Daily Python-URL 2005-3-24 2005-4-13Daily news from the Python universe, presented by your friends at PythonWare.
Guido van Rossum interview [Tarek Ziadé recently interviewed Guido van Rossum, putting to him some questions from members of the Association Francophone Python.]
Combining GUIs and asynchronous I/O with threads and pygtk [Pierrre Amadio shows how to access sockets, serial ports, or other asynchronous but blocking I/O sources while running a GUI with pygtk.]
Spyce + Tiles = ? [Jonathan Ellis has added Tiles-like functionality to the Spyce trunk.]
Python for Series 60 app: QuoteGrab [Matt Croydon describes his Python application for Series 60 phones that fetches graphs of stock prices from Yahoo Finance.]
Computing derivatives using Python [André Roberge shows how to compute derivatives using Python.]
The Snake is hibernating [Writing the "Feeding the Snake" blog was fun, but Rick Muller found that it was taking him away from other fun things that he enjoys.]
Telnet and IMAP4 incompatible! [Recently the creator of the IMAP4 protocol stated that you cannot telnet to a modern IMAP or POP3 server, but J P Calderone has a Python utility that suggests that telnet and IMAP4 may not be as incompatible after all.]
Reacquainted with GIMP and meeting Pyrex [Kevin Turner has decided to port some of his old GIMP plug-ins to Python using Pyrex.]
Generating Python functions from a template [J P Calderone often uses metaclasses to remove boilerplate from class definitions. But then he found that a traceback would use the name of the code object rather than the function object. He presents a solution for getting a code object with the name you want.]
Quoting PL/Python [One of the hassles of PL/Python stored procedures for PostgreSQL is having to include the Python code in a quoted string. Tim Parkin shares a script that takes care of this.]
The concurrency model debate [Ian Bicking discusses how concurrency is handled in the Python world.]
Free Plone workshops in Zürich [In order to encourage interest in the use of Zope and Plone, redCOR AG is holding monthly free Plone workshops in Zürich and Bern.]
Five-minute multimethods in Python (using 'dispatch') [While the 'dispatch' module from PyProtocols more or less implements multimethods out of the box, Bob Ippolito thought it would probably be useful to demonstrate that Guido's "Five-minute multimethods in Python" can be cloned using it.]
More on multimethods [Ian Bicking follows up Guido van Rossum's article on multimethods with an exploration of generic functions.]
London Python meetup on Wednesday [Simon Brunning reminds us that the London Python meetup takes place this Wednesday evening.]
Me and PyBlosxom [Will Guaraldi no longer has the time and energy to work on PyBlosxom and so has stepped down as its maintainer. However he'll stay on as an occasional developer.]
Building an SMTP client from scratch [J P Calderone has written the bulk of a tutorial on building an SMTP client from scratch using Twisted. He'd like to hear whether people find it clear and useful.]
Rapid Python for Series 60 development [Matt Croydon describes his setup for developing Python applications for Series 60 phones.]
lxml released at last [Martijn Faassen finally found the time to release lxml, his Pythonic wrapping for libxml2 and libxslt.]
Using Selenium to test a Plone site (part 2) [In his second article on using Selenium to test a Plone site, Grig Gheorghiu talks about some Plone-specific features available in Selenium, such as the setup, tearDown and postResults methods.]
All combinations of N elements [Gustavo Niemeyer shows how to compute all combinations of N elements over K positions.]
Jython users wiki page created [Sean McGrath invites Jython users to share how they are using Jython.]
Simplest (overlooked) things [Patrick Logan highlights the ease of integrating dynamic languages into the Cocoa (née Next Step) framework and contrasts this to the struggles of dynamic languages in the C++, C#, and Java environments.]
Python, MD5, duplicate files finder [Guyon Moree sometimes forgets that he has downloaded a file and ends up downloading it again, so he wrote a Python script to find such duplicates.]
Python/C API, part I [Jerome Laheurte introduces us to the topic of writing Python extensions in C.]
A simple ZODB viewer in wxPython [Chris Cioffi has written a script that allows you to examine a ZODB database.]
More accurate language statistics from Roeland Rengelink [Jarno Virtanen revisits the subject of Python's growth with some figures from Roeland Rengelink.]
Launching a subprocess without a console window [On the MS Windows platform, if you launch a subprocess from within a non-console process a console window appears. Richard Philips's recipe shows how to avoid this using Python 2.4's 'subprocess' module.]
Right method names suggestion [bearophile's recipe customizes the AttributeError message to suggest similar method names whenever an unknown class method is looked up.]
When to not just use socket.close() [John Nielsen has contributed a recipe that implements a "broken" client/server to show how socket.shutdown can be more useful than a simple socket.close operation.]
