Daily Python-URL

Daily news from the Python universe, presented by your friends at

2005-04-01

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.]

2005-03-31

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.]

2005-03-29

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.]

2005-03-28

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.]

2005-03-25

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.]

2005-03-24

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.]

2005-03-23

Choose Python spotting at Pycon? [Since work duties and recent surgery have kept Tim Lesher from PyCon, he'd be grateful for a digital snapshot of anyone in the crowd wearing a "Choose Python" or "PySpotting" shirt.]

Cheetah template overriding [Base-Art reckons one of Cheetah's strengths is the way it applies the object-oriented model to documents. He shows how to overload parts of a template.]

Lambda revisited [Simon Brunning had said he'd be happy to see the back of lambda, but then saw a "beautiful" use for them when Fredrik Lundh posted ElementPlist. "He only does it to make me look stupid, you know."]

Thout Bytes [Swaroop C H is excited that OSoft, Inc. has released his book 'A Byte of Python' in the XHTML-based Thout format, because of the "very cool" functionality provided by the Thout reader software. The official Python documentation and 'Dive Into Python' are also available in Thout format at the OSoft website.]

PyCon sprints, day 3 [Richard Jones had another (mostly) good day of sprinting.]

Pycon ideas using simple generic functions instead [While skimming the PyCon 2005 presentations, Phillip Eby was interested to see a few ideas that he thought could also be implemented using simple generic functions. "The cool thing about finding this out now," he says, "is that I can now use those other systems as a basis for comparison in my presentation, which may lead to more interesting discussions."]

The ElementPlist module [Fredrik Lundh shows how to use ElementTree to load plist files, the XML format used by iTunes to store playlists.]

The Eggs are coming [Phillip Eby and Bob Ippolito hacked out a lot of the Python Eggs implementation on Monday. As Phillip explains, "An egg is to a Python as a jar is to Java."]

Del.icio.us tickering, step one [Jim Hughes has been tinkering with del.icio.us again. Using a lightly modified version of pydelicious, he can now create a daily post of his previous day's del.icio.us items.]

New Jython wiki [java.net mentions the Jython project's new wiki. John Reynolds has written in: "Efforts are underway to close the gap between CPython and Jython, and to port Jython to JDK 5. The new Jython Wiki is documenting the progress."]

2005-03-22

PyCon sprints, day 2 [Ted Leung reports what his second day at the PyCon sprints brought.]

"Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition" published [O'Reilly has published "Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition", edited by Alex Martelli, Anna Ravenscroft and David Ascher. Updated for Python 2.4, the book now includes over 200 recipes that range from working with list comprehensions to monitoring a network.]

Generator methods [Peter Parente has written a recipe that enables the use of the yield statement within a method by decorating that method with a wrapper for a generator object.]

Pascal's triangle [This Python Cookbook recipe prints a few lines of Pascal's triangle.]

A challenge to Zopistas that has not been answered [kedai discusses possible Zope solutions to Michelle Levesque's PyWebOff challenge.]

PyCon photo feed [Andrew Kuchling reports that there is now a Flickr feed for PyCon photos. The tag to use is "pycon2005".]

PyCon sprints, day 2 [Andrew Kuchling didn't do much programming during the second day at the PyCon sprints. Instead he poked around the web for possible venues for PyCon 2006 and worked on updating the "What's new in Python 2.5" document to match what's in CVS.]

Dynamic languages on the CLR [Patrick Logan discusses a post by Microsoft's Jason Zander that mentions dynamic languages on the CLR. Patrick isn't sure we should get up our hopes just yet.]

PyCon sprints, day 2 [Richard Jones reports on his second day at the PyCon sprints. One of the highlights was getting a package archive on www.python.org.]

A gasbag-free edition of Planet Python? [Fredrik Lundh wonders how hard it would be to generate a "gasbag-free" edition of Planet Python.]

2005-03-21

Stéfane Fermigier: Paris Zope3/ECM/Five sprint: the wrap-up ["Here is the wrap up for the sprint that just happened in Nuxeo's premises in Paris this week. As you can see, a lot has been achieved, though what has been done is slightly different from what was envisioned in the first place."]

Ted Leung: PyCon sprints, day 1 [Ted Leung reckons that the Zope and PyPy sprints seem to be the largest at this year's PyCon.]

New PyCon session: Sprint reports [Andrew Kuchling reports that a PyCon talk has been cancelled due to illness. Steve Holden will instead chair a "Sprint Reports and Feedback" session on Wednesday at noon.]

Richard Jones: PyCon sprints, day 1 [Richard Jones reports on the first day of the distutils and PyPI sprints at PyCon.]

