The other day, I saw an interesting question on StackOverflow where the author asked if there was a way to serialize a Python dictionary into a human-readable format. The answer that was given was to use a package called jsonpickle, which will serialize complex Python objects to and from JSON. This article will give you […]
jsonpickle: Turning Python pickles into JSON Read More »
The other day, I came across an article about a fork of the pbs package called sh. These packages are wrappers for Python’s subprocess module. Basically sh allows you to import and use shell commands directly from Python. This article will go over a few examples to show you how to use this fun little
The new sh Package – A subprocess wrapper Read More »
The arrow project is an attempt to wrap Python’s time and datetime modules into a single API. It also claims to plug gaps in functionality in those modules, such as time spans, ISO-8601 and humanization. You can kind of think of arrow as a drop-in replacement for Python’s datetime and time modules, much like the
arrow – A new date / time package for Python Read More »
The Pony ORM project is another object relational mapper package for Python. They allow you to query a database using generators. They also have an online ER Diagram Editor that is supposed to help you create a model. When I first started using PonyORM, they were one of the only Python packages I’ve seen with
Python 101: An Intro to Pony ORM Read More »
I thought it would be fun to try out a few different Python object relational mappers (ORMs) besides SQLAlchemy. I recently stumbled across a project known as peewee. For this article, we will take the examples from my SQLAlchemy tutorial and port it to peewee to see how it stands up. The peewee project supports
An Intro to peewee – Another Python ORM Read More »
Redirecting stdout seems to be a pretty common request on the wxPython users group, so I decided to see how easy it would be to do it with Tkinter. The typical use case for redirecting stdout or stderr is that you are calling some other process (like ping or tracert) and you want to catch
Tkinter – Redirecting stdout / stderr Read More »
I’ve been using wxPython for quite a while now and I see certain questions come up on a fairly frequent basis. One of the popular ones is how to ask the user for their credentials before loading up the rest of the application. There are several approaches to this, but I am going to focus
wxPython: How to Create a Login Dialog Read More »
Yesterday, Philip Guo made the claim that Python is now the most popular introductory teaching language at top U.S. universities on the Communications of the ACM blog. I came across this information via Planet Python’s redistribution of Vasudev Ram’s blog post on the subject. If this is true, then I think this is really cool.
Python Most Popular University Teaching Language? Read More »
Packt Publishing recently asked me if I would be interested in letting my readers know about a sale that they are doing right now. Most of the time, I avoid marketing to my readers, but Packt has a lot of Python ebooks for sale this week that I think you might find useful. Here is
Packt Publishing is having a Sale on Python books this week Read More »
Last week, DZone contacted me to ask if I would like to be featured in their “Dev of the Week” series. In other words, they wanted to do a short interview with me. The interview went live yesterday. You can read it here, if you like: http://java.dzone.com/articles/dev-week-mike-driscoll I don’t know why the link is on
My First Interview Read More »
Last year there was an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in support of PyDev, the Python IDE plugin for Eclipse. It was put on by the primary developer of PyDev, Fabio Zadrozny. As a part of that campaign, Fabio also created LiClipse. Anyway, Fabio is at it again with a new crowdfunding campaign. You can read about
PyDev and Python profiler UI Crowdfunding Project Read More »
This contest is now over I have decided to sponsor a contest for my first book, Python 101. I will be giving away 3 copies of my eBook bundle (PDF, EPUB and MOBI) and 1 copy of the paperback, which I will ship anywhere in the world. If you haven’t heard of my book, you
Book Contest: Win a Copy of Python 101 Read More »
eGenix announced this week that they were releasing an “open source, one file, no installation version of Python”. You can read their entire announcement in their press release here. If you want to check out the actual product, you can get it at the following URL: http://www.egenix.com/products/python/PyRun/. This is a Unix-based Python and they state
PyRun – Running Python with a Single File Read More »
Every once in a while, I run into a situation where I need dummy data to test my code against. If you need to do tests on a new database or table, you will run into the need for dummy data often. I recently came across an interesting package called Faker. Faker’s sole purpose is
Python: Create Fake Data with Faker Read More »
Recently I ran into an issue where an application that calls Python would insert int into Python’s namespace, which overwrites Python’s built-in int function. Since I have to use the tool and I needed to use Python’s int function, I needed a way around this annoyance. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to fix. All you
Working Around Shadowed Functions Read More »