Python and IRC [In an article for DevShed, Peyton McCullough explains how to make Python and IRC work together.]
socket.recv - three ways to turn it into recvinto [J P Calderone discusses how to make Python's sockets more efficient.]
What Zope can learn from Ruby on Rails [After reading Ian Bicking's "insightful" analysis of what makes Ruby on Rails work, Martijn Faassen considers what Zope can learn.]
Scripting languages lag in Web Services support [A recent Burton Group report concluded that Python, Perl and PHP are well suited for web development, system administration and limited integration; but Nitin Bharti contends that they are far behind Java, C++ and C# in support for Web Services.]
What really makes Rails work [Ian Bicking considers what the Python community can learn from the success of Ruby on Rails. And he doesn't think the answer is trying to create Rails for Python.]
Why web programming matters most [Ian Bicking proposes that resolving Python's problems with web programming is the most important thing the community can do to market Python.]
A general purpose file iterator class [Anand Pillai contributes a class that gives several iterator functions to read a text file by characters, words, lines, paragraphs or blocks. It also acts as a proxy for the wrapped file object.]
Starting to cook [Fuzzyman wasn't overly impressed after a quick flick through the Python Cookbook, but now that he's getting into it, he's finding it extremely useful.]
New Lisp [Patrick Logan regards Ruby and Python as Lisp-like, even if neither can be considered the new Lisp.]
Python vs Illinois [Bill Mill was prompted to enlist Python in investigating "Illinois Numbers" (based on the Erdös Number concept) after someone managed to show that the NCAA basketball team with the lowest Ratings Percentage Index of the season was "better" than Illinois, one of the finalists.]
Subversion extension lessons [Richard Jones has some tips for working with Subversion's Python API.]
PyObjC and unicode [Bob Ippolito observes that there's a constant battle in PyObjC about what to do about regular 'str' instances, since Foundation doesn't have a data type that's unencoded bytes and text at the same time. This week he committed a change that he hopes will address this.]
GoogleCacheServer [Mike Foord contributes a simple implementation of a proxy server that fetches web pages from the Google cache.]
Synchronization in Python [Mark Williamson discusses synchronization in Python, one of the few places where he considers Java wins over Python.]
Useful Python for Series 60 app: Dict2Go [Matt Croydon wanted to put together a simple Python application for Series 60 phones that would actually be useful. He found a starting point in John Goerzen's client for the Dictionary Server Protocol.]
Relational algebra & Metakit [Brian Kelley's article for Dr Dobb's Journal describes Metakit, an embedded database that encapsulates relational algebra and hierarchical data structures.]
Extending Python [Dr Dobb's Journal has an article by Greg Smith that looks at one of Python's greatest strengths, being able to extend it with modules written in C or C++.]
A word about GUIs [fraca7 has a "rant" about some issues with wxWidgets/wxPython, in particular the claim of being cross-platform.]
Teen builds Linux workaround for iTunes [Arik Hesseldahl writes for Forbes about PyMusique, the Python-based client for Apple's iTunes Music Store. He notes the developers' insistence that the goal is not the oft-reported one of defeating DRM but instead making available a client for alternative OSs such as Linux, BeOS and cell phones.]
Twisted.AU 2005.1 [Christopher Armstrong reports on the Twisted sprint that took place in Tasmania.]
Python 2.4 decorators [Phillip Eby's article for Dr Dobb's Journal explains how decorators are a powerful feature of Python 2.4 that can help you reduce code duplication and consolidate knowledge.]
Resource management in Python [Python does a good job of resource management, but there are subtleties that affect portability, robustness and performance. Oliver Schoenborn's article for Dr Dobb's Journal explains.]
Firedrop 2005.8 available [Hans Nowak describes the plugin system that is new in version 2005.8 of Firedrop, his client-based blogging tool.]
Wax 0.2.57 available [Hans Nowak describes what's new in version 0.2.57 of Wax, his user-friendly layer on top of wxPython.]
twill [Titus Brown describes twill, his reimplementation of PBP for automating tests of Web sites.]
PyPI renaming options [Richard Jones has drawn up a shortlist of suggestions he's received for PyPI's new name.]
Programmers want Python, does business? [Brian Ray discusses Python's acceptance in business.]
socket.recv - three ways to turn it into recvall [John Nielsen presents three basic approaches to the problem of knowing when you are done receiving data with socket.recv.]
Zope 3 IDE considerations [Shane Hathaway is thinking of working on a Zope 3 IDE and, rather than start from scratch, he wants to plug into an existing IDE. But which one?]
GRUF 3 notes with LDAPUserFolder [Ingeniweb have written notes on how to make Plone, GRUF and LDAPUserFolder work together.]
Post PyCon wrap-up [Glyph Lefkowitz looks back on his time at PyCon.]