Andrew Kuchling: PyCon sprints, day 1 [Andrew Kuchling reports on the first day of the PyPI sprint at PyCon.]

WATSUP: Automated Windows application functional testing [Kevin Dangoor reckons it's been a good couple of weeks for automated functional testing tools. First there was Selenium for web applications, and now there's Windows Application Test System Using Python (WATSUP) for Windows applications. Kevin thinks these tools could help with the challenging task of performing automated tests on GUI applications.]

Richard Jones: PyCon sprinting begins [Richard Jones reports on the distutils sprint and other things that he got up to on arriving at PyCon.]

Speeding up MoinMoin [Andrew Kuchling explains the issues that caused the MoinMoin wiki on python.org to overload the machine recently.]

Sun's 'Coyote' project is no lone wolf [internetnews.com talks to Sun's Tim Bray about the Coyote project's goal of bringing dynamic languages to NetBeans.]

PyMusique — The fair interface to the iTunes Music Store ["Preview songs, signup for an account, buy songs, redownload songs that were bought with PyMusique"]

TriZPUG March 2005 meeting: Python "new style" classes [The Triangle Zope/Python User Group (TriZPUG) will hold its March 2005 meeting on Wednesday, March 23, at 7:00 p.m. in Chapel Hill, NC. David Handy will introduce Python "new style" classes, including changes in properties, super(), descriptors, and static and class methods.]

Neil Kandalgaonkar: 50 people see... [I wrote a program to blend Flickr images which share the same tags. No human is involved in choosing, positioning, or blending the images.]

Little Python scripts [Any time James Tauber has written a Python script that he thought others might find interesting (such as "Statistically improbable words in Python"), he's posted it to his blog. Now he's compiled a list of them to make them easier to find.]

Fixing the Zope release process [Martijn Faassen identifies problems with the Zope release strategy and proposes some solutions.]

2005-03-18

Cesare Marilungo: devachan ["... an open-source (LGPL license) software for easy 3d programming (using python and OpenGL). I'm interested in real-time computer-generated visual art and I started developing 'devachan' for my works. With support and cooperation from interested people it could become a tool useful for every kind of visualization need."]

Writing and reading XML with XIST [In Uche Ogbuji's latest Python and XML column he introduces XIST, which has been called "object-oriented XSLT for Python" - a framework for manipulating XML Pythonically.]

goopy.functional [As part of its Open Source initiative, Google has released goopy.functional, a functional-programming library for Python.]

Python pet peeve [Golden Spud's Python pet peeve of the day: Python coders who write code or docstrings that go beyond 80 columns per line!]

Buffered iterator for big arrays [Roberto Antonio Ferreira De Almeida has written a class that creates a buffered iterator for reading big arrays in small contiguous blocks. It can be used with any object that supports multidimensional slices and a 'copy' method.]

httpflow - a tcpflow parser to help debug HTTP [Bill Bumgarner writes about httpflow, a little Python script written by Ben Holt and him a really long time ago that parses the output of tcpflow and reconstructs HTTP conversations from the raw data.]

Garbage collection: Python vs C++ [Titus Brown: "Chui Tey gives a nice example of how something that works in C++ wouldn't work in Python."]

Python at the April XPDX code sprint [Patrick Logan reports that the XPDX (Extreme Programming in Portland, Oregon) code sprint on April 9-10 will be be using Python in several flavors: CPython, Jython, maybe IronPython, and Python.Net.]

2005-03-17

Peter Bengtsson: IssueTrackerProduct 0.6.4 ["The 0.6.4 release adds several new features such as the user-friendly system error pages, auto-login for Issue Users, Compact List Issues, ZCTextIndex support amongst others. In total there are more new features than bug fixes. But don't let that scare you."]

Guido van Rossum: Python 2.4 wins the "Jolt productivity award" ["Python 2.4 won the "Jolt productivity award" last night. That's the runner-up award; in our category, languages and development tools, the Jolt (the category winner) went to Eclipse 3.0; the other runners-up were IntelliJ and RealBasic (no comment :-)."]

Threaded test suite running and other goodies [Extending unittest to provide extra features wasn't easy, so Ori Peleg devised a scheme that allows easy extensions for running existing test suites.]

@deprecated [Michael Chermside provides a Python decorator that has the same purpose as Java's '@deprecated' Javadoc flag.]

Pseudo-random string-to-float conversion [Ori Peleg shows how to convert strings to floats in the range [0, 1), using a hash function.]

Tabbed windows in PyGTK [Glyph Lefkowitz shows how to do tabbed windows in PyGTK.]

"Python has a change of heart"

2005-03-16

Project Coyote [Tim Bray writes about Project Coyote's goal of bringing dynamic-lan