Big Girl, Ayn Rand, and going straight through Alan Greenspan. When I go to Cato Institute functions, there's always a group of guys who look like they cut their own hair and get their mothers to dress them, with lots of buttons about legalizing heroin and demanding a return to the gold standard. The institute has tried to weed them out over the years, but they still turn up at the bigger events. As soon as I see them coming toward me, my heart sinks. -- P.J. O'Rourke, quoted by Joe Queenan in an NYT piece on overly-favorable book…

According to Ohloh, it would take close to 4m$ to hire a team to reproduce Crunchy from scratch. To be fair, we've included in Crunchy's distribution jquery, ElementSoup (i.e. ElementTree and BeautifulSoup), pygments and editarea - so Ohloh's estimate is not simply based on the work of mostly a couple of people working part time ... but still... it does seem to be a lot. I think the estimated effort (71 person years) is way off base. Nonetheless, it makes me wonder sometimes ... perhaps I have chosen the wrong career...

For those interested, docpicture can now display images from the web. There's also a somewhat silly example where I embedded the code for a matplotlib example inside a docstring and have it displayed as a plot when viewing the docstring via docpicture inside a web browser. In order to do so I had to exec the code which is not exactly good practice ... but it serves to highlight the need to either only allow "parsers" from the standard distribution or require the user to give permission to a parser to be able to register itself with docpicture while it is running. I chose this second approach,…

Ok, it's done: mathematical equations generated dynamically and displayed as svg graphics. Only using the standard Python library ... and one "tiny" additional download: matplotlib. Here's the first result (saved as a "hard-copy"; you may have to download the page and reopen it locally using Firefox.)Note: do not bother looking for the files in the "py-fun" repository where I had the first release of docpicture. I will clean up things a bit and do a new release from a different place.As usual, comments & suggestions are welcome.

In a previous post about docpicture, I gave an example of a graphics generated from this site as something that would be desirable to do. (You can find more examples here.) Well, it turned out to be easy to do ... at the cost of a server connection. I used the example given to embed a graphics inside a page and ... voilà, it is done. As long as one has a live internet connection (and assuming the websequencediagram server is not down), a graphics is generated as requested.Eventually, I still would like to implement my own parser to create svg code for uml sequence diagrams rather than…

The subject line says it all. It's a small download: less than 22 kB, available from here. Feedback and suggestions are definitely welcome.

Via : Grab the nearest book. Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. From The Omnivore’s Deilemma by Michael Pollan: And then of course there’s the corn itself, which if corn could form an opinion would surely marvel at the absurdity of it all—and at its great good fortune. I don’t usually do the meme thing, but I happened to have a book on my desk so it took so little effort… only one chapter to go!

Python 2.6 came out yesterday, so I figured I might as well see if Pylons works on it. Pylons already has a set of buildbots that builds Pylons along with some of its dependencies, so it was fairly trivial to add another builder to verify things ran swimmingly on Python 2.6. Unfortunately, as one can see looking at the build results, things weren’t so great. It appears that nose had a Python 2.6 incompatibility which is used to run all the various Pylons tests, meaning that they all failed so far mainly because the testing tool was Python 2.6 incompatible. Making Buildbot nicer While I wait…

Amazingly enough, despite all the hoop-la of how the bailout will pass, on Monday, it failed. It was quite entertaining to me to see a bill that everyone seemed so sure would pass, to just go and fail. In the meantime I’ve found more than a few interesting links that only go to re-inforce my prior thoughts on the bailout. The vagueness I noted in some sections of the bailout was quite intentional. Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it. Ouch, well that sure is reassuring. How’d they…

With the upcoming expected passage of the bailout, I noticed that the draft text was online so I decided to take a look. There’s some thoughtful provisions that the first bailout plan was lacking, such as an attempt to prevent financial institutions from making an actual profit with plenty of loopholes so they don’t look terribly effective. Unjust Enrichment Consider this first attempt to prevent the companies helped, from actually getting a little ‘too much help’: PREVENTINGUNJUSTENRICHMENT.—In making purchases under the authority of this Act, the Secretary shall take such steps as…

I’ve had an iPhone for about a month now, quite loving it. Today I decided to add some custom ringtones to it, so I went into iTunes and clicked the button to sync ringtones… Really? They couldn’t find any way to add a few ringtones without removing (erasing) all the music I already dragged over? Really???

