SciPy India 2009 -- Call for Presentations The first Scientific Computing with Python conference in India has announced its Call for Presentations. The conference will be held at the Technopark in Trivandrum, Kerala, India from December 12th to 17th, 2009.
Python
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Python News
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SciPy India Call for Papers
5 Nov 2009 | 3:46 pm -
RuPy '09 Conference - Schedule Posted
29 Oct 2009 | 7:45 amRuPy '09 has posted its schedule. The conference will take place November 7 & 8 in Poznan, Poland. (See the PyCon blog for more details.) -
Python 2.6.4 final released
25 Oct 2009 | 8:17 pmThe fourth maintenance release of the 2.6 series is available. -
PSF adopts Diversity Statement
23 Oct 2009 | 8:00 pmOn October 12, 2009, the board of the Python Software Foundation voted to adopt a Diversity Statement. -
ConFoo.ca 2010 (Montreal): Call for Proposals
15 Oct 2009 | 12:55 pmConFoo.ca has posted a call for speakers. ConFoo.ca is a bilingual (English & French) web development conference covering PHP, Python, Ruby, Web standards, security, project management and many other topics. Proposals are due November 13th, 2009. Confoo.ca 2010 will take place in Montreal, Canada, from March 10th to 12th 2010.
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Python Software Foundation News
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Third-Quarter Community Service Awards
25 Oct 2009 | 1:27 pmRegular readers will know that the Foundation periodically honors those who have made significant contributions to its mission. Often these people aren't even members of the Foundation, but this doesn't exclude them. At its recent meeting the PSF Board voted Community Awards to two people, one of whom isn't currently a member. Noufal Ibrahim Noufal was nominated for heading up the organizing team for the recent (and very successful) first PyCon India conference held on September 26 and 27 in Bangalore, attracting 450 delegates. Although Noufal was "first among equals" this award also… -
Reminder: 5 days left for PyCon US 2010 Proposals
25 Sep 2009 | 7:24 amOctober 1, the deadline for submitting PyCon talk proposals, is now just under a week away. If you're planning to present, you should submit your outline now! See the proposal instructions for guidance. -
Python at the 2009 Atlanta Linux Fest
23 Sep 2009 | 6:19 amWe should all give Brandon Rhodes a hearty "Thanks!" for doing a great job representing Python at the Atlanta Linux Fest on September 19th. You can read Brandon's account of the day for more details and his advice to anyone planning similar outreach activities. -
What modules need documentation work for Python 3.x?
21 Sep 2009 | 8:13 amAs part of ongoing preparations for GHOP, Titus Brown and the other organizers are soliciting feedback about what modules in the standard library need more documentation work. Are there any modules that lack useful examples? Or where the writing or examples could be clarified? Head over to this survey and give us your opinion today, or forever hold your tongue! -
Reminder: 14 Days left for PyCon US 2010 Proposals
17 Sep 2009 | 12:12 pmOctober 1, the deadline for submitting PyCon talk proposals, is now just under a month away. Start thinking about your outline now! See the proposal instructions for guidance.
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The PyCon blog
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RuPy '09 Conference - Agenda is Complete
29 Oct 2009 | 7:36 amRuPy is the strongly dynamic conference concerning mostly Ruby and Python programming languages (7 & 8 November, in Poznan, Poland). Registration has been open for some time, and now we have also completed the agenda. There will be a load of talks and many stars of the geek world will come to talk about their experiences.After the first day of talks, we invite all attendees to join the Geek Party on Saturday night, where one can discuss Ruby and Python-related issues while holding a glass of cold beer.The list of speakers and talks include:Michael Dirolf - "An Introduction to… -
Invited speakers
19 Oct 2009 | 8:01 amThe vast majority of talks at PyCon go through a challenging submission process where they are weighed against the other submitted talks - 179 submissions this year. A few speakers, however, have been so consistently and overwhelmingly popular at previous PyCons that this year's program committee has invited them to skip the usual review process, reserving talk slots for topics of their choice.The PyCon 2010 invited speakers and their topics areIan Bicking, On The Subject Of Source CodeJeff Rush, Interfaces, Adapters and FactoriesJack Diederich, Python's Dusty CornersMike Fletcher, Debating… -
Introducing the PyCon US Poster Sessions!
17 Oct 2009 | 8:00 pmStarting at PyCon 2010 in Atlanta, GA, we're excited to announce the addition of organized poster sessions during the regular conference days. Every year, PyCon US has tried to highlight new, interesting, and noteworthy things going on in the Python Community... and every year, we've been amazed by the variety and depth of interesting projects that have been presented. Up until now, that information has been formally presented using a combination of invited and reviewed talks, lightning talks from attendees, and open-space events. While these are all good in their own right, we've decided… -
ConFoo.ca 2010: Call for Proposals
15 Oct 2009 | 12:55 pmPHP-Québec, Montréal-Python, Ruby Montréal, W3Qc, and OWASP Montréal are organizing the first edition of the ConFoo.ca conference, which will be held in Montréal, Canada, on March 10th through 12th at the Hilton Bonaventure Hotel. With over 500 attendees expected, ConFoo.ca will be one of the largest web development conferences in North America.ConFoo.ca is looking for great speakers willing to share their experience and skills with programmers, managers, marketers and decision makers. The conference will be divided into two parts:A technical part, encompassing different aspects of web… -
pyTexas: Regional Conference - Oct 24/25
14 Oct 2009 | 5:46 ampyTexas, the 3rd annual regional Python conference, is coming up in only ten days. It is being held Oct 24-25 Sat/Sun in Ft. Worth at the University of North Texas Health Science Center.The format is scheduled talks on Saturday morning followed by open space talks driven by the attendees in the afternoon. On Sunday there will be sprints on various projects and, in parallel, a Python Lab that tests the attendees with interesting programming puzzles.There is no cost to attend but we would appreciate you adding your name to the registration wiki to give us a better idea of attendance.We expect…
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Happenings in Python Usergroups
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pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, October, 14th Notes
18 Oct 2009 | 2:39 amThe Python User Group Cologne (pyCologne) met on October, 14th at the computer centre of the University of Cologne. The meeting was attended by 19 people. German speakers might want to refer to our wiki page which you can reach at moment only on http://wiki.python-forum.de/User Group Köln/This time we had two talks about Google Wave. Many thanks to Alexander Benker and Andi Albrecht:Overview of Google Wave (Alexander Benker)Alexander gave a detailed overview of Google Wave. He presented the elements of Google Wave (Wave, Wavelet, Blip) as well as its architecture. Furthermore, he described… -
pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, October, 14th, Announcement
