The Mouse Vs. The Python

I was reading the Python blog feed yesterday and stumbled on Tarek Ziade’s Python Meme article. I thought it sounded like a fun idea, so here’s my answers to his questions. (more…)

The Linux Journal readers have good taste. This is the 3rd year that they have voted Python as the Best Programming Language. Oddly enough, C++ is the runner-up. I personally liked C++ when I was in school, but the two languages are quite different. On the other hand, Python interfaces with C/C++ pretty well, so maybe the readers of that magazine like to do mash-ups with the two languages. You will also note that they voted Python as the Best Scripting Language too.

Congrats to the Python community and the PSF too!

Hat-tip to Steve Holden who mentioned this on Python.org’s news feed.

Another week is over and we have a new set of articles for you to check out this weekend. You can learn new things, try modules, and be productive. Or you can go party. Don’t forget about all the different PyCons going on this year around the world. There are local ones and International conferences.

• Multiple reviews for the Python Testing Cookbook” target=”_blank”>Python Testing Cookbook are out now. See Jacob Perkins or Doug Hellman’s reviews
• Learn why SqlAlchemy rocks and how it’s different from Django’s ORM in Armin Ronacher’s article
• Speaking of Django, this article is an introduction to sessions in Django
• Python Application in the Cloud
• Re-load modules or import them without import with Exocet
• A Python 4 Kids Tkinter tutorial
• PyOhio

is next weekend!

• Read-Ahead and Python Generators
• How to convert Python UTC datetime to UNIX timestamp

That’s all for this week. Let me know if you find anything cool that you think I should highlight next time.

It’s been a while since I have done any interesting Python links. I quit for a while because these things take a while to put together and few seemed interested, but I’ll give it another go. This week has a really interesting article on Python and robots. Jesse Noller has a fun article where he collects various Python stories too (I nabbed a couple of his picks for mine too because he was right: they are interesting!)

• Building a face-tracking robot (Headroid1) with Python in an afternoon
• Python Debugging; Embarrassment, Contracts and Nothing is private (Jesse Noller)
• Nothing is Private: Python Closures (and ctypes) – Michael Foord
• namedtuple and exec() by Kristján Valur
• Both PyTexas and PyCon Japan are calling for papers so if you like talking about Python, get in on the action now!
• mock 0.7.2 and PyDev 2.1.0 were both released recently.
• Quick and Easy Debugging in Python by Jeet Sukumaran
• Teaching (and learning) Python by Ned Batchelder
• Filenames with accents by Ned Batchelder

If you think I missed something awesome that happened in the Python world recently, let me know in the comments and maybe I’ll add it next time. Thanks for your support!

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.

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!

It’s almost the end of January already and PyCon USA 2011 is just around the corner. In this edition, we cover a wide variety of topics, from Python 2.7 – 3.x. We’ve got sprints, new books, web-related projects and good old recursion articles. Come one, come all! Read the news of the week!

• eWeek reports that Python Skills are in demand this year
• zzzeek’s Guide to Python 3 Porting by Michael Bayer, the man behind SqlAlchemy.
• Foundations of Python Network Programming: A Last Hurrah For Python 2. Brandon Rhodes (former editor of Python Magazine) talks about a book he just finished writing.
• Python Sprints is sponsoring Software Carpentry 2011. Details are sparse and I’m not really familiar with either organization, but this sounds interesting.
• Shannon Behrens talks about Python SSL Hell on his blog
• Learn how to deploy Python WSGI apps behind nginx
• Learn New-style PyQt Signals and Slots on Mario Boikov’s blog
• Building Python with LLVM 2.8 (and why I still love the project) by Brett Cannon.
• A little discussion of tail recursion can be found in the following article: Tail Recursion in Python using Pysistence

On the PyCon front, you should take note the Early Bird pricing is now over. Why did you wait? Fortunately, they are still selling tickets, so stop stalling and just come! The PyCon blog also mentions that they’re still looking for sponsors, so if you or someone you know has that kind of cashola, point them in that direction.

And now we return you back to your regularly scheduled blog reading…

In this article, we will be looking at wxPython’s Wizard widget. No, it has nothing to do with Dumbledore or Gandalf. Instead, it is that dialog that you’ll see when you run an installer or set up a template. Sometimes you’ll even see them used for setting up mail merge. We will cover two examples in this tutorial: one that is fairly simple and another that is slightly more complex. Let’s get started!

Note: The code in this article was adapted from the wxPython Demo application

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PyChecker is a cool tool for checking Python scripts for bugs. It works with Python 2.0 – 2.7. In this article, we will write some crappy code to see what PyChecker can pick up on. Then we’ll improve the code according to what we find until the code checks out. According to PyChecker’s website, it can detect the following problems:

• No global found (e.g., using a module without importing it)
• Passing the wrong number of parameters to functions/methods/constructors
• Passing the wrong number of parameters to builtin functions & methods
• Using format strings that don’t match arguments
• Using class methods and attributes that don’t exist
• Changing signature when overriding a method
• Redefining a function/class/method in the same scope
• Using a variable before setting it
• self is not the first parameter defined for a method
• Unused globals and locals (module or variable)
• Unused function/method arguments (can ignore self)
• No doc strings in modules, classes, functions, and methods

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