AMK did a post where he graphed is social software connections. I thought that is rather interesting, so I decided to do it myself. Doing this put a couple of things into perspective for me.One is that I like the microblogging services. At the moment I swap between identi.ca and Jaiku. I started to use the former after hearing the creater, Evan Prodromou, interviewed on FLOSS Weekly. Liked his reasoning behind choosing PHP and appreciated it being open source. But I still prefer Jaiku. Plus I have talked to some people while here at Google who are still working on it so I have a personal…

There is currently an initial draft for a document that is to be considered a Getting Set Up doc for people wanting to hack on Python. But I have a dilemma: how does this and future docs I plan to write tie into the dev FAQ?For as long as I have been the unofficial maintainer of the dev FAQ it has been primarily used for helping out with svn and SSH. While both tools obviously have their own FAQs all over the Net, the dev FAQ collects exactly what a typical contributor or core developer might need to know in order to work on Python.But I am beginning to realize there is some overlap in goals.

The password-generating program that I created, Oplop, has now hit version 0.3. The biggest change since the last version is that the whole idea of having various restriction filters placed on your eventual password is now gone. From practical experience it turned out that most sites are happy with what Oplop generates, otherwise sometimes there is demand for making sure there is a digit.So now a digit is always included in any generated password. Simplifies the UI immensely. Now all one needs to do is input a label and a password to get their generated label password back; no more…

Back in August I outlined what I considered the stages of a typical issue. The uncontentious parts of that list has now been added to bugs.python.org for all issues. Hopefully this will make it easier to find stuff they can work on (e.g. writing needed test cases for reported bugs) and also make it easier to know exactly what the next logical step is for an issue to take.

I decided to go with the VM panel over the python-dev panel since the panel would be more interesting for me that way. Plus it makes sure that the talks I look forward to the most won't happen at the same time as the presenters will be on the panel. =)But I still want to give the community a chance to ask questions of the core development team. That leaves me with two options. One is to use Google Moderator and just let people add questions there and answer the top questions in a couple categories (community, development, language, interpreter, stdlib, etc.). The other option is to hold an…

A list of what & why. Mostly tech-oriented 'casts, with the odd, odd exception.

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.

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!

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.

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).

At the PyWorks convention this week there were enough people talking about interesting things I missed from not having a Twitter account that I decided to abandon my resistance and sign up. I'm still setting up the list of feeds I want to follow, and since people search is down I expect that to take a while.

Version 1.4 of virtualenvwrapper includes a .pth file management function contributed by James Bennett and Jannis Leidel. The new add2virtualenv function makes it easy to share code between virtual environments without installing it in the system site-packages directory, by adding directories to a .pth file in the virtualenv.Thanks, James and Jannis!

array – Sequence of fixed-type dataPurpose:Manage sequences of fixed-type numerical data efficiently.Python Version:1.4 and laterThe array module defines a sequence data structure that looks very much like a list except that all of the members have to be of the same type. The types supported are listed in the standard library documentation. They are all numeric or other fixed-size primitive types such as bytes.array InitializationAn array is instantiated with an argument describing the type of data to be allowed, and possibly an initialization sequence.import arrayimport binasciis…

Nov 12-14: PyWorks 2008Nov 15: Google AppEngine Hack-a-thon, co-hosted by PyATL and GoogleNov 15-16: TurboGears Sprint

MTA is putting the finishing touches on our plans to host the first annual combined PyWorks and php|works conference Nov 12-14. This year's conference builds on the past success of php|works events by adding 2 new tracks of presentations for Python developers and a cross-over track with topics of interest to everyone. The tutorials on Wednesday offer an excellent introduction to four of the popular frameworks available for Python web applications. Mark Ramm promises a fast paced introduction to TurboGears and its related components. Travis Cline will be presenting Django from the perspective…

Figures I was sitting on the couch when I read this instead of at work, or in the computer room, or.. well anywhere else in the house. That meant I had a choice of grabbing highlights (which counts as a magazine…) and leave me reaching over and putting my hand on the book next to [...]