11 Oct 2009 | 12:23 pmThe next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, October, 14thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda:Google Wave (Andi Albrecht, Florian Scheel) At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the evening in a nearby restaurant.Further information including directions how to get to the location can be found at:http://wiki.python.de/User_Group_Köln (Sorry, this page is in German only) -
pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, September, 9th, Announcement
7 Sep 2009 | 11:30 amThe next meeting of pyCologne will take placeWednesday, September, 9thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, GermanyAgenda:Hacking and reverse engineering with Python (Stefan Pielicke) Development status of moin-1.9 (beta3++) (Reimar Bauer) At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the evening in a nearby restaurant.Further information including directions how to get to the location can be found at:http://wiki.python.de/User_Group_Köln (Sorry, this page is in German only) -
pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, August, 12th Notes
30 Aug 2009 | 11:15 amThe Python User Group Cologne (pyCologne) met on August, 12th at the computer centre of the University of Cologne. The meeting was attended by 17 people. German speakers might want to refer to our wiki page http://www.pycologne.deFlyerThe pyCologne-Flyer is ready for print!!! Klaus Bremer introduces its contents:The three inner pages contain information about Python.The title page shows the pyCologne-Logo and short information about pyCologne.The remaining pages contain a short description of pyCologne and contact information.Please see the flyer on:… -
PUB - Python Users Berlin, Germany, 20th of August, Announcement
13 Aug 2009 | 12:02 pmPython Users Berlin are meeting next Thursday (20.08) , 7pmThe gathering takes place at newthinkingstore, Tucholskystr. 48, 10117 Berlin, GermanyThere will be a talk about Python 3.Everybody with an interest in Python is invited to come. Afterwards, we'll have food and drinks in a nearby restaurant (please sign here for the restaurant visit)See you next Thursday, Stephanhttp://wiki.python.de/User Group Berlin
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ShowMeDo Blog » Python ShowMeDos
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New Video Published: Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python and Parallel IPython
1 Nov 2009 | 7:14 pmShowmedo is proud to publish:[1439] Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python and Parallel IPython, a video-tutorial by unpingco This video is part of the series Scientific and parallel computing using IPython In this segment, we continue with the case study of robust regression methods, but here we show how to use generators and the parallel computing features of IPython to accelerate the computation. -
New Video Published: Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python continued
1 Nov 2009 | 7:14 pmShowmedo is proud to publish:[1438] Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python continued, a video-tutorial by unpingco This video is part of the series Scientific and parallel computing using IPython In this segment, we discuss how the least-median estimate can be computed from the sample dataset using generators. -
New Video Published: Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python
1 Nov 2009 | 7:14 pmShowmedo is proud to publish:[1437] Case Study: Robust Regression Methods Using Python , a video-tutorial by unpingco This video is part of the series Scientific and parallel computing using IPython In this case study, we pull together everything we have learned so far in order to compute the least MEDIAN squared estimate of a line given data with outliers present. This segment describes the fundamental problem. -
New Video Published: Finer Control for Parallel Computing in IPython
1 Nov 2009 | 7:14 pmShowmedo is proud to publish:[1435] Finer Control for Parallel Computing in IPython, a video-tutorial by unpingco This video is part of the series Scientific and parallel computing using IPython In this segment, we discuss the push, pull, and push_function, features of IPython that allow finer control over individual namespaces of remote nodes and over the computations that run on them. -
New Video Published: Distributing Parallel Computations Using IPython
21 Oct 2009 | 7:56 pmShowmedo is proud to publish:[1434] Distributing Parallel Computations Using IPython, a video-tutorial by unpingco This video is part of the series Scientific and parallel computing using IPython In this segment, we discuss the map feature to distribute computations across the available nodes, how to use targets to specify which nodes to use, and how to use blocking to avoid waiting for long computations to finish.
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PyPy Status Blog
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Düsseldorf Sprint Started
6 Nov 2009 | 1:23 amThe Düsseldorf sprint starts today. Only Samuele and me are there so far, but that should change over the course of the day. We will mostly work on the JIT during this sprint, trying to make it a lot more practical. For that we need to decrease its memory requirements some more and to make it use less aggressive inlining. We will post more as the sprint progresses. -
PyPy on RuPy 2009
3 Nov 2009 | 8:38 amHello. It's maybe a bit late to announce, but there will be PyPy talk at Rupy conference this weekend in Poznan. Precisely, I'll be talking mostly about PyPy's JIT and how to use it. Unfortunately the talk is on Saturday, at 8:30 in the morning. EDIT: Talk is online, together with examples Cheers, fijal -
Logging and nice graphs
1 Nov 2009 | 10:59 amHi all, This week I worked on improving the system we use for logging. Well, it was not really a "system" but rather a pile of hacks to measure in custom ways timings and counts and display them. So now, we have a system :-) The system in question was integrated in the code for the GC and the JIT, which are two independent components as far as the source is concerned. However, we can now display a unified view. Here is for example pypy-c-jit running pystone for (only) 5000 iterations: The top long bar represents time. The bottom shows two summaries of the total time taken by the various… -
GC improvements
16 Oct 2009 | 7:27 amIn the last week, I (Armin) have been taking some time off the JIT work to improve our GCs. More precisely, our GCs now take one or two words less for every object. This further reduce the memory usage of PyPy, as we will show at the end. Background information: RPython object model We first need to understand the RPython object model as implemented by our GCs and our C backend. (Note that the object model of the Python interpreter is built on top of that, but is more complicated -- e.g. Python-level objects are much more flexible than RPython objects.) Consider these two RPython classes:… -
First pypy-cli-jit benchmarks
15 Oct 2009 | 6:36 amAs the readers of this blog already know, I've been working on porting the JIT to CLI/.NET for the last months. Now that it's finally possible to get a working pypy-cli-jit, it's time to do some benchmarks. Warning: as usual, all of this has to be considered to be a alpha version: don't be surprised if you get a crash when trying to run pypy-cli-jit. Of course, things are improving very quickly so it should become more and more stable as days pass. For this time, I decided to run four benchmarks. Note that for all of them we run the main function once in advance, to let the JIT recoginizing…
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IronPython URLs
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QCon Presentation: Real World IronPython
