News
| Four short links: 4 August 2010 - Python Reasoning, Learning the Right Way, Curated Folksonomy, Arduino Image Correction by Nat Torkington
FuXi -- Python-based, bi-directional logical reasoning system for the semantic web from the folks at the Open Knowledge Foundation. (via About Inferencing) Harness the Power of Being an Idiot -- I learn by trying to build something, there's no other way I can discover the devils-in-the-details. Unfortunately that's an incredibly inefficient way to gain knowledge. I basically wander around... |
| Four short links: 2 June 2010 - WikiLeaks Ethics, Education Business Opportunities, Corewar Updated, Watch Google IO by Nat Torkington
Wikileaks Launched on Stolen Documents (Wired) -- Wired claims the first set of documents was obtained by running a Tor node that users connected to ("exit node") and saving the plaintext that was sent to the users, without their knowledge. Reminds me of the adage that nothing big in Silicon Valley starts without being some degree of evil first:... |
| Four short links: 10 May 2010 - Barcodes, Python's Innards, Informed Elections, and Data Literacy by Nat Torkington
zxing -- barcode library for iPhone, Android, Java, and more. Guido's Python -- how the compiler and interpreter see your Python programs. It wasn't until I had this level of knowledge of Perl that I really know what the hell I was doing. (via Hacker News) UK Election Data -- this was posted on the eve of the UK... |
| Mock the Web Service by Phlip Plumlee
This post shows how to write a web service using Test-Driven Development. Our source code example is the exemplary active_merchant contribution to Ruby on Rails. It reveals how developer tests can correctly attack remote web services. Programmers writing clients (or servers) for any kind of web service should use these techniques. My next post will extend this one into the Abstract Test Pattern. |
| Four short links: 20 April 2010 - CS Epigrams, Star Trek Made Real, Python Filings, and Difficult Games by Nat Torkington
Epigrams in Programming -- all from the remarkable Alan Perlis. By the time I learned that he was responsible for such gems as "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon", "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing", and "Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to... |
| PyMOTW: Creating XML Documents with ElementTree by Doug Hellmann
In addition to its parsing capabilities, ElementTree also supports creating well-formed XML documents from Element objects constructed in your application. |
| What's New in O'Reilly Answers - Windows phone and iPhone programming, algorithms in Python, recovering files in Windows 7, and much more! by O'Reilly Media
Do I need to learn Objective-C to program the iPhone?
How to get started with Windows Phone programming
An introduction to genetic algorithms in Python
How to recover lost, damaged, and deleted files and folders in Windows 7
How to link to a specific point in a YouTube video
Will we see Java on the iPhone?
Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today. |
| PyMOTW: Parsing XML Documents with ElementTree by Doug Hellmann
Python's xml.etree.ElementTree library makes it easy to use XML data in your application or library. |
| PyMOTW: tabnanny - Indentation validator by Doug Hellmann
Consistent use of indentation is important in a langauge like Python, where white-space is significant. The tabnanny module provides a scanner to report on "ambiguous" use of indentation. The simplest way to use tabnanny is to run it from the command line, passing the names of files to check. If you pass directory names, the directories are scanned recursively to find .py files to check. |
| Four short links: 5 March 2010 - GMail CRM, Django Best Practices, Stats-Think, and WoW Number Crunching by Nat Torkington
Rapportive -- a simple social CRM built into Gmail. They replace the ads in Gmail with photos, bio, and info from social media sites. (via ReadWrite Web)
Best Practices in Web Development with Django and Python -- great set of recommendations. (via Jon Udell's article on checklists)
These and more in today's Four Short Links. |
| Four short links: 25 February 2010 - Rap Python, Being Believed, Hot Maps, and Old School Secrets by Nat Torkington
gheat -- add a heatmap layer to a Google Map. For more on its design and implementation, read Chad Whitacre's blog. This and more in today's Four Short Links. |
| Learning Python Gets 9/10 on Slashdot - "This book continues to be Python's bible." by O'Reilly Media
Slashdot reviewer Ahmed Al-Saadi gives Learning Python, Fourth Edition, by Mark Lutz, a 9/10 rating, and says, "Like many O'Reilly books, this is a well-written, coherent, and beautifully type-set book. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to, or already does, program using python. It should help the novice in the transition to an excellent programming language or, otherwise, make an already familiar environment more powerful in the hands of veterans." Read more. |
| Four short links: 8 December 2009 - Python Moratorium, Math Pictures, Assemblers Needed, Tennis Vision by Nat Torkington
Python's Moratorium -- Python language designers have declared a moratorium on enhancement proposals (feature requests) while the world's Python programmers get used to the last batch of New And Shiny they shipped. I'm reasonably sure that the ALGOL designers went through exactly the same discussions, and I know Perl did too. So, don't be afraid of it - don't think that Python is evolutionarily dead - it's not. We're taking a stability and adoption break, a breather. We're doing this to help users and developers, not to just be able to say 'no' to every random idea sent to python-ideas, and not because we're done. Reminds me of Perl god Jarkko Hietaniemi's signature file: "There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen. This and more in today's Four Short Links. |
| 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. |
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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