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| Announcing O'Reilly Answers - Clever Hacks. Creative Ideas. Innovative Solutions. by Allen Noren
We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. |
| Four short links: 6 October 2009 - Birdwatching Technology, Transportation Data, Multitouch in Python, and Face Detection on the iPhone by Nat Torkington
Bird-watching Turns To Technology (BBC) -- BBC News reports on technical advances in bird watching used by a group of researchers to monitor a population of guillemots on Skomer Island, employing a CCTV like system adapted for use in the wild. This and more in today's Four Short Links. |
| Four short links: 5 October 2009 - Bozo Cloud Talk, Annotation Fail(ish), Python MySQL Slash, and Infinite Books by Nat Torkington
Brown Cloud Marketing -- An advertorial "interviewing" the general manager of a company offering "DNS in the cloud". This might be a worthwhile service, but the way he markets it (by saying open source is "freeware" and the market leader is "legacy") reveals a rich vein of bozo. This and more in today's Four Short Links. |
| Four short links: 25 September 2009 - On Wheel Reinvention, Research Visualization, New Comments, and Defective Congressional Data by Nat Torkington
Diesel: A Case Study In That Thing I Just Said -- A new asynchronous I/O library in Python, which earned this fabulous review from Glyph Lefkowitz who wrote the granddaddy of all asynch libraries in Python, Twisted. This and more in today's Four Short Links. |
| PyMOTW: fractions - Rational Numbers by Doug Hellmann
Python's Fraction class implements numerical operations for rational numbers. |
| PyMOTW: decimal - Fixed and floating point math by Doug Hellmann
The decimal module implements fixed and floating point arithmetic using the model familiar to most people, rather than the floating point representation implemented by most computer hardware. |
| PyMOTW: dis - Python Bytecode Disassembly by Doug Hellmann
The dis module converts code objects to a human-readable representation of the bytecodes for analysis. |
| Four Short Links: 28 August 2009 - The Future, Python Metrics, Distributed Version Control, and Stylish R by Nat Torkington
What The Future's All About (Webstock Words) -- Bruce Sterling, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a science fiction author explains, "We're not going to get a future Cloud World as somehow opposed to a future Augmented Reality World. It can’t happen. The ideas can be clearly distinguished, but ideas about technology, labels for technology, predictions and suppositions about technology, they don't map onto actual real-world technology. Human culture doesn't work like a logical argument." This and more in today's Four Short Links. |
| Four short links: 12 August 2009 - Health Data, Python Term Extraction, Network Neutrality, New Database by Nat Torkington
Improving Health Care -- Adam Bosworth has posted the text of a speech he delivered at the Aspen Health Forum. Among his points Bosworth notes "the importance of giving us all the right to our health data online." The speech starts strong and just gets better: "We should require sharing of population statistics across practices and hospitals in order to better determine what works for whom. We should reward practices and hospitals that are delivering the best most cost-effective long-term outcomes and penalize those that deliver the worst." This and more in today's Four Short Links. |
| PyMOTW: pydoc - Online help for Python modules by Doug Hellmann
The pydoc module imports a Python module and uses the contents to generate
help text at runtime. |
| PyMOTW: In-Memory Data Structures by Doug Hellmann
Python includes several standard programming data structures as built-in types (list, tuple, dictionary, and set). Most applications won't need any other structures, but when they do the standard library delivers. |
| Use APIs to do market research by Andrew Odewahn
Basic product attribute questions (what's the best price, size, length, etc) are crucial elements in any product or marketing strategy, but it's often too difficult or expensive to get timely market information. However, a quick script that pulls data from a relevant website's API can often give you an answer that's good enough. This post provides a few techniques for using this powerful new resource for market research. |
| PyMOTW: Text Processing Tools by Doug Hellmann
Python's standard library includes a variety of tools for working with text data. |
| PyMOTW: urllib2 by Doug Hellmann
The urllib2 module provides an updated API for using internet resources identified by URLs. It is designed to be extended by individual applications to support new protocols or add variations to existing protocols (such as handling HTTP basic authentication). |
| PyMOTW: abc - abstract base classes by Doug Hellmann
Define and use abstract base classes for API checks in your code using the abc module. |
Introducing PyXML
In the second Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji introduces PyXML, the add-on XML library which builds upon Python's core XML support. (Sep 25, 2002)
You need to fork a daemon process on a Unix or Unix-like system, which, in turn, requires a certain precise sequence of system calls.
Do it now.
Loghetti: an apache log file filter in Python As announced earlier on my personal blog, I launched an open source project on Google Code called "loghetti". It's written in Python, and is a foundation for what I hope will become a very flexible tool to help admins (myself… read more Brian K. Jones
Scale(1), Scale(2), ... Scale(n) Ted Neward attempted to pull apart some of the silliness in the debate over scalability with Can Dynamic Languages Scale?. In particular, one of the most important insights is: There's an implicit problem with using the word "scale" here, in… read more chromatic
TIOBE declares Python as programming language of 2007 I really don't know what this means, but here is the page that contains the headline. Further down in the page are a few details regarding the announcement. Here are those details: Python has been declared as programming language of… read more Jeremy Jones
setuptools tip - script creation My last two blog posts on egg-related topics had a title prefix of "easy_install tip". This post is related, but since it's handled with setuptools rather than easy_install, I'm prefixing it accordingly. Have you ever wondered how various packages you… read more Jeremy Jones
TMTOWTDI -> The Right Way to Do It J. David Blackstone has a pointed journal post entitled The Right Way To Do It which praises Perl's "There's More Than One Way To Do It" philosophy: TMTOWTDI is anarchy. It scares people who want to keep order by force. Allowing people… read more chromatic
You Can Use Statistics To Prove Anything That's Remotely True (TIOBE 2008) "Perl is dead", crows TIOBE's January 2008 index. The world belongs to Python. You see what you want to see in statistics though. For example, you could compare Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby job trends. Don't drop those sigils yet.… read more chromatic
TPT (Tiny Python Tip): Virtualenv Google Group Ian Bicking just created a Google Group for Virtualenv here, and a bug tracker at launchpad for virtualenv here. I also have slides from a talk at Pyatl here Links: noahgift.com My O'Reilly Feed Virtualenv Google Group Virtualenv Launchpad Bug Tracker Virtualenv Package Information Virtualenv Slides Noah Gift
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