7 Nov 2009 | 2:39 amIn March I spoke at the QCon London 2009 conference on "Real World IronPython". InfoQ has just put up a video of the presentation, including the slides and a demo of "Resolver One", the highly programmable spreadsheet system created by Resolver Systems with IronPython. Real World IronPython Summary Michael Foord discusses IronPython, the DLR, dynamic languages on .Net, static vs. dynamic typing, Visual Studio integration, Resolver One, Intellipad, Crack.net, embedding IronPython, the ScriptEngine, error handling, dynamic operations, functions as delegates, and the C# 4.0 dynamic… -
A Good Mix 28: NTornado, WPF, Testing in Italian, More Benchmarking, and adodbapi
7 Nov 2009 | 2:20 amYet another collection of IronPython and DLR related articles, projects and blog entries from the past few weeks. NTornado NTornado is an IronPython version of the Tornando web server. The Tornado Web Server is the open source version of the non-blocking web server that power FriendFeed and now part of the Facebook's open source initiative. This server is coded in Python and with strong emphasis on operating systems with epoll support. NTornado is a port of Tornado to IronPython using asynchronous high-performance sockets in .NET. To run the demos (requires IronPython 2.6): > ipy -X:Frames… -
The Dynamic Languages Team
28 Oct 2009 | 6:44 amA blog entry from Lisa Feigenbaum (the Microsoft Visual Studio Languages Community Program Manager) introduces us to all the members of the IronPython and IronRuby development teams and the MVPs (community members). Connecting with IronPython & IronRuby Team Members IronRuby: website, mailing list IronPython website, mailing list In the blog post you can find details of all the team members, including links to their blogs and twitter accounts. Team members: Jim Deville (IronRuby) Jimmy Schementi (program manager for dynamic languages Silverlight integration) Harry Pierson (IronPython… -
A Good Mix 27: A Dynamic T-Shirt, Testoob, Mathematica and Blaze
28 Oct 2009 | 4:44 amYet another collection of IronPython and DLR related articles, projects and blog entries from the past few weeks. You had me at dynamic An IronPython T-Shirt created by Harry Pierson. The text is C# + IPy = <3. You had me at "dynamic". Testoob 1.15 Released Testoob Project Homepage The latest release of the Testoob project (yet-another-Python-testing-framework) announces IronPython support. I haven't used Testoob, but it is nice to see more projects supporting IronPython: Testoob is an advanced testing framework and test runner for Python. As a test runner, it can run your… -
Working with .NET Code Remotely with execnet
27 Oct 2009 | 3:26 pmTesting is a big topic in Python, with major libraries like py.test and nose pushing forward the state of the art. Even the standard library module unittest has had a lot of improvements that will appear in Python 2.7 and 3.2. Part of py.test is a library for distributed testing and deployment with remote Python interpreters. This library is called execnet: The execnet package allows you to: instantiate local/remote Python Interpreters send code for execution to one or many Interpreters send and receive data through channels execnet performs zero-install bootstrapping into other interpreters;…
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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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Coder Who Says Py
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PyCon talk decisions have been made
4 Nov 2009 | 3:20 pm[edit: nixed a paragraph by request] [edit: link to accepted talks and thank Doug] I want to say three things in this post. One is that the PyCon program committee has finished making there decisions of which 95 talks out of the 179 submissions we received. I should also admit that my talk (#9 in the list) was accepted although I actually missed the part of PC meetings where it was so I didn't officially find out until everyone else did. Second, I wanted to publicly thank Jesse Noller and the other members of the pycon-pc for their hard work (with special honorable mention to Doug Napoleone… -
Submit a poster for PyCon 2010
20 Oct 2009 | 7:27 pmThe PyCon organizers are trying something new for PyCon 2010: posters. Basically there is a plenary session where people have posters about something and they stand there talking to whomever comes by (if you have been in academia you know what these can be like). In my time doing posters at academic conferences I have found that at the larger conferences a poster can be worth your time. You end up with enough people coming by talking to you that you get valuable feedback and contacts. Plus a poster is a lot less stressful to do compared to a full talk and allows for more detail than a… -
I ♥ jQuery (UI)
14 Oct 2009 | 7:59 pmI had this grand plan for a blog post comparing the various JavaScript GUI libraries, which in the end ended up being this blog post stating how I like jQuery UI. If you don't care about reading a "love letter" to jQuery UI, then you can stop reading now. Since I was planning on refreshing the old online UI for Oplop I figured this was as good a chance as any to see what the various libraries offered. I knew that I wanted a wizard-like interface for Oplop's pasword hash generation workflow where users couldn't skip steps (see the FAQ if you want to know how Oplop works). This led me to think… -
Everyone should switch to Distribute and off of setuptools
5 Oct 2009 | 12:39 pm[edit: mention how the fix in Python 2.6.3 may have not belonged in 2.6.3 since it is a micro release] Python 2.6.3 has a couple of bugs still lingering that warrant a brown bag 2.6.4 release (should be out before the end of the month). One of the "bugs", and the entire reason I am doing this blog post, involves distutils and setuptools. Turns out that for Python 2.6.3 a change was made to distutils that broke setuptools for building extension modules. While the change that broke setuptools is being viewed as improper for a micro release (code shouldn't break in a micro release unless it… -
Adding structural consistency to exceptions
29 Sep 2009 | 4:35 pmWhen I wrote PEP 352: Required Superclass for Exceptions one of the hopes I had was it would lead to some sanity when it came to attaching information to exceptions. As it stands now everything is stored under BaseException.args which is not exactly structured, and so I wanted to clean that situation up. Unfortunately this got derailed because of backwards-compatibility issues (and for those of you being bitten by the BaseException.message deprecation, Python 2.6.1 has a fix to make it saner). But today a tweet from Jacob Kaplan-Moss reminded me why exceptions need to be cleaned up. If…
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David Goodger's Weblog
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Podcasts I listen to
A list of what & why. Mostly tech-oriented 'casts, with the odd, odd exception. -
Go see "Speed Racer" -- what a blast!
A couple weeks ago I saw Speed Racer with my wife and kids. Lots of fun was had by all in this action-packed animé brought to hyper-real life. -
Unicode misinformation
It's great that Google is moving to Unicode 5.1 and that UTF-8 is so popular, but I wish they'd get their terms straight! -
Polyform Puzzler Talk Video (Montreal Python)
Video of my February 7 talk at the Montreal Python users group meeting is now up on the web. It was a lot of fun, and the group seemed to enjoy it too. -
Python 3000 podcast interview with DDJ
An interview I did recently with Mike Riley of Dr. Dobb's Journal has been released: http://www.ddj.com/architect/205918857 (click through for a live hyperlink).