1 hour per frame, 24 frames per second, 1 second per day, 40 days. High res avi is here (14Meg).

Just wanted to give a status update to all those who are wondering what is going on with the PyCon US 2009 program committee. We have recieved 109 proposals. (NOTE: there is now a dynamic image URL so you can embed the above graph in your blog! You need to right click as it uses  redirect.) This [...]

The talk proposal deadline is Monday. We are on track to get 100 proposals, given previous years trends. Most people do not submit their talk until the deadline. We have more space and more time in the schedule this year so we will be able to accept more proposals, and more 45min proposals. We are [...]

Ok, I meant to do this post about 3 months ago, a writeup 2 months ago and ended up just posting the video below over a month ago. I simply have not had time, and for that I apologize. I made the video because I could simply talk out what was in my head. I [...]

Tor Norbye has been working on nbPython, which will bring Python support to NetBeans 6.5. As anyone that has ever worked with me will know, I am one of those "You will pry my Vim from my cold dead fingers" kind of developers. I work at Sun, and nbPython is directly using the ANTLR parser that I developed for Jython, but these are not sufficient reasons for me to abandon my beloved Vim. Having said that, Tor recently posted a weblog where he demonstrates the tool by simply pulling up datetime.py right out of the Jython distribution and immediately finding an ancient typo ("ValueError" was…

Happy Halloween! On behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5b0 is available for download. See the installation instructions.Jython 2.5 Beta0 is the beginning of a code cooling period where the number of new features should significantly slow as we concentrate on solidifying Jython 2.5 for an eventual release. There are still a number of features that we will squeeze in (like jythonc).This is a beta release so be careful.

The Jython roadmap is a bit dated now -- I thought I'd put an updated version here first, take comments, and then update the official roadmap. BTW there is a more detailed roadmap on the wiki which I'll also need to update. Also, if you have dependencies for a Python project that you want working in Jython, please put an issue in our tracker so we can get a chance to fix it before we release!SummaryNote that Jython's version numbers represent the version of CPython from which Jython pulls most of its libraries that are written in pure Python (as opposed to the parts that are written in…

On behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5a3 is available for download. See the installation instructions.Jython 2.5 Alpha3 fixes a bug that caused installation problems for many Windows users, so Oti Humbel and Leo Soto came to the rescue with an assist by Geoffrey French. Oti also fixed standalone mode while he was there. Yay!As before, this is an alpha release so be careful.

Mark Ramm spent his talk urging the Django community to reduce the coupling between the various parts of Django. He fears that Django might be (partly) going down the same path that historically hurt Zope 2. Zope 2 was a self contained web framework that had no external dependencies. On the surface this sounds like a good thing, it makes installing, deploying, testing etc very easy. *But* Zope 2 created an environment where there where two communities: Python developers and Zope developers, and this surely contributed to its decline. It would be sad if the same thing happened to Django -- and…

(a brief entry in which Fredrik explains why he won't be evil)

Re-posted from effbot.org.

From the desk of online.effbot.org.

Introducing the tkList module.

