Archive for python

• Seeing a Python through your Windows?

  OK, the title might be a bit vague so let me first describe what this is all about: I've been working on Unix and Unix-like systems more or less exclusively for the last nearly 10 years. I switched from Windows to Linux right after the new millennium started and only started to look back a bit thanks to Windows 7. So now, for about three weeks, I can call a Windows-PC my own again (look what Starcraft2 can do to you). Since I'm still very much a Python guy (although I really like quite a few other languages) I naturally want to continue coding Python even on Windows.

  This works pretty well if you don't do one of two things: (1) Prefer Powershell over cmd.exe or (2) require some C-extension for Python (like keyring's Windows integration). Getting all this working will definitely take some time, so in this post I want to write about some of my first steps and impressions.

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  • python
  • windows
  • mingw

  2010/08/29 at 20:38:45

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• EuroPython 2010

  Better late than never, I guess. It's now been two weeks since this year's EuroPython in Birmingham (UK) ended and I somehow never found to time to write at least a short summary. Well, at least now I will try to write a not so short summary instead :-)

  Compared to most other conferences I've attended in recent years this was by far the longest. I've so far never been at a conference with 4 days full of talks and while I couldn't even listen to one talk in each slot, I still managed to learn many, many new and exciting things (at least to me). But let's go through the program day by day... or at least only through the most memorable talks.

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  • europython
  • python
  • conference
  • birmingham

  2010/08/08 at 19:35:00

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• Eine Python-Usergroup für Graz

  Irgendwie ist es seltsam. Graz ist eine Studentenstadt und auch in technischer Hinsicht mit Einrichtungen wie Joanneum Research und der TU-Graz nicht von schlechten Eltern. Aber so richtig viele Entwickler-Usergroups habe ich noch nicht gesehen. Soweit ich gehört habe, gabs zwar einmal Bestrebungen, da auch eine Usergroup für Python ins Leben zu rufen, aber das ist scheinbar im Sand verlaufen. Zumindest konnte ich bis jetzt nur eine Gruppe in Wien finden.

  Auf der DjangoCon.eu traf ich Dorian Santner und gemeinsam mit Armin Ronacher meinten wir dann auch, wir könnten es zumindest einmal versuchen, eine Python-Usergroup in der steirischen Landeshauptstadt aufzubauen. Eine Mailinglist gibt es schon einmal und wir suchen noch nach Vorschlägen für einen Stammtisch (so als ersten Schritt).

  Eine Usergroup macht natürlich nur dann Sinn, wenn es auch User gibt. Falls du also Interesse hast, bitte melde dich bei der Mailinglist an und mach mit!

  • graz
  • python

  2010/06/16 at 21:35:13

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• EuroPython 2010 Schedule announced

  Primary link: www.europython.eu

  And finally there is a timetable available for this year's EuroPython conference in Birmingham this July. And it will be quite packed: Four days full of talks about tools like eventlet and twisted and literally a whole day for testing techniques alone :D But not only are the topics great, the list of speakers is highly impressive as well with Guido van Rossum, Mark Ramm, Raymond Hettinger and Andrew Godwin, just to name a few. Combined with an awesome venue and two sprint days this is going to be a truly great week :-)

  • python
  • europython
  • birmingham

  2010/06/03 at 17:34:11

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• Whoosh looks interesting

  This morning I read a great post by Arne where he introduced me to Whoosh, a pure-Python search backend. Traditionally when you're working with site-specific search-technologies, you sooner or later stumble upon the Lucene ecosystem (since there is a whole forest of applications surrounding it, I guess you could really call it an ecosystem by now). Lucene might be the best thing since the invention of sliced bread but especially for smaller sites it might just be too much configuration overhead. Surely, some of the applications and libraries around Lucene have made that whole process much easier -- Solango comes to mind, there -- but that might still not be enough.

  Whoosh on the other hand appears to be quite Python-targeted (while Lucene goes after any environment) with a very simple configuration- and operation-workflow: Create a storage, create an index above it, define what should be indexed, hand the index a document you want to index according to your schema, done. No running some Java application in the background, no XML-schema declarations.

  I'm not yet sure, if I will go with Whoosh or Solango for the next iteration of this site but Arne definitely provided me with yet another option to think about, thanks :-)

  There are a couple of aspects I'm not yet really sure about with Whoosh, though. For example, the searcher (the thing that you pass your query to receive the actual hits) doesn't seem to provide any offset mechanism. This way, running any kind of pagination over the result-set would end up being a bit of a problem. But perhaps there is already a solution for this out there :-)

  • python
  • searching
  • whoosh

  2009/03/17 at 21:29:23

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• Reblog: Take the Python Packaging Survey

  Want to give some feedback about the state of distutils and in general the available methods for distributing Python packages? Now is your chance: http://tinyurl.com/package-survey.

  According to Tarek Ziadé the survey is for every Python developer that distributes his code and should help the participants of the Python Language Summit.

  • distutils
  • python
  • survey

  2009/03/09 at 09:39:51

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• Getting to VIM's Python interface

  Scripting is usually one of the selling points for those types of text editors that are specifically targeted at power-users. But most of the time you have to learn a whole new scripting language to really be able to use it. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that VIM besides having it's own scripting language also let's you also write plugin in Perl, Python, Ruby and TCL. This way you don't really have to learn a new language for scripting VIM, although you might still want to look into it because there are a few problems.

  Since I like Python quite a bit, the rest of this post will be mostly focused on the Python interface.

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  • python
  • scripting
  • vim

  2009/02/21 at 23:58:39

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• Python 3.0 released

  When I read yesterday night that Python 3.0 was imminent, I looked in awe at my calendar and thought "Is it already that late in the year"? This morning I then woke up, checked the newsfeeds and realized: Yes. Naturally this doesn't mean that everyone will just leave 2.x behind and move over to 3.x right away but this public release hopefully makes it way more attractive to people to finally look into it then was the case with all these preview-builds ;-) And there's much to look into, indeed:

  • A whole new way to handle strings (no longer do you distinguish between unicode strings and normal strings)
  • print is now a function and no longer a statement (which ended up in quite an ugly construct if you used it for printing to a specific IO-object)
  • There is now only one integer type anymore. So long got dropped (and int is the new long)
  • sets and dict now also have their own *-comprehension shortcuts

  and much much more. There are also some syntax changes, but from what I've seen so far Python stays Python :D

  I'm not going to dive into it right away, but Graham Dumpleton also just wrote that mod_wsgi should already work with Python 3.0 with some tweaks if you're using trunk.

  • python

  2008/12/04 at 13:12:07

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• distutils-recipe for buildout

  Today I released something I've planned to write for quite some time now: A very minimal recipe for zc.buildout that can install an arbitrary source distribution of a Python package. Sure, there is already collective.recipe.distutils out there and big kudos to Kevin Teague for his work there, but I had some minor problems with it. I also wanted to get some more practice when it comes to writing recipes for buildout. As always, you can find the result on PyPI and github.

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  • buildout
  • distutils
  • python
  • recipe

  2008/10/21 at 22:10:08

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• Syntax Highlighting in Markdown with Pygments

  If you want to get syntax highlighting using Pygments in Markdown texts, you have more or less 2 options. For one you can work on the HTML output of the Markdown2HTML converter of your choice, or you can try extending Markdown to offer special syntax for stuff you want to pass over to Pygments.

  A good idea if you want to go the first route is the use of some kind of HTML parsing library like BeautifulSoup as shown in this snippet and this article.

  This post will focus on the 2nd approach, though, since it is a bit cleaner :-)

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  • markdown
  • pygments
  • python

  2008/06/18 at 21:20:19

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