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Doug Hellmann
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PyMOTW: sys, Part 4: Exception Handling
1 Nov 2009 | 12:14 pmException Handlingsys includes features for trapping and working with exceptions.Unhandled ExceptionsMany applications are structured with a main loop that wraps execution in a global exception handler to trap errors not handled at a lower level. Another way to achieve the same thing is by setting the sys.excepthook to a function that takes three arguments (error type, error value, and traceback) and let it deal with unhandled errors.import sysdef my_excepthooktype value traceback print 'Unhandled error:' type valuesysexcepthook my_excepthookprint 'Before exception'raise… -
PyMOTW: sys, Part 3: Memory Management and Limits
25 Oct 2009 | 7:50 amMemory Management and Limitssys includes several functions for understanding and controlling memory usage.Reference CountsPython helps you manage memory with garbage collection. An object is automatically marked to be collected when its reference count drops to zero. To examine the reference count of an existing object, use getrefcount().import sysone print 'At start :' sysgetrefcountonetwo oneprint 'Second reference :' sysgetrefcountonedel twoprint 'After del :' sysgetrefcountoneNotice that the count is actually one higher than expected because there is a temporary… -
PyMOTW: sys Part 2: Runtime Environment
18 Oct 2009 | 4:04 pmRuntime Environmentsys provides low-level APIs for interacting with the system outside of your application, by accepting command line arguments, accessing user input, and passing messages and status values to the user.Arguments to Your ProgramThe arguments captured by the interpreter are processed there and not passed along to your program directly. Any remaining options and arguments, including the name of the script itself, are saved to sys.argv in case your program does need to use them.import sysprint 'Arguments:' sysargv$ python sys_argv.pyArguments: ['sys_argv.py']$ python… -
PyMOTW: sys, Part 1: Interpreter Settings
12 Oct 2009 | 6:09 amInterpreter Settingssys contains attributes and functions for accessing compile-time or runtime configuration settings for the interpreter.Build-time Version InformationThe version used to build the C interpreter is available in a few forms. sys.version is a human-readable string that usually includes the full version number as well as information about the build date, compiler, and platform. sys.hexversion is easier to use for checking the interpreter version since it is a simple integer. When formatted using hex(), it is clear that parts of sys.hexversion come from the version information… -
Duplication of effort or evolution?
1 Oct 2009 | 5:25 amDear LazyWeb,I need help compiling a list of Python modules that exist outside of the standard library and either duplicate or serve as replacements for modules that are in the standard library.For example, simplejson became the standard library module json but is also maintained separately for backwards compatibility and to include the optional C extension that is not part of the standard library version (please correct me if I'm wrong).Another example is httplib2, which is meant to have more features than the standard library's httplib.If you know of other similar modules, please post links…
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me->flub
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Python modules and the GPL: I still don't get it
3 Nov 2009 | 2:59 pmI've never understood if you can use GPL python modules (or packages) in GPL-incompatibly licensed code. Today I re-read the GPL looking for this and am tempted to think yes, you can. The GPL says: 1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it [...] This is simple enough, what if you need to change it? This gets more interesting: 2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, [...] provided that you also meet all of these conditions: b) You must cause any work that you… -
Delny 0.4.1
24 Oct 2009 | 12:59 pmA little while ago I released a new version of Delny (my python wrapper around Qhull for Delaunay triangulations), the main purpose to use numpy instead of numeric. Impressively enough people actually seemed to care and I got a few bug reports and hints for improvements. So I just released 0.4.1 with some of these updated: I forgot to change some python code to numpy, so was still importing numeric Use numpy.get_include() to find the numpy header files At the same time I fixed the 2D square issue by using the Qz option and removing the extra point from all output. Finally fixing a… -
No permission to see Ubuntu bugs?
22 Oct 2009 | 3:47 pmSo I'm looking at the release notes for Ubuntu 9.10 and am interested in the hibernation issue. Naturally I follow the link to the bug report. First I need to log in to launchpad. That's weird, since when do I need to log in simply to view bugs? But after logging in I see this: Not allowed here Sorry, you don't have permission to access this page. You are logged in as Floris Bruynooghe. Since when is Ubuntu hiding bugs? Sure security bugs might need to be hidden for a while but you could be more descriptive about that. And surely you shouldn't be linking to such bugs? Just weird. -
Cross platform shell scripts
24 Sep 2009 | 1:18 pmAt work we have an rather elaborate collection of shell scripts that builds our softweare and all it's dependencies on about 7 UNIX variants as well as on Windows. Shell seemed like a good choice when we started to write those scripts: it is available on all hosts (using Cygwin on Windows) and with some care you can do most task in a portable way, ssh and scp are at your fingertips to do things on remote hosts without any extra hassle etc. The thing I didn't realise is just how extrordinary expensive forking is on Windows. And when having lots of shell that's what you're doing all the time… -
Battery life
23 Sep 2009 | 12:07 amNormally I'm quite happy with the 3h of battery life of my laptop, it covers all my disconnected time on trains etc. But it just doesn't cut it on a 10h flight, especially painful if my brain has loads of ideas to try out and things to do.
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Frank Wierzbicki's Weblog
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Leaving Sun
4 Nov 2009 | 11:05 amI've always regarded working full time on Jython at Sun as a miraculous sabbatical that might come to an end at any moment. Sadly that time has come. I've worked with many amazing people and had a great time: Sun provided me with one of the greatest professional experiences I have had, for which I will always be grateful.I'm very pleased with how far Jython has come during my tenure at Sun. Jython is now a modern version of Python, and has the momentum to continue its growth. A far larger group of developers than ever before contribute regularly, making Jython a very healthy project. Jython… -
Jython 2.5.1 Final is out!
26 Sep 2009 | 11:36 amOn behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5.1 final is available for download. See the installation instructions.Jython 2.5.1 fixes a number of bugs, including some major errors when using coroutines and when using relative imports, as well as a potential data loss bug when writing to files in append mode. Please see the NEWS file for detailed release notes.Please report any bugs that you find. Thanks! -
Jython 2.5.1 Release Candidate 3 is out
23 Sep 2009 | 6:54 pmOn behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5.1rc3 is available for download. See the installation instructions.I didn't really want to have an RC3, I was hoping to have a final by now, but a data loss bug was discovered in RC2 and that prompted one more RC. I'm hoping that this is the last one and that we'll have a final shortly. Please see the NEWS file for detailed release notes.Please report any bugs that you find. Thanks! -
PyCon 2010 Call For Talks Ends Soon!