Second International Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science and Engineering Saturday, May 23, 2009 Co-located with ICSE 2009 - Vancouver, Canada http://www.cs.ua.edu/~SECSE09 Overview This workshop is concerned with the development of: Scientific software applications, where the focus is on directly solving scientific problems. These applications include, but are not limited to, large parallel models/simulations of the physical world (high performance computing systems). Applications that support scientific endeavors. Such applications include, but are not limited to,…

Via The Great Beyond:  The US National Academy of Sciences has created an initiative that will link TV and movie directors with scientists and engineers to incorporate more accurate science content into entertainment. Press release here, web site here. That would be a cool job…

A lot of it seems obvious now, but it really did change the world…

One of our project students has a weird problem with Rails — if you have an answer (weird or otherwise), we’d like to hear from you. I want to send an AJAX request to the server using POST. Rails is supposed to handle parameter passing, placing all parameters in the params hash. When I use Ajax.Request using POST, the variables that I’m passing are not reaching the params hash. It works with GET though! If I do: render :text => request.inspect I can see my POST parameters in @parameters in the request object, but somehow these aren’t making it to my params hash. And…

The Computer Science department at the University of Toronto is featured in a recent episode of “Byte Club”.  I can hear the hippos whispering…

I got a new Lenovo ThinkPad T61p, and of course I promptly installed Ubuntu Ibex 8.10 on it. The first day I used it, I had no issues, but this morning it froze no less than 3 times, and each time the Caps Lock light flashed. I googled around, and I found what I hope is the solution in this post on the Ubuntu forums. It seems that this is the core issue:System lock-ups with Intel 4965 wireless The version of the iwlagn wireless driver for Intel 4965 wireless chipsets included in Linux kernel version 2.6.27 causes kernel panics when used with 802.11n or 802.11g networks. Users affected by this…

You've probably heard by now of Microsoft's entry in the cloud computing race, dubbed Azure. What I didn't know until I saw it this morning on InfoQ was that Microsoft encourages the use of languages and tools other than their official ones. Here's what they say on the 'What is the Azure Service Platform' page:"Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python."While you and I may think MS says this just for marketing/PR purposes, it…

Via Elliot:Grab the nearest book.Open it to page 56.Find the fifth sentence.Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.Here's mine, from 'Kim' by Kipling:"A little later a marriage procession would strike into the Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust."Not bad, I like it :-)

If you ever find yourself facing this task, use this guide -- worked perfectly for me.

Best Halloween costume I've ever seen. You rock Nate!!!

I attended PloneConf 2008 recently, to talk about Deliverance. But I’ll talk here more about my observations as a relative outsider to that community. (This post is really written for the Plone community — if you aren’t familiar with Plone this post probably won’t make much sense or be very useful.) One of the ongoing concerns in the Plone community has been the difficulty of attracting and maintaining developer interest in the community, and generally making Plone easier to work with as a developer. It’s been a very successful community for consulting and…

I’ve finished renaming pyinstall to its new name: pip. The name pip is a acronym and declaration: pip installs packages. I’ve also added a small feature intended for Google App Engine users, allowing you to zip and unzip packages in an environment. For instance: $ pip zip --list In ./lib/python2.5/site-packages: No zipped packages. Unzipped packages: paste (98 files) pygments (64 files) tempita (7 files) weberror (31 files) webob (22 files) webtest (9 files) nose (43 files) setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg (43 files) simplejson (28 files) $ pip zip webob Zip webob (in…

Roy T. Fielding, author of the REST thesis wrote an article recently: REST APIs must be hypertext-driven. I liked this article, it fit with an intuition I’ve had. Then he wrote an article explaining that he wouldn’t really explain the other articles because, I guess, he wanted a conversation with the specialists, and it seems like a kind of invitation to reinterpret his writing. So since others are doing it I figured I’d do it too. I’d summarize his argument thus: Focus on media types, i.e., resource formats, i.e., document formats. The protocol will flow from these if…

So, decorators are neat (maybe check out a new tutorial on them). Descriptors are neat but may seem hard (though they hardly take a long time to describe). Sometimes these two things intersect, and this post describes how. Here’s an example decorator where this comes up. First, we want something that looks like a WSGI application: def application(environ, start_response): start_response('200 OK', [('content-type', 'text/html')]) return ['hi!'] But we want to use WebOb, like: from webob import Request, Response def application(environ, start_response): req = Request(environ) resp =…

