The Mouse Vs. The Python

As PyCon approaches, the blogger community was invited to interview the speakers that are coming to the event. I chose Wesley Chun, writer of Core Python Programming and co-author of Python Web Development with Django. In this interview, I ask Wesley about his talk, Running Django Apps on Google App Engine and about PyCon in general. Let’s see what he has to say: (more…)

This weekly edition of Python News has quite the variety of topics. You can learn about how to create passwords, the new Enthought Python Distribution and about something called pylibftdi. Plus, I’ve added a section just for PyCon related stuff since they seem to be releasing a lot of info this month. For example, there’s an interview with Armin Ronacher (author of Flask) in that section.

• Peter Fein talks about Better Passwords in Under 200 Characters
• Sphinx and htmlhelp
• Enthought Python Distribution version 7.0 released this week.
• pylibftdi 0.7 – multiple device support
• Python’s dictionary implementation
• A simple self-upgrade build pattern
• `cute_profile`: Profile your Python code on the fly

PyCon News

• Press release: Record-Breaking Submissions to PyCon 2011
• PyCon 2011: Interview with Armin Ronacher – “Opening the Flask”

So far no one has ever given me any leads for my next article, so that either means I’m doing something right or no one’s reading these posts. Well, as always, I will take a look at any links that my kind readers give me.

The other day on the wxPython IRC channel on freenode, one of the members there asked if there was a way to make the wx.FileDialog display more than one file type at a time. In the back of mind, I thought I had seen a Microsoft product that could do it, but I’d never seen any wxPython examples. In this short tutorial, you will learn how to do this handy trick! (more…)

PyCon USA 2011 is less than a month away! This year, they are promoting the use of Convore as a PyCon aggregator of sorts. I guess that means that the cool DjangoDose from last year is dead now. Anyway, Convore is similar to Twitter, but it has the concepts of Topics, so it’s a little more organized. I suppose I would describe it as a mix of Twitter and IRC. They currently have three topics: whether or not to use the service, volunteering for PyCon and a Scotch BoF.

Jesse Noller has announced “Startup Stories“. Startups are the theme of this PyCon and as I understand it, they will be the focus of the plenaries. So in addition to the “Fireside Chat” with Guido and the Hilary Mason talk, we will get to hear about Dropbox, Disqus and Threadless. I use two out of three of those, so I’m excited.

There’s still time to sign up and come to PyCon. Don’t wait until it’s too late!

I didn’t really have much time last year to check out the first PyCon Poster session, but this year I’ll have the time to really check it out. The last I heard, there will be 35 posters at this year’s session and they have some pretty amazing topics. Here’s a sampling:

• Using a Kinect to improve accessibility
• A Technical Anatomy of SPM.Python, a Scalable, Parallel Version of Python
• Python for Hydro-Geo-Chemical Modeling
• Capture, Store, Analyze, and Compare Supercomputer Performance Metrics with Python and MySQL
• Collaborative Book Making

I’m not even sure what some of that stuff means, but I’d like to find out. What about you? Don’t you want to check this out too? I’m pretty sure this session won’t be recorded, so you’ll need to be there to check it out. If the above didn’t get you excited, then try reading the full list.

It’s time for your weekly dose of Python news. What happened in the last week? Or what did I find that I thought was newsy? Lots of stuff, it turns out. This week, you can learn about the controversy of PyPI, Tablib, a “fireside” chat with Python’s founder that’s coming up next month at PyCon USA and more.

• In Defense of PyPI
• Tablib update
• Enthought’s reStructuredText editor
• A fun, short article on Sphinx documentation
• PyCon 2011: Announcing “A Fireside Chat with Guido van Rossum”
• FLOSS Weekly Interviews the Pylons Project
• Add City Coverage to MapPoint using the GeoNames Database
• Help Mike Pirnat by giving him topics for his PyCon talk
• Jenkins (FKA: Hudson) is now available

I hope you find a few of those links useful or interesting. Feel free to give me a few for next week in the comments!

Last week, there was an interesting thread on the PyWin32 mailing list about how to read Microsoft Access databases with Python without having Access actually installed. Vernon Cole had the solution, but I noticed that Google doesn’t seem to index the PyWin32 list very well, so I decided to write about it here. (more…)