16 Sep 2009 | 5:20 pmIf you where thinking about submitting a talk to PyCon 2010 you should do it now! -
Jython 2.5.1 Release Candidate 2 is out!
12 Sep 2009 | 12:04 pmOn behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that Jython 2.5.1rc2 is available for download. See the installation instructions.Jython 2.5.1rc2 fixes bugs that we found when testing rc1, including some db, codec, and locking issues. Please see the NEWS file for detailed release notes.Please report any bugs that you find. Thanks!
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The Third Bit
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Misa Sakamoto on DB2 Technology Explorer
6 Nov 2009 | 11:31 amOne of our PEY students, Misa Sakamoto, has an article up on DeveloperWorks about the stuff she’s doing at IBM — yay! -
The Greatest Failing of High School Science
5 Nov 2009 | 11:40 amI don’t care exactly what science is taught in high schools, so long as people learn that: The universe works according to rules. If we ask questions carefully and humbly, we can find out what those rules are. We don’t get to pick or change those rules. It’s not like basketball, where we can just decide one day that if you throw the round thing through the other round thing from far enough away, then bingo, you get an extra point. I think #3 is the fundamental “don’t get it” in the minds of many climate change deniers. Just read this story: it doesn’t… -
Toronto Innovations Showcase
5 Nov 2009 | 7:43 amMy students and I a few hours on Monday and Tuesday (Nov 2-3) at City Hall showing off our projects. It wasn’t as busy as expected, thanks primarily to H1N1 fears, but there was still more traffic at our double booth than at any other I saw, and I was proud of how well the students presented their work. The projects and teams were: Q-Me: using SMS text messaging to manages lineups for things like building permits and vaccinations (Dejana Bajic, Tyler de Witt, Alex Lee, and Akhil Mathur) I-Spy: allowing you to see who has looked at your medical records (Fan Dong, Lenny Han, Benton Hui,… -
We’re Going to PyCon
3 Nov 2009 | 3:02 amThe PyCon 2010 committee has just accepted our talk about Basie — we’ll see you in Atlanta in February! Update: but getting there by train or bus will take almost 24 hours. My resolution not to fly for a year is being severely tested… -
There’s No Such Thing As KeepItGoingCamp
2 Nov 2009 | 3:05 amThere are lots of dating sites on the Internet, but many fewer devoted to keeping your marriage happy. Similarly, Toronto now has DemoCamp, Entrepreneurship 101, and a growing list of other events devoted to getting new ventures off the ground, but so far as I can tell, there’s nothing for technical types who want to know how to keep an established business going and growing. One reason, I think, is that starting new things has a higher social status than being a conscientious gardener. Another is that the attitude and skills needed to start something are often quite different from…
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Agile Testing
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Automated deployments with Puppet and Fabric
5 Nov 2009 | 1:55 pmI've been looking into various configuration management/automated deployment tools lately. At OpenX we used slack, but I wanted something with a bit more functionality than that (although I'm not badmouthing slack by any means -- it can definitely be bent to your will to do pretty much whatever you need in terms of automating your deployments).From what I see, there are 2 types of configuration management tools:The first type I call 'pull', which means that the servers pull their configurations and their marching orders in terms of applying those configurations from a centralized location --… -
Thierry Carrez on running your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud
13 Oct 2009 | 2:21 pmThierry Carrez, who works in the Ubuntu Server team, has a great series of blog posts on how to run your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. I haven't had a chance to try this yet, but it's high on my TODO list. Thierry uses the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud product (which has been part of Ubuntu server starting with 9.04) together with Eucalyptus. Here are the links to Thierry's posts:Part 1Part 2Part 3 -
Compiling, installing and test-running Scribe
9 Oct 2009 | 12:51 pmI went to the Hadoop World conference last week and one thing I took away was how Facebook and other companies handle the problem of scalable logging within their infrastructure. The solution found by Facebook was to write their own logging server software called Scribe (more details on the FB blog).Scribe is mentioned in one of the best presentations I attended at the conference -- 'Hadoop and Hive Development at Facebook' by Dhruba Borthakur and Zheng Shao. If you look at page 4, you'll see the enormity of the situation they're facing: 4 TB of compressed data (mostly logs) handled every… -
Brandon Burton on 'Automation is the cloud'
6 Oct 2009 | 10:38 amGreat post from Brandon Burton, my ex-colleague at RIS/Reliam, on why automation is the foundation of cloud computing. Brandon discusses automation at various levels, starting with virtualization and networking, then moving up the layers and covering OS, configuration management and application deployment. Highly recommended. -
Pybots success stories and a call for help
24 Sep 2009 | 9:54 pmAny report of the death of the Pybots project is an exaggeration. But not by much. First, some history.Some historyThe idea behind the Pybots project is to allow people to run automated tests for their Python projects, while using Python binaries built from the very latest source code from the Python subversion repository.The idea originated from Glyph, of Twisted fame. He sent out a message to the python-dev mailing list in which he said:"I would like to propose, although I certainly don't have time to implement, a program by which Python-using projects could contribute buildslaves which…
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jessenoller.com
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PyCon 2010: Talks are live!
4 Nov 2009 | 6:08 pmThe official talk list for PyCon 2010, happening in February in Atlanta Georgia is now live: http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/talks/ My thanks go out to every author, and person involved in getting us this far. With out the hard work of a lot of people, this would not have been possible. -
Dive Into Python 3: The Foreword
25 Oct 2009 | 7:47 amSeveral months ago; Mark Pilgrim contacted me, asking if I would be interested in writing the foreword to Dive Into Python 3 – the latest revision to his seminal book Dive Into Python. After I was done being flabbergasted, and after I picked myself off the floor, I gladly accepted. What follows is what I wrote, and what will appear in the print edition of Dive Into Python 3 (amazon link). I wanted to convey my passion for both the language, the community – for everything involved in this. I wanted to explain why I, as just another developer see Python 3 as critical to the… -
Python 3to2: Go check it out.