I’ll be attending PloneConf this year again, giving a talk about Deliverance. I’ve been working on Deliverance lately for work, but the hard part about it is that it’s not obviously useful. To help explain it I wrote the philosophy of Deliverance, which I will copy here, to give you an idea of what I’ve been doing: Why is Deliverance? Why was it made, what purpose does it serve, why should you use it, how can it change the way you do web development? On the Subject of Platforms Right now we live in an age of platforms. Developers (or management or coincidence) decides…

Back in 2006, I wrote an entry called Python Tuples are Not Just Constant Lists which, after the Dr Horrible covers is my most visited blog post ever. In it, I suggest that: the index in a tuple has an implied semantic. The point of a tuple is that the i-th slot means something specific. In other words, it's a index-based (rather than name based) datastructure. In that same post, I pointed out the connection between the relational algebra and this notion of a tuple and further suggested that: it might be useful to have the notion of a tuple whose slots could additionally be named and then…

I was just thinking yesterday that I need to get back to the posts I was intending to make after my initial post of the month, Two Fun(ctional) Questions. Then tonight Eric Florenzano made an excellent post on Lambda Calculus which is related to my topic of interest. So let me take one of his examples and raise again the issue from my first post. First of all, consider the following Python function taking two arguments: >>> add_ = lambda x, y: x + y This function works as expected: >>> add_(5, 4) 9 Eric shows a curried version defined in Python: >>> add = lambda x:…

I made the comment in my Half Time Report that I think I've managed to stick to "posts no shorter than normal and no longer". Alas the data don't match that. Here's a graph of average post length (just len(page.content.split())) by month: Clearly the posts this month are longer on average. And because I'm writing more of them, the last point of this next graph is no surprise. This is a graph with post lengths totalled for each month: And obviously this month has a fair bit to go. What's more interesting though is my first year of blogging saw growth in total words posted per month…

I've previously talked about Oxford's Very Short Introduction series. My first introduction to it (via a recommendation from Greg Mankiw) was Timothy Gowers' Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction which is the best little (160 page) book I've ever read on what mathematics is really about. A few weeks ago, I bought The Princeton Companion to Mathematics which weighs in at 1008 pages. It's sweeping vista of pure mathematics, and probably the best big book I've ever read on pure mathematics in general. It provides survey articles on many different areas within pure mathematics from both a…

I've often been intrigued by the lossy part of JPEG compression so I thought I'd explore Discrete Cosine Transforms and their use in JPEG as a short multi-part blog series. In this part, lets just talk about what a "discrete cosine" function is and then in the next couple of posts look at how the concept can be combined with basic linear algebra to break up images into components in such a way that you can throw out some components with minimal effect on the perceived image. It's quite clever but the mathematics is fairly straightforward. Let's start with a single cycle of a cosine…

A coworker just dropped an ancient artifact off for me to read:

Recently, I made an offhand comment here about: I've actually started thinking about/sketching an actor model build on top of MP, using concepts from actors/monitors and things in the ecosystem today The ensuing comments and discussion were pretty good - but last night Michael Sparks (of Kamaelia) posted a darned nice comment: Are you aware that a complete mini-axon using generators is tiny and the rest is optimisations and extra stuff that you find useful in real world systems? By tiny, I mean this small: * http://www.kamaelia.org/MiniAxonFullA mini-axon using processes would be equally…

Via GVR's blog he's put answers up on the ask-a-google-engineer page for the top 20 questions. I'm seriously laughing here: Q: "Why google choose python as the main programming?" A: Incorrect this is. Oh, and yay multiprocessing (see: this question) but man is there a lot of work to do. I've actually started thinking about/sketching an actor model build on top of MP, using concepts from actors/monitors and things in the ecosystem today

Another information rich issue of Python Magazine is live! This time, it's the October (stunning, I know) issue. The cover story is on "Versioning your database with sqlalchemy-migrate" - and of course, there's a short article from me on "SSH Programming with Paramiko". You can see the run down for the article here. A lot of good people put a lot of work into the magazine - Doug Hellmann doesn't let any of us slack off, and keeps us on target. If you don't already have a subscription - you should get one. Additionally, if you like writing - or even if you're new to writing, if you have and…

I just pushed a minor update for PyJavaProperties out - this just adds a simple list as an index of the keys as they're parsed, and appends new keys on the internal index. Next, I want to keep original comments and whitespace.

