The Mouse Vs. The Python

I was recently asked to convert a few hundred images into PDF pages. A friend of mine draws comics and my brother wanted to be able to read them on a tablet. Alas, if you had a bunch of files named something like this:


'Jia_01.Jpg', 'Jia_02.Jpg', 'Jia_09.Jpg', 'Jia_10.Jpg', 'Jia_11.Jpg', 'Jia_101.Jpg'


the Android tablet would reorder them into something like this:


'Jia_01.Jpg', 'Jia_02.Jpg', 'Jia_09.Jpg', 'Jia_10.Jpg', 'Jia_101.Jpg', 'Jia_11.Jpg'


And it got pretty confusing the more files you had that were out of order. Sadly, even Python sorts files this way. I tried using the glob module on the directly and then sorting the result and got the exact same issue. So the first thing I had to do was find some kind of sorting algorithm that could sort them correctly. It should be noted that Windows 7 can sort the files correctly in its file system, even though Python cannot. (more…)

Last Thursday (the 5th) I attended Pyowa, the local Iowa Python Users group I founded a few years ago. We had Scott Peterson from Principal Financial Group come and talk to us about Library Gadget, a cool Django-based website he created to track what library books his family has checked out. Now he has lots of users using his website. It not only tracks the books you have borrowed, but it’ll auto-renew them if it can and let you know if you’re books are overdue.

He spent most of his time talking about the backend stuff behind the website though. Such as why he chose Amazon Web Services, how he uses Puppet, Vagrant and Fabric to manage his server’s settings and back them up.

The second talk was done by myself and I spoke on my MediaLocker project, an open source wxPython application that is supposed to help you track your media library. Most of my time was spent telling the story behind the project and showing a demo. Then I took some questions.

Overall, I’d say that we had a really good meeting with 10 people showing up. Next month, on February 2nd, we’re bringing in the BIG guns though. We have Doug Hellman and Steve Holden scheduled to Skype in and talk to us.

Doug Hellman is the author of The Python Standard Library By Example, is a senior developer with Racemi, Inc., and communications director of the Python Software Foundation. He has programmed with Python since version 1.4, and has worked on multiple platforms in mapping, medical publishing, banking, and data center automation. Hellmann was previously columnist and editor-in-chief for Python Magazine and, since 2007, has blogged the popular Python Module of the Week

Steve Holden is chairman of the Python Software Foundation and author of Python Web Programming. He owns Python consulting business and does Python training.