27 Aug 2009 | 6:26 pmEarlier this week – Joe Amenta shot an email to the Python-Dev mailing list announcing the completion of the Google Summer of Code project he had be working on – a Python 3 to Python 2 translation tool. This is something which, when discussed at the Python Language Summit at PyCon 2009 was met with much “yes please make this” – but not a lot of people could allocate the time. In fact, when asked who could at least help drive it forward, I was lame^H^H^H awesome enough to raise my hand. In true upper management style, I discussed it, and promptly delegated it to… -
PyCon 2010: Call for Papers, Reviewers, and Volunteers.
14 Aug 2009 | 10:15 amPyCon is coming back around – although it seems as if we just finished PyCon 2009! This next PyCon (PyCon 2010) will be held in Atlanta, Georgia February 17 through 25th at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta. PyCon 2010 is now accepting talk proposals – the Call for Papers went out yesterday! This year is a bit different for me; this year I’ve taken the torch of Program Committee chair from Ivan Krsti? – this means I get to “lead up” the committee in reaching out for talks, reviewing proposals and choosing the content all of us will be privy to. This isn’t a… -
PyCon 2010: Call for Proposals
13 Aug 2009 | 1:08 pmCall for proposals — PyCon 2010 — http://us.pycon.org/2010/ Due date: October 1st, 2009 Want to showcase your skills as a Python Hacker? Want to have hundreds of people see your talk on the subject of your choice? Have some hot button issue you think the community needs to address, or have some package, code or project you simply love talking about? Want to launch your master plan to take over the world with python? PyCon is your platform for getting the word out and teaching something new to hundreds of people, face to face. Previous PyCon conferences have had a broad range of…
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Ned Batchelder's blog
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Continuous integration for Python with Hudson
5 Nov 2009 | 6:26 pmContinuous integration is a great idea: you configure a server to periodically pull your source code, build it, run the tests, run lint, measure coverage, and so on. Then it graphs everything, stores the results for examination, and so on. I'd been trying to figure out how to use the Hudson CI server with Python, and the few times I tried to get my mind around it, it just wasn't clicking. I happened to mention my mental block to Joe Heck, and a few days later, he produced Setting up a python CI server with Hudson. It's a great step-by-step how-to covering everything you need to get Hudson… -
Life-sized Link
3 Nov 2009 | 7:04 pmFor Halloween, Ben dressed as Link from the Legend of Zelda video games. We made a shield for him in a hurry, with corrugated cardboard and colored electrical tape. It was pretty good for an hour's work. But hchiu completely outdid himself on a similar task: Life-Sized Link, 831 pieces printed on 197 sheets of paper, cut, folded, and glued into a life-sized statue. OMG!! BTW, there's an entire subculture of Nintendo papercraft with some very dedicated participants... -
Hey Jude, flowcharted
3 Nov 2009 | 6:01 pmThis is just genius, by love all this: -
Magritte Mac sticker
1 Nov 2009 | 9:36 amI've seen clever decorations of Mac laptops incorporating the Apple logo before, but this Magritte-inspired sticker is one of the best. Their other stickers, for walls as well as laptops, are also good, with a nice dash of whimsy. -
Measuring tire pressure at the pump
1 Nov 2009 | 5:05 amI had an idea the other day for a way to measure a car's tire pressure that wouldn't require any action on the part of the driver. Think of it as a remote passive tire gauge. The problem is, I don't know if it would work. The idea is to put a plate in the ground at gas pumps. The plate would have sensors that measure two things: the weight of the car, and the area of the tires' footprint. Dividing the weight by the area gives pounds per square inch, the inflation of the tires. For more useful information, the plate can be divided in four to measure each tire independently. Will it work? I…
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Entity Crisis
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Unity becomes free, Unreal follows lead.
5 Nov 2009 | 5:22 pmHot on the heels of the UT announcement of a free version of Unity 3D, Unreal just released a free set of game tools.I can't help but think that this is a knee jerk reaction, and really shows that Unreal is feeling very threatened by Unity 3D. -
Forward thinking from Radiohead.
3 Nov 2009 | 9:48 pmRadiohead is BraindeadLet's throttle the internet to stop file sharing. Great Idea. While we're at it, lets stop road accidents by limiting highways to one lane at 20kph. Excellent thinking. -
What is right with Unity3D?
29 Oct 2009 | 11:00 pmI'm pleased to see that my previous rant about problems with Unity3D is now irrelevant. All those problems are fixed. Excellent!Even better, Unity Indie is now free. The new profiler will also be very useful! Unfortunately its too late to port my current project, so I'll have to wait a bit to try out the new features. -
Lost Serial Numbers
19 Oct 2009 | 7:39 amI've paid for Homeworld 2 three times.Each time, I've lost the installation media, or the manual (with the printed serial key).Wanting to fire it up again, I found the CD, but not the serial key. Bummer. Is the only alternative to search for a crack, or someone else's serial?I think this is the reason that platforms like Steam or Impulse are so great. You never lose your games, unless the provider goes bust, of course. -
West Australian Game Developers
8 Oct 2009 | 6:21 amI've started a LinkedIn group for West Australian Game Developers.If you are a professional, and you want to network, feel free to sign up.