Late-binding properties: allowing subclasses to override getters and setters [Steven Bethard's recipe provides a LateBindingProperty callable that allows the getter and setter methods associated with the property to be overridden in subclasses.]
Playing with a Panda [Fuzzyman was left a bit disappointed when he first tried Panda3D, the Python-scriptable rendering engine originally developed by Disney. But when he recently revisited it after several months, he was very impressed at how it's been cleaned up and documented in the duration.]
Gustavo Niemeyer: Permutations and derangements ["While working on a toy software for computing association rules out of a given database, I ended up working on an interesting algorithm for computing permutation on lists. /.../ An interesting aspect of this algorithm is that it may be easily adapted to compute derangements, which are a special set of permutations which do not allow any member of the given list to be in its initial position."]
The PC Weenies: "Still struggling with Python?"
Playing with Firedrop [Fuzzyman has been playing with Firedrop, a client-side weblog-management system.]
you_smell.py [Eight-year-old Freja Brunning has been having fun with Python ... helped by her dad Simon.]
Python unicode browser [J P Calderone presents a code snippet that pages through Unicode characters.]
Python's growth at SourceForge and Freshmeat [Jarno Virtanen examines Python's growth over the last three years using statistics from SourceForge and Freshmeat.]
Minor Python for Series 60 2.0 update [Matt Croydon points to a new Python for Series 60 release for 2.0 SDK phones. "While this is a minor update, it's forward progress," he says.]
Yet another timeit function [Thomas Heller's recipe provides a "handy function to use the timeit module from a script, creating a nice overview of the runtimes of one or more code snippets".]
Calculating the distance between two points on the earth [Kevin Ryan's recipe calculates the distance between any two points on the earth given their longitude and latitude points. ]
Substitute Decimals for floats in expression strings [Raymond Hettinger's recipe allows expressions to be evaluated using Decimals instead of floats.]
Basic threading in Python [Threads can be used to make an application perform several tasks at once, but many developers find thread programming tricky. Peyton McCullough's article for Dev Shed covers how to spawn and kill threads in Python.]
Basic exception-handling idiom using decorators [Anand Pillai presents a basic exception-handling idiom using decorators. The exception-handling decorator can be reused for different functions and be customized with arguments.]
Geometric range [Steven Bethard's recipe uses a generator to produce a geometric sequence.]
Guido van Rossum: Stricter Whitespace Enforcement ["The Python Style Guide (PEP 8) lists a number of guidelines for the use of whitespace. Since there are still a lot of folks ignoring these rules, here's a proposal for enforcing them."]
Joel on SpamBayes [Joel Spolsky reckons SpamBayes is "probably the best implementation of what is probably the best spam filtering algorithm out there".]
Evidence that Python is advancing into the enterprise [For Cameron Laird the bottom line from the PyCON 2005 conference is that Python is an open-source technology whose use in enterprise IT operations will only grow for the foreseeable future. His article for NewsForge explains why.]
Accurate floating point summation [Raymond Hettinger has contributed a recipe that completely eliminates rounding errors during summation by keeping a list of partial sums at various precisions.]
Embed Python scripting in C applications [IBM developerWorks has a tutorial on how to embed Python in C applications.]
The battle of the less clueless [Ryan Tomayko has held forth on how quality dynamic-language support on the VM is coming down to a battle of who will get lucky and be the less clueless between Microsoft and Sun. But now the more he thinks about it, the less he cares.]
Twisted 2.0 released [Twisted 2.0 has been released. Twisted is an event-based framework for Internet applications.]
Page Template style guide [zopewiki.org has a style guide that suggests best practices for writing Zope Page Templates.]
Mobile screen scraping with BeautifulSoup and Python for Series 60 [Matt Croydon was pleasantly surprised when he decided to try running BeautifulSoup, a Python library for scraping HTML, on his Nokia phone.]
Padding variable-length sequences [George Sakkis provides a recipe that gets round the fact that Python tuple unpacking works only for fixed-length sequences.]
Using decorators to load data structures [Scott David Daniels provides a recipe that shows how decorators can be used to load data structures with a function and so reduce the "lots of declarations; large table definition; startup" structure of some larger programs. "The insight," he explains, "is remembering that a decorator can return the original function unchanged."]
Cool PyCon acquaintances [J P Calderone tells us about some of the interesting people he met at PyCon.]
Five-minute multimethods in Python [Guido van Rossum used to believe that multimethods were so advanced he would never need them. He might still believe that, but he's provided a quick and dirty implementation so we can see for ourselves.]
PyPI needs a new name? [Richard Jones and others think that PyPI needs a better name.]
Python 2.4.1 released [Python 2.4.1 has been released. Python 2.4.1 is a bugfix release of Python 2.4 - Python 2.4 is now in bugfix-only mode, no new features are being added. Several dozen bugs were squashed since Python 2.4, including the SimpleXMLRPCServer security fix.]
