![[LWN Logo]](/images/lcorner.png) |
|
![[LWN.net]](/images/Included.png) |
From: kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)
To: Dr.Dobb's.Python-URL.distribution@starbase.neosoft.com
Subject: Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (May 14)
Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 13:19:11 -0500 (CDT)
What RedHat admin tool uses rand?!?!?!? And doesn't that explain a lot...
See
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=redhat+rand+group:comp.lang.python*&hl=en&scoring=d&selm=mailman.1021151124.25548.python-list%40python.org&rnum=1
for a technical nugget in a long, involved discussion.
QOTW: "You have chosen to install a new printer. You roll a 1d20...
You get a 1. *CRITICAL FAILURE* Your home directory is now being deleted."
-- Jeremy Bowers
Jason Tishler: "Can I play with my daughter now or should I submit a
patch?"
Fredrik Lundh: "... the answer to that should always be 'if she wants to
play, go play with her'"
Timbot: "Fiddlesticks. If she *really* wants to play, she can damn well
write a Playtime Enhancement Proposal first, get community input,
summarize the arguments pro and con, present them to Guido, and then
he'll decide whether playtime is appropriate, and if so when. Be sure
she includes full documentation for the intended modes of play, a test
suite verifying compliance to the Playtime Plan, and-- if at all possible
--checking for potentially unfortunate interactions with cyclic gc and
the trashcan mechanism.
deeply-nested-tuples-are-playtime-for-all-ly y'rs"
New software releases for developers:
PythonCard, a cross-platform application development framework for
use by everybody, built on wxPython, released prototype version
0.6.6 (containing 30 sample applications and a new source code
editor) on 2002-05-09:
http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/14884/0/8623392/
PyGTK and Gnome-Python, the Python bindings to the GTK GUI widget
library and the GNOME desktop library, released version 1.99.10, for
GTK/GNOME 2.0, on 2002-05-14:
http://www.daa.com.au/pipermail/pygtk/2002-May/002787.html
PyQt, the Python bindings for the Qt GUI toolkit (which work even
on the Zaurus), released version 3.2.2 on 2002-05-12:
http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/
Python-SIP, a tool that makes it easy to create Python bindings for
C++ libraries (much like SWIG), and which is used to build PyQt and
PyKDE, released version 3.2.3, a bug-fix release, on 2002-05-13:
http://mats.gmd.de/pipermail/pykde/2002-May/002796.html
New software releases for XML developers:
Gnosis Utils, a collection of utility Python modules including,
among other things, a lot of XML processing utilities, released version
1.0 on 2002-05-09:
http://www.gnosis.cx/download/
pyRXP, an XML parser that builds a lightweight tree of tuples
instead of a heavyweight DOM tree and is thus an order of
magnitude faster than most other Python XML parsers, released
version 0.7 on 2002-05-09:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=mailman.1020975316.11461.python-list%40python.org
http://www.reportlab.com/xml/pyrxp.html
New server-side web software releases:
MoinMoin, a WikiWikiWeb system in Python, has finally released
version 1.0 after nearly two years of development, on 2002-05-09:
http://moin.sourceforge.net/
Python Community Server is an alpha-quality free reimplementation of
Userland Software's Radio Community Server; version 0.04 was released
on 2002-05-11:
http://pycs.sourceforge.net/
Plone, a WWW content management system that runs on Zope and CMF,
released version 0.9.9 on 2002-05-13:
http://plone.org/
Python Web Objects, or pwo, another system that lets you embed
Python code into an HTML template, released version 0.61b on
2002-05-11:
http://jamwt.com/pwo/
Other new software releases:
Gadfly, the in-memory pure-Python SQL relational database, is
finally being worked on again by Richard Jones; a prerelease of
version 1.0.0 was announced on 2002-05-13:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=mailman.1021253184.13753.python-list%40python.org
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=662
milter, a Python interface to the Sendmail 8.10-12 libmilter
interface, released version 0.4.4 on 2002-05-09:
http://www.bmsi.com/python/milter.html
FtpCube, a very pretty multi-platform GUI FTP client built on PyGTK,
released version 0.3.0 on 2002-05-13:
http://ftpcube.sourceforge.net/
rdiff-backup, a program for doing a remote incremental backup of a
directory tree with the ability to restore any previous backup,
released development version 0.7.4 on 2002-05-11:
http://www.stanford.edu/~bescoto/rdiff-backup/
Experiments with httplib accidentally uncover easter eggs from
Slashdot.
http://zopezen.org/Members/zopista/1021336942
Discussion on python-list this week:
The formation of the Python Business Forum, an organization of
businesses that write software in Python, was announced.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=mailman.1021079120.30733.python-list%40python.org
The organization has a web page.
http://pbf.nuxeo.org/
Some Emacs work was posted; Laura Creighton posted a "Python outline
mode" by Ronny Wikh which lets you hide the bodies of functions and
classes in Emacs.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=mailman.1021230441.6662.python-list%40python.org
Bernhard Herzog posted some (slightly broken) code to make Emacs
word-wrap paragraphs in Python comments and docstrings correctly.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6qznz9hx0a.fsf%40abnoba.intevation.de
Christian Tismer discusses Stackless Python and its prospects for
getting into the standard CPython release (not good).