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For Some Value of "Magic"
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Links for 2009-11-02 [del.icio.us]
The Complete Guide to Google Wave Unofficial guide that seems quite helpful -
Links for 2009-10-31 [del.icio.us]
Cell Size and Scale Fascinating zooming graphic from the University of Utah U.K. Drug Adviser Fired After Marijuana Comments : NPR Politicians again prove they are irrational idiots How a clerical error made corporations “people” Time to dispense with the myth of corporate personhood American Politics At its worst. The sad fact is, this cartoon is all too accurate in its portrayal -
Google Mail Weirdness
31 Oct 2009 | 10:07 amI'd be delighted if somebody could explain what the hell's going on here. I switched mail for the holdenweb.com domain to run through Google's Gmail for Domains service. Things had been going quite nicely, and the spam levels had reduced amazingly without me having to apply any external filtering (which makes me wonder just exactly why Google Groups is so clogged up with the output of asshole spammers, but that's another post).Recently I have started to receive replies to emails sent out from my holdenweb.com account in the Gmail mailbox I have used for years. At first I though this might be… -
PyCon is Coming
31 Oct 2009 | 8:57 amKirby Urner suggested that the PSF should advertise PyCon at airports. I though this was a great idea until I looked into the cost of hiring the billboards. Thanks to the wonders of modern web technology, however, we can all now see what it would be like to advertise PyCon on buses.My slogan is probably pretty feeble. Can you do better? -
Links for 2009-10-28 [del.icio.us]
21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic If you want more traffic (not always a given) this seems like good advice The Principles of Good Web Design One day I will know all this stuff
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Fetchez le Python
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virtualenv and zc.buildout now with Distribute included
6 Nov 2009 | 5:36 pmWe are still actively working in fixing all the remaining bugs in Distribute (our Setuptools fork). But we have reached an important milestone this week: both virtualenv and zc.buildout now comes with an option to switch to Distribute. In virtualenv: $ virtualenv --distribute ENV In zc.buildout, using its bootstrap.py file: $ python bootstrap.py --distribute Enjoy ! For those who may wonder why they should switch to Distribute over Setuptools, it’s quite simple: Distribute 0.6.x is a drop-in replacement for Setuptools Distribute is actively maintained, and has over 10 commiters… -
First Distribute mini-sprint (online)
16 Oct 2009 | 12:36 pmWhile we are working at fixing bugs in 0.6.x, we are organizing a first online coding sprint for the 0.7.x series, and for various community tasks. What are we going to do ? We need to finalize the 0.7.x renaming and splitting work We also need to define a more detailed roadmap for each splitted package (new features, deprecations, etc.) We need to build a better test environment, and see if we can set up a buildbot for our work We need to write a tutorial explaining how Distribute can be used in a project. (Python 3 support, Moving from Setuptools to Distribute, etc) Who can join ? There are… -
top-posting, mobile devices, mail threads and semantics
11 Oct 2009 | 3:55 amThere’s an interesting discussion on python-dev about how hard it is to follow a thread when people are starting to top-post, meaning they are answering by quoting the whole text and putting their answers at the top. I even got bitten by someone once because I was top-posting (don’t get me wrong, he was right about it, I was just not fully aware of the problem) First of all, if you use a mobile device, there are good chances that the mail application you are using doesn’t give you the choice : it will quote the text for you and will let you answer at the top. That’s… -
Distribute 0.6.4 released – zc.buildout support
10 Oct 2009 | 3:53 pmWe’ve juste released Distribute 0.6.4. This version is now fully compatible with zc.buildout, meaning that you can use Distribute in your buildout transparently as long as you use our special zc.buildout bootstrap file located here : http://nightly.ziade.org/bootstrap.py. We’ve also added in Jannis’ upload_docs command, that allows a project to upload its Sphinx based documentation to PyPI. As a matter of fact, Distribute is using it now and you can reach its documentation at : http://packages.python.org/distribute. If you have any feedback, or want to help around, drop us a… -
Python 2.6.3 and Distribute.
3 Oct 2009 | 7:20 amPython 2.6.3 is out, will a lot of bugs fixed. I had my share with Distutils and fixed quite a few, and 2.6.3 is looking very good so far ! Just a quick note for Setuptools users: you might bump into a problem if you provide a C extension. The setuptools code makes some assumptions on how and in which order the Distutils build_ext API are called. It also overrides some of these API to do some internal extra work. In other words, the way Setuptools patches Distutils makes it very sensitive to any internal Distutils code changes. In this particulare case you might have this bug: File…
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Ted Leung on the Air
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10 Years of Apache
30 Oct 2009 | 3:27 pmNovember is just around the corner, which means that once again it’s time for ApacheCon US. This year is a special year for the Apache Software Foundation – its 10 year anniversary. Since I got involved with Apache just a few months after the foundation was created, it is also my 10 year anniversary of being involved in open source software. This year I am going to be speaking twice. On Wednesday I’ll be speaking on the Apache Pioneers Panel, and on Thursday I’ll be giving a talk titled How 10 years of Apache has changed my life. I owe a huge professional debt to the… -
The LumaLoop
29 Oct 2009 | 10:53 pmBack in September, my friend James Duncan Davidson stopped to visit me and the family here on Bainbridge Island. Duncan has been working on a new design for a camera strap, and during that visit he showed me one of the prototypes of the LumaLoop. I spent a good portion of our time playing with the strap, and was quite taken with the design. Needless to say, I didn’t really want to give it back to him when it was time for him to go. The following week at DjangoCon, I lost the strap portion of my Upstrap quick release strap. I liked the Upstrap, but it wasn’t ideal. The Upstrap was… -
Concurrency => Parallelism
6 Oct 2009 | 11:44 pmI wanted to clarify a point from my post The Cambrian Period of Concurrency. I made the statement From where I sit, this is all about exploiting multicore hardware because I’ve seen a pile of actor and other concurrency libraries which have not taken parallel execution of the concurrent program seriously. If I am going to go to the trouble of writing a concurrent program, then I want that execution to be parallel, especially in a multicore world. Simon Marlow from the GHC team said that if programming multicore machines is the only goal we ought to be looking at parallelism first and… -
The Cambrian Period of Concurrency
5 Oct 2009 | 9:33 amBack in July, I gave an OSCON talk that was a survey of language constructs for concurrency. That talk has been making the rounds lately. Jacob Kaplan-Moss made referred to it in a major section of his excellent keynote Snakes on the Web, and Tim Bray has cited it as a reference in his Concur.next series. It seems like a good time for me to explain some of the talk content in writing and add my perspective on the current conversations. The Cambrian The Cambrian period was marked by a rapid diversification of lifeforms. I think that we are in a similar situation with concurrency today. -
DjangoCon 2009
