Python resources for this week

[Kragen Sitaker]

I wrote these for another destination; thought I'd post them here too.

QOTW:

    What RedHat admin tool uses rand?!?!?!?  And doesn't that explain
    a lot...

    "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

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/

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

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
To forget the evil in oneself is to turn one's own good -- now
untethered from modesty and rendered tyrannical -- into a magnified
power for evil.  -- Steve Talbot, NETFUTURE #129, via SMART Letter