My first application server [For those who want to start dynamic web programming, but don't know what to choose among the many Python web frameworks, Pierre Quentel offers a starting point with ScriptServer, a minimalist application server.]
PyCon blog [Chris DiBona, Greg Stein, Jeremy Hylton, Matthew Blecker and Will Robinson are collectively writing the PyCon blog.]
PyCon SubEthaEdit notes [Using SubEthaEdit, Ted Leung and others have collaboratively created notes of the PyCon sessions.]
P-languages better for enterprise [innternetnews.com has details of a report from the Burton Group that recommends organisations to consider the "P-languages" - Perl, PHP and Python - in future architectural decisions.]
Design patterns, part III - Singleton [fraca7 regards the Singleton pattern as redundant in Python, but, for the sake of completeness, he describes several ways to implement it in Python.]
Zope Magazine: Interview with Jim Fulton
Zef Hemel: Python Beauty ["I've been playing with Python some more in the past few days (more on that in the close future). The more I use it, the more I love it. The syntax is rich but not absurdly rich like Perl or Ruby. /.../ I'll give two examples of the power of Python: adding a new feature to the language (method synchronization) and some examples of functional-like programming."]
Design patterns, part II - State [fraca7 introduces us to State, one of the design patterns he uses most. It also happens to be the pattern that he feels has the most beautiful and clear implementation in Python.]
Design patterns, part I - Chain of Responsibility [fraca7 launches his blog with a series on Python implementations of design patterns, starting with Chain of Responsibility.]
Using the Win32 IPHelper API [Zeb Bowden provides an example of using the Win32 IPHelper API: a function that returns a list of ports that the current machine is listening on.]
PyCon: SQLObject [Matt Croydon noted that several groups enthused about SQLObject during the sprint reports session.]
PyCon: Matplotlib [Matt Croydon caught "a great session" on matplotlib, a Python library that allows you to plot 2D graphcs in a simple Matlab-like way.]
PyCon: Scripting the Mac with Python [Matt Croydon went to a PyCon session on using Python to interface with Applescript; he shares with us an example of what Appscript can do.]
Tim Churches: NetEpi — Free, open source, network-enabled tools for epidemiology and public health practice ["NetEpi, which is short for 'Network-enabled Epidemiology', is a collaborative project to create a suite of free, open source software tools for epidemiology and public health practice. Anyone with an interest in population health epidemiology or public health informatics is encouraged to examine the prototype tools and to consider contributing to their further development."]
Andy Gross: py2dot ["... generates Graphviz '.dot' files from Python source code. The output images can be used to teach parsing concepts, or as cubicle art."]
Martin Doudoroff, Matt Feifarek: Form Kit: new alpha release (0.9a2) available ["FormKit is a library for the creation, parsing, and validation of HTML forms with Webware WebKit."]
Sébastien Sauvage: webGobbler ["... creates pictures by assembling random images from the web. Think of it as attempt to capture the chaos of the human activity, which the internet is a partial and subjective snapshot of."]
PyCon sprint reports & feedback [Leaders from the Chandler, Zope/ZODB, Schooltool, Distutils, Core, and PyPy sprints gave reports on what got done during the four days of sprinting at PyCon. Andrew Kuchling shares the answers to some questions he asked the audience.]
Ruby on Rails is winning the marketing war [Kevin Dangoor has integrated a few different open-source Python projects that give him power at least equivalent to that of Ruby on Rails. But he thinks that Rails is winning the marketing war, particularly among Java people.]
PyCon Sprints, day 4 [Ted Leung reports that the two Chandler sprint groups have finished their parcels to the level where they can show them as part of their presentation on Thursday.]
PyCon sprints, day 3 [Day 3 at the PyCon sprints was the first day of the Chandler sprint. Ted Leung reckons that things are going pretty well so far.]
Batch-running Word macros from the DOS command line [Andrew Savikas (author of Word Hacks) shows an easy way to batch-run Word macros from the DOS command line, with examples in Python, Ruby and Perl.]
The state of the scripting universe [The use of scripting/dynamic languages is growing. DevSource asked leaders in the development communities for Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl to help them paint a picture of the scripting universe.]
PyCon keynote: IronPython [Matt Croydon reports in detail on Jim Hugunin's PyCon keynote on IronPython.]
PyCon keynote: Jim Hugunin [Andrew Kuchling reports on Jim Hugunin's PyCon keynote. It covered much of the same territory as his IronPython talk last year: an introduction to the CLR and .NET, IronPython's architecture, and demos of accessing C# classes from Python. Apologising for his disappearance for the past year, Jim announced the release of IronPython 0.7 and said that releases should be happening every two weeks until 1.0 is reached.]
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