A federal judge has ordered five Guantanamo detainees released because the case against them is weak. I was disgusted to hear the details of this case. When the men were first captured, the Bosnian government thought the case was too weak against them, but handed them over to the U.S. anyway. We tossed them into Guantanamo, and argued that they shouldn't be allowed to challenge their detention. In June, the Supreme Court decided they had that right, and now the government drops the primary case against them, resorting to lesser charges of planning travel to Afghanistan to train as terrorists,…

¶   A new Wallace & Gromit, at last! ¶   Splitter, yet another fun physics-based game. ¶  Typealyzer, an automatic Myers-Briggs analyzer for blog content. Also, GenderAnalyzer to determine if the author is male or female.

At work we've been using the well-regarded feedparser module to parse RSS feeds, and it works great for the most part, but we'd occasionally get a stuck server process. The CPU would spike to 100%, and wouldn't make any progress. We discovered a particular feed would cause a particular regular expression in the code to spin endlessly. The regex was intended to determine if a style attribute is valid CSS:if not rematch"^(\s*[-\w]+\s*:\s*[^:;]*(;|$))*$" style     return  Breaking this out into verbose regex syntax shows how it matches valid…

My grandmother died this morning. She was 97 years old, a good long life. She lived in New York City most of my life, but lived in a nursing home near me in Boston for the last year, so I saw her a few times, and those visits taught me some things about her.

I've had presentations on my mind lately, and that has caused me to search out a good tool for doing them. I have a Windows laptop, so PowerPoint is always an option, but I wanted to try other alternatives first. Unfortunately, I found them all lacking. I want a way to author and show slides, and then a way to export them for use in a web page. I've got a goal of putting the presentations online not just as a deck of images, but as a text transcript, illustrated with slides. I've never been able to watch other people's presentations online because I don't have the patience to watch an…

Right now I send out my newsletter via a hand-rolled PHP script.  I just sent out a letter this morning and it took 80 minutes to process.  Not only does it take forever, but I am a bit concerned I might not be doing it “right”. All that said, I’m in the market for getting some decent mailing list software, or subscribing to a decent service. So, “dear lazy web” .. Can anyone give me a rec?  What’s good in the software or service markets? My one “requirement” is the ability to import a CSV file of e-mail addresses every month.  And if…

So it’s about time to make something new here: Instead of jumping right into the iPhone code on this one, I decided to prototype the game in python+pygame first. I’ve gotten a lot of UI glitches worked out, and I’m going to get at least one complete single player game working nicely in python before I port it over to C. Galcon was “easy” to port to C because I had a very clear definition of what I was going to create before I created it.  Since this is a new game, I think if I define the game pretty well in python first it will save me loads of time tweaking…

Hey, The Galcon Prize contest is finally over!  Congrats to mewo for his great entry!  You can get the results package here.  This includes all entries and all datasets and all results.  It also includes some explanation on how I judged the entries, as well as the script I used to aggregate the results from the various dataset runs I did. Now that the compo is over I’d love it if everyone who competed wrote up some postmortems about their entries, what strategies they used, and how they came up with the solutions they did.  Please post those in the forums. Thanks again!  I’m…

If you haven’t put an entry together for the contest, you’ve got just a couple days left I’ll be doing the final judging Monday morning when I awake. -Phil

Hey, So .. I’m thinking about proposing a talk about tinypy at pycon.  Not quite sure what I’d want to say about it.  So, here’s my “ask the web” question: What do you want to hear me talk about tinypy? I could talk about anything from how I made it, why I made it, what good it is, how to use it, to .. err .. I dunno.  Whatever If no good talk ideas come together, I’ll probably do a lightning about it again, and maybe an open session. I also want to do a Galcon tournament of sorts again at some point :)  That was great fun last year! -Phil