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=mailman.1020963136.13183.python-list%40python.org
Wenshan Du had added multibyte character support to Python and posted
a link to it; this initiated a lot of discussion about the right way
to internationalize Python.
Wenshan Du's post:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=e786d63d.0205080421.3788a0e2%40posting.google.com
The multibyte-ready Python:
http://www.dohao.org/python/mbcsp/en/
Francois Pinard explains how he wishes he could write French
variable names:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=mailman.1020884595.5671.python-list%40python.org
Alex Martelli explains why he would prefer everyone to program in English:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=UVhC8.20845$CN3.673651%40news2.tin.it
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=mailman.1020937216.3332.python-list%40python.org
Stephen Turnbull explains that his Japanese students hate programming
in English:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=87pu05mvmf.fsf%40tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
Paul Boddie cuts through Sun's marketing hype and explains what J2EE
is, comparing it to available Python software.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=23891c90.0205090751.5f4f40a9%40posting.google.com
Tim Peters discusses the history (and the bugs!) of one very small
optimization in Python.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=mailman.1021046059.919.python-list%40python.org
Ron Stephens is delighted with his ability to run his Python scripts
on his new ARM-Linux Zaurus, recommending the Zaurus Python
interpreter from Riverbank Computing (the folks who do PyQT, PyKDE,
and SIP).
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3CDEE799.5030306%40earthlink.net
But Alex Martelli is unhappy that Sharp won't sell him a Zaurus because
he's in Italy.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=C0KD8.50586$zW3.682855%40news1.tin.it
There was some discussion of David Boddie's CMDSyntax module, a sort
of replacement for getopt that can automatically pop up a GUI window
(with Tkinter or PyQt) to ask for parameters not supplied on the
command line.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=18289ee4.0205130632.78dc4dbc%40posting.google.com
Supercomputer folks talked about running Python on unusual platforms;
in the middle of a thread of Cray folks having trouble, Holger Berger
reports that Python 2.2 works fine on NEC's line of vector
supercomputers, the SX-5 and SX-6.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=abgcf2$eq4$1%40news.uni-stuttgart.de
========================================================================
Everything you want is probably one or two clicks away in these pages:
Python.org's Python Language Website is the traditional
center of Pythonia
http://www.python.org
Notice especially the master FAQ
http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html
PythonWare complements the digest you're reading with the
daily python url
http://www.pythonware.com/daily
Mygale is a news-gathering webcrawler that specializes in (new)
World-Wide Web articles related to Python.
http://www.awaretek.com/nowak/mygale.html
While cosmetically similar, Mygale and the Daily Python-URL
are utterly different in their technologies and generally in
their results.
comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software. Be
sure to scan this newly-revitalized newsgroup at least weekly.
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python.announce
Michael Hudson continued Andrew Kuchling's marvelous tradition
of summarizing action on the python-dev mailing list once every
other week, into July 2001. Any volunteers to re-start this
valuable series?
http://starship.python.net/crew/mwh/summaries/
http://www.amk.ca/python/dev
The Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collect Python resources
http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/
Much of Python's real work takes place on Special-Interest Group
mailing lists
http://www.python.org/sigs/
The Python Software Foundation has replaced the Python Consortium
as an independent nexus of activity
http://www.python.org/psf/
Cetus does much of the same
http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_python.html
Python FAQTS
http://python.faqts.com/
The old Python "To-Do List" now lives principally in a
SourceForge reincarnation.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=355470&group_id=5470&func=browse
http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0042.html
The online Python Journal is posted at pythonjournal.cognizor.com.
editor@pythonjournal.com and editor@pythonjournal.cognizor.com
welcome submission of material that helps people's understanding
of Python use, and offer Web presentation of your work.
*Py: the Journal of the Python Language*
http://www.pyzine.com
Links2Go is a new semi-automated link collection; it's impressive
what AI can generate
http://www.links2go.com/search?search=python
Tenth International Python Conference
http://www.python10.org
Archive probing tricks of the trade:
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python&num=100
http://groups.google.com/groups?meta=site%3Dgroups%26group%3Dcomp.lang.python.*
Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here:
http://www.ddj.com/topics/pythonurl/
http://purl.org/thecliff/python/url.html (dormant)
or
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Python-URL!&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python
Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.
[http://www.egroups.com/list/python-url-leads/ is hibernating. Just
e-mail us ideas directly.]
To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday morning,
ask <claird@neosoft.com> to subscribe. Mention "Python-URL!".
-- The Python-URL! Team--
Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com) is pleased to participate in and
sponsor the "Python-URL!" project.