12 Sep 2009 | 3:38 pmLast week I attended DjangoCon 2009 in Portland. Due to scheduling conflicts, I wasn’t able to attend DjangoCon last year, and I was disappointed that I missed that inaugural event. I’ve seen some Django stuff at PyCon, and I’ve written some Django code, being at a conference like DjangoCon helps me to understand the community and technology in a way that just reading the documentation doesn’t. Talk Highlights Here are some of the talks that I found notable: Shawn Rider and Nowell Strite of PBS gave a talk titled: Pluggable, Reusable Django Apps: A Use Case and…
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The Voidspace Techie Blog
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IronPython in Action Second Quarter Sales
22 Oct 2009 | 10:42 amTech publishing has been in the geek news recently, with a couple of stories making the front page of Slashdot: Beginning Ruby: What I've earned and learned The author of Beginning Ruby wanted to make the ebook free. Apress refused and the author, noting that he still owned the copyright (whilst Apress have sole right to publish) says he would have no problem with his readers distributing an 'unauthorised' free ebook version. ... [456 words] -
Northampton Geek Meet
22 Oct 2009 | 7:41 amWell, last night was the inaugural meeting of the Northampton Geek Meet. Nine geeks from around Northamptonshire (in the UK) got together in the King Billy pub to partake of the real ale and geek talk. ... [298 words] -
Testing File Access with storage.py
16 Oct 2009 | 4:00 amSo in my last blog entry I introduced storage.py and discussed how it could simply testing file access. What I didn't do is show you how. ... [185 words] -
Testable file Type and File I/O in Try Python
15 Oct 2009 | 9:33 amA few weeks ago I announced Try Python, a Python tutorial with interactive interpreter that runs in the browser using IronPython and Silverlight. Because it runs in Silverlight, which is sandboxed from the local system, the parts of the tutorial that show how to do file I/O didn't work. ... [743 words] -
New IronPython Articles: Introduction to IronPython, Python for .NET Programmers, Dark Corners and Metaprogramming
2 Oct 2009 | 6:22 amI've put up three new articles in the IronPython section of this website. The first two are aimed at developers new to IronPython, particularly .NET developers. ... [299 words]
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Will's blog
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Need help testing KDE screensaver patch
5 Nov 2009 | 7:21 amAbout a week ago, Joe contributed a patch to disable the screensaver on KDE when Miro is playing fullscreen. I don't run any systems with KDE on them. I'd love to get some help testing this patch so that we can include it in the next release of Miro. The bug for this work is http://bugzilla.pculture.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3067. The patch is at http://bugzilla.pculture.org/attachment.cgi?id=1980. Let me know whether this patch works or doesn't work for you either in the comments of this blog entry or in the comments of the bug. -
Dev call 11/04/2009 minutes
4 Nov 2009 | 8:27 amminutes Paul: Is sick. Bug fixes and small features for Miro Community. We have a lot of sites and things seem pretty stable. Working on Miro Community 0.9 now. 0.9 isn't very feature-full, but it improves on things for style, look and feel, and such. Luc: Worked a couple of days on subtitle support for Miro on Windows using VLC. Building a test application in C. Once he's got that working, he'll transcribe it to Python and ctypes. Switched gears to help Will to fix libtorrent build problems with the new binary kit system. Bumped into problems getting it to compile on OSX 10.4 (expletive… -
libtorrent out of portable
2 Nov 2009 | 7:47 pmMiro uses libtorrent-rasterbar for bittorrent downloading. We had a copy of the libtorrent source code in the portable section of our repository. Miro would compile libtorrent as a Python extension along with all the other stuff to build Miro binaries. Not any more. Luc is almost done carrying my changes over to OSX 10.4, but as of today, libtorrent-rasterbar is no longer in the portable section of our repository. What does this mean? For Windows, a clean build on our Windows build box went from taking enough time for me to make dinner, eat dinner, and then completely forget what I was… -
bought new glasses
2 Nov 2009 | 4:42 pmI had an eye doctor appointment a few weeks ago and discovered my prescription had changed. It wasn't a huge big change like last time (I was in grad school), but it was big enough to warrant new glasses. Not to mention that my current glasses were really scratched up and "well-used". I have a very limited budget these days. A couple of years ago I read Adventures in $40 eyeglasses. I decided to try buying a pair online this time around. I bought my pair from 39dollarglasses.com. I got the Polermo frames ($39) and figured I might as well get the anti-reflective coating ($24). Add on shipping… -
Dev call 10/28/2009 minutes
28 Oct 2009 | 8:08 amminutes Paul: Worked on Miro Community stuff over the week. Talked about infrastructure for the MC services. Janet: 2.5.3 looks like a pretty good release. Tested Will's torrent-related fixes--looks good. Testing Luc's subtitle work. Found some bugs with the subtitle code and older versions of OSX. Otherwise, it's looking good so far. Talked a bit about Miro Community testing. We have a few volunteers helping, but there's still work to do. Luc: Worked on subtitle stuff. Happy to see people are starting to test subtitle-enabled builds. Worked out some bugs so it now works on 10.4, 10.5, and…
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t+1: Matt Wilson's blog » Python
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Help me rewrite some repetitive scripts
18 Oct 2009 | 4:36 pmI have about a dozen functions (that are run as scripts) that have very similar sections interleaved with specialized code. I copied two of the scripts below. Here’s the first: def pitz_estimate_task(): p = optparse.OptionParser() p.add_option('--version', action='store_true', help='Print the version and exit') # This script requires these arguments. p.set_usage("%prog task [estimate]")… -
Why I’m hooked on parameters
14 Oct 2009 | 7:09 pmI have this need to make everything into a parameter. Here’s some code I wrote recently: import subprocess, tempfile def edit_with_editor(s=None): """ Returns the text typed in the editor, after running strip(). """ with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as t: if s: t.write(str(s))… -
How to download photos from phone over bluetooth with ubuntu
3 Oct 2009 | 7:11 amI have a samsung sync phone. It is about two years old now. It isn’t fancy, but it has a camera and a bluetooth device. I wrote a python script to copy photos from my phone to my laptop. Any time I take a bunch of pictures, I just run $ getpics.py and if my phone is anywhere nearby, my computer will pull all the photos off my phone. Bluetooth is a great little tool and I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on more with people like us. I’ve been able to access my phone from my laptop when I’m on the second floor and the phone is across the house and downstairs, still in… -
virtualenvwrapper postactivate and screen is a wonderful combination
16 Aug 2009 | 8:52 amI switched to virtualenvwrapper from plain old virtualenv a while back because I found out that virtualenvwrapper has a postactivate hook I can define. Now when I do $ workon pitz to start my work day, I get a customized work environment exactly the way I want it. In addition to activating a virtualenv named pitz, the postactivate script changes me into the top of my pitz checkout directory and then it starts up or reattaches a screen session customized just for pitz. Setting this up was trivially easy. Here’s what my postactivate script looks like: $ cat… -
Python niceties
2 Aug 2009 | 6:08 pmnicety (plural niceties) A small detail that is nice or polite to have but isn’t necessary. Make a comma-separated string >>> x = ['a', 'b', 'c'] >>> ', '.join(x) 'a, b, c' Isn’t that prettier than some big loop? If you want to join a list of elements that aren’t strings, you’ll have to add a step:>>> x = [1, 2, 3] >>> ', '.join(map(str, x)) '1, 2, 3' I’m using map to convert every element to a string first. Choose a random element from a sequence…