Fibra has grown an event handling plugin. 1 import fibra 2 3 4 def task_a(): 5 for i in xrange(10): 6 yield fibra.Send('AN_EVENT') 7 8 def task_b(): 9 while True: 10 msg = yield fibra.Recv('AN_EVENT') 11 print 'Received:', msg 12 13 def test(): 14 s = fibra.schedule() 15 s.install(task_a()) 16 s.install(task_b()) 17 s.run() 18 19 if __name__ == "__main__": 20 test()Now I need to reinstate the networking layer... and think about adding multi-core features via the new (in 2.6) multiprocessing module. It would be nice to have events magically transferred across process boundaries. FibraNet used…

...another gamejam has been scheduled for November 14-30. Short notice I know. Apologies.I had hoped to deploy a new version of the gamejam.org interface, but I simply don't have the time. Next year, perhaps.The previous gamejam was quite successful, so if you feel inclined, feel free to join in.

Today, a friend asked me, "Why are you attracted to dynamic languages?".I didn't have a ready answer. After thinking about it for a while, I can list some good reasons why I prefer to work in Python, which is a dynamic language. Lately I have been writing a lot of code in C and C# (directly re-implementing Python algorithms), so I think I am in a good place to pass comment.Python code is ~10% the size of my equivalent C# code. This means less typing, faster prototypes and less room for bugs.Dynamic languages really do promote loose coupling. There is no dependence on types. This helps the…

Too many projects. Too many people asking for things. No time for the things I really want to do.How do _you_ prevent burn out?

Is it possible?In the past, I've been told, "No.".I've just read an article which states "With a little extra work, you can get hard real-time support with the PREEMPT_RT patch."Dear Lazyweb, is this so?

So, here I am at this hotel, using their network to browse the web as one does, and I suddenly see this web graphic notifying me that my network access has been blocked for ten minutes because "[the] server has detected questionable traffic originating from this computer".At first I was concerned that perhaps I had unwittingly picked up some virus or other malware, so I made a call to the "support" team to see if they could tell me what was wrong with the traffic. Of course, I might as well not have bothered, since they couldn't tell me anything about why this might have happened without me…

It's difficult to say "don't use Python 3.0" without being rude to the developers, as the code seems to be of very high quality. Now that Python 3.0 is almost here (release candidate 2 is a week old as I write) we should encourage people to use it, but only under well-defined circumstances. Here is some text I put together for inclusion in the release notes, to give people guidance about when and why it is and isn't appropriate to use 3.0. I would welcome further ideas to refine this text.Readers should note that this release has significant backwards incompatibilities with the 2.X series,…

Well, here's a turn-up. I spotted this meme on Grig Georghiu's blog.Grab the nearest book.Open it to page 56.Find the fifth sentence.Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. As luck would have it I am on a trip to San Diego and the only book I have with me is Rapture for the Geeks by Richard Dooling. [Disclaimer: Richard was kind enough to send me this book in return for a programming favor I did him some time ago]. By the most amazing coincidence, when I examine…

So I have this trip coming up to San Diego, and I fly tomorrow. I get this friendly little Web-2.0 e-mail from United. It comes from an address in a subdomain of p0.com, telling me that United are using Yesmail, and it includes a link for me to follow to "view my complete itinerary". They even have it link to a server in the p0.com domain so my browser doesn't think this is a phishing attack. The only problem comes when I click on the link, and repeatedly see Connection InterruptedThe connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.The network link was interrupted while…

Introduction to Python Final class of 2008. Get it while it's hot!

