The Daily Python-URL
Daily news from the Python universe, presented by your friends at PythonWare.
2008-10-30
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."] #
2008-09-25
Ask a Google engineer:
How would you sort 1 million 32-bit integers in 2MB of RAM using Python?
[see also]
[see also] #
2008-09-22
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 so, I set out to write code that will essentially behave like the regular expression above, but will work for letters and numbers in all the languages of the world."] #
2008-09-21
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."] #
2008-09-20
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 quality can be enforced. The fact that Google stands by Python is an
added motivation for undergraduate majors."] #
2008-09-19
Mark Seaborn:
'Introducing CapPython
["/.../ Python has a convention for private attributes of objects which is widely used. Attributes that start with an underscore are private. /.../
CapPython proposes that we enforce this convention by defining a subset of Python to enforce it. The hope is that this subset could be an object-capability language. Hopefully we can do this in such a way that you can get encapsulation by default and still have fairly idiomatic Python code."] #
2008-09-18
Jesse Noller:
The cost of (not) testing software
["As a long-time automation-engineer/test-focused guy I've pondered the great existential question of "how much testing" is enough for awhile. More recently, I've started focusing on the cost of not testing a product."] #
2008-09-16
Kevin Teague
I want a pony: Django Cheeseshop
["As primarily a Zope/Plone/Grok developer, I thought I'd share some of my experiences in working with the python packaging, dependencies and builds aspects. From my perspective, packaging and deploying Python applications are one of the areas of Python that could use the most improvement - there is a tonne of good and interesting work out there already, but the approachability of this ecosystem can be fairly challenging."] #
Florent Aide:
TurboGears 1.0.7 released
["I am pleased to announce the release of TurboGears 1.0.7, a new stable
release that fixes even more bugs. If you tried 1.0.6 it is
recommended you upgrade to 1.0.7 because is fixes an issue which was
introduced in 1.0.6 and resulted in errors when using the identity
framework to redirect on error pages. 1.0.x users are encouraged
to upgrade their applications to this release."] #
2008-09-15
2008-09-12
Het Nederlandsche Muntenhuis/Stani Michiels:
De enige officiële herdenkingsmunt van 2008
[background] #
2008-09-11
Robin Becker:
ReportLab 2.2 has been released! #
2008-09-07
Chris Siebenmann:
Why your main program should be importable
["When I first started coding in Python, I didn't know what I was doing. So I structured my Python programs the way I would write Bourne shell scripts or Perl programs, writing functions as necessary and useful but otherwise putting all of the logic and code in the program's file outside of functions (in what I now call 'module scope'). This is a perfectly rational structure for Python programs, and even works; my programs ran fine and were perfectly functional. But it was also a bad mistake, as I slowly discovered later; what you really want to do is put all of your code in functions (and then start one with magic)."] #
2008-09-04
Jacob Kaplan-Moss:
Django 1.0 released!
["No, you're not hallucinating, it's really here.
Around three years ago, Adrian, Simon, Wilson and I released some code to the world. Our plan was to hack quietly on it for a bit, release a solid 1.0 release, and then really get the ball rolling.
Well.
What happened, of course, was that an amazing community sprung up literally overnight — our IRC channel had over a hundred people in it the day after release, and it's never been that 'empty' since. /.../ Django 1.0 represents a the largest milestone in Django's development to date: a web framework that a group of perfectionists can truly be proud of. Without this amazing community, though, it would have never happened."] #
2008-09-02
Frank Wierzbicki:
Jython's Trunk Now Targets 2.5
["This post is mainly of interest to those that like to follow the development path of Jython. I just merged our development branch called 'asm' to trunk. This marks a nice milestone on the path to getting 2.5 out. So if you are interested in grabbing bleeding edge Jython out of the svn repository, the asm branch is now closed, so use trunk instead."] #
2008-09-01
Andrew Kuchling:
"What's New in Python 2.6" is finished
["This weekend, I made a last review and editing pass over the 'What's New in Python 2.6', and have declared it finished. (Well, finished barring any corrections that get e-mailed to me.)"] #
2008-08-30
Lynn Greiner :
PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Tcl Today: The State of the Scripting Universe
["...like any other tool, dynamic languages are not necessarily interchangeable. Each has its place in a programmer's toolkit. We asked a group of luminaries in the scripting world for their perspectives on the current state of the scripting universe, and how it has changed since we last looked at the scripting language scene in 2005."] #
2008-08-25
Brian M. Clapper:
Making XML-RPC calls from a Google App Engine application
["Google App Engine (GAE) is a useful platform on which to develop Python-based web applications. But a GAE application runs in a sandbox that prevents it from opening a socket, which makes the standard Python xmlrpclib module inoperable. Fortunately, there's a simple solution to this problem."] #
2008-08-16
Steve Weis et al:
Keyczar
["Keyczar is an open source cryptographic toolkit designed to make it easier and safer for developers to use cryptography in their applications. Keyczar supports authentication and encryption with both symmetric and asymmetric keys. /.../ Cryptography is easy to get wrong. Developers can choose improper cipher modes, use obsolete algorithms, compose primitives in an unsafe manner, or fail to anticipate the need for key rotation. Keyczar abstracts some of these details by choosing safe defaults, automatically tagging outputs with key version information, and providing a simple programming interface."] #
2008-08-15
Naomi Hamilton:
The A-Z of Programming Languages: Python
["Our series on the most popular programming languages continues as we chat to Van Rossum, the man behind Python."] #
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