I like Google Alert, the idea of receiving a mail every day that summarizes all articles related to a given topic is really helpfull when you need to focus on a specific subject for a while. But this is not enough. I want to receive a mail that points me to any mailing list or planet feed or blogs out there as well, that talks about the topic. You can’t do it with Google Alerts as far as I know. Let’s take an example: I want to receive a daily mail that points me to any mail thread or blog entry, that is related to the word “buildout” or to the word…

I am back from the Plone Conference in D.C., and the jetlag is gone. The jetlag is gone for weeks now but it’s hard to find the time to blog these days :/ On the talks I have seen and topics I have chatted about There were a lot of great talks in D.C., and it was hard to decide which one to look at. In any case it was easy to meet the speaker if I had missed the talk, because the Plone Conference, unlike big conferences like OSCON, is a place where everyone hangs around the same spot after a talk is over. Here’s a list of some topics I have seen or I have talked about with some…

I was totally drowned into some customer projects since I came back from the Plone Conference. But things are looking better now, so I can take a bit of time to start blogging about the conference. I’ll probably do three blog posts: this one about my tutorial, the next one about the conference itself and last, an entry about the sprints. So I gave a tutorial about zc.buildout. The length was a bit challenging, since I had 90 minutes. Enough time to explain more things than in a regular talk, but not enough time to get into great details, as a tutorial should be. The other thing was…

Just a quick note: We have started the sprint in D.C. on packaging matters. Our tasks for the moment: re-read all the threads in distutils-ML since mid-september. write a short list of actions that can be done NOW in distutils, setuptools and PyPI write a short list of writing that can be done to define a “new” tool Please, join at any time in #distutils in freenode, and ping us, if you want to get involved.       

JJ shirt So I promised I would create a shirt for the top #5 contributors of my fund raising. I think I found an idea. My friend JJ is wearing a shirt I made on the picture you see. That’s the phrase we wanted me to put on the shirt: There’s no place like 127.0.0.1 (except maybe ::1) That is one of the geekiest shirt I know of Anyway, I want to borrow the idea for the plone shirt, and write, beside the Plone logo: There’s no place like 127.0.0.1 (except maybe #plone on freenode) That is, to express the fact that the Plone community is a really friendly one, and it’s…

Along with today’s launch of NetBeans 6.5, Sun, in cooperation with the NBPython community, are releasing an early access version of Python support for NetBeans. This is a result of the collaboration between Sun people and the NBPython project that I wrote about back in July. This release has been tested by folks in the NetBeans community and some folks from Sun’s NetBeans QA team, and it’s in pretty good shape for an early access release. We’re interested in getting people’s feedback. We would also love to see more people get involved with NBPython. How to get…

I’ve been dithering back and forth about writing this, but Duncan’s recent posts about his new D700, as well as several camera discussions that I had at ApacheCon have pushed me over the edge. Back in April I bought a new camera. When I got my first digital SLR back in 2005, I was just getting (back) into photography, and I had no idea if was going to really take to it or whether I would be any good. As a result, I went for the best cheapest camera that you could get at the time, which was Canon’s Digital Rebel XT. That camera served me well, but thanks to the digital…

So there’s a new project in the Apache Incubator called Olio. It’s a “toolkit that can be used to evaluate the suitability, functionality and performance of web technologies”. There are already implementations in Java, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. Here are some additional versions that I would like to see: Django (Python) Turbogears (Python) Lift (Scala) Seaside (Smalltalk) Erlang Clojure Haskell Common Lisp ASP.NET If I’ve left out your favorite language, framework, feel free to add it in the comments. Or better yet, show up to the project with an implementation.

Today Sun is announcing a new line of storage appliances. I haven’t been involved with this product at all, but I do have a personal angle on them. Shortly after I joined Sun this year, I took a trip to California to meet various people in person. Amongst the people that I met up with were Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro, and Adam Leventhal, the inventors of DTrace. I was a graduate student at Brown when Bryan and Mike were undergraduates. I was mostly interested in talking to them about DTrace, because DTrace is an important part of your toolkit if you are building web applications using…

ApacheCon US has come and gone for 2008, and here’s the roundup. Talks I’ve known Simon Phipps since we worked together at IBM in the late 1990’s. He’s always been great at finding and articulating trends in the computer industry, and I had read his post on the Adoption Led market. I expected him to talk about just that one issue, but it turned out that he had five points to make. Besides the adoption led characterization of open source, he talked about substitutability as preferable to interoperability, with a corollary of standards body reform. He also made the point…