Sorry, I really could not resist ;-) But I got a better logo monster for the new git website than Dōmo-kun:
January 06, 2009
Alexander Artemenko
Python Google Chart
Link: "Python Google Chart".
Easy to use python wrapper for Google's Chart API.
The Blog - Juri Pakaste
Emacs tips: Navigate CamelCase words
Emacs tip #0: Always search EmacsWiki when you think you might need something.
Emacs tip #1: To navigate studlyCapped words, M-x c-subword-mode, as found on the CamelCase page. I had to add the following lines to my .emacs to get it work with C-left/C-right, M-b/M-f worked right out of the box:
(define-key global-map [(control right)] 'forward-word)
(define-key global-map [(control left)] 'backward-word)
Before that, they were bound to the -nomark variants.
Sean McGrath
From Personal Computer to Impersonal Chameleon
Booting from something you carry around in your pocket. There is a trend there I think. A trend that could take the "personal" out of the PC box and into your pocket which, arguably, is where it belongs in this day and age : From Personal Computer to Impersonal Chameleon.
IronPython Url's
John Udell in the Cloud with IronPython
John Udell is a well known blogger with an interest in Python, who now works for Microsoft. Recently he has been exploring various aspects of working with Microsoft technologies with Python, including several posts on using the new cloud computing platform Azure.
His first post doesn't show much code:
Jon does however turn his proof of concept into "a service in the Azure cloud that aggregates calendar events from Eventful.com and from a diverse set of iCalendar feeds".
Jon explores the problems of working with Azure from IronPython - Azure runs in a 'medium trust' environment, something that only partly works with IronPython. He also talks about the blurring of the lines between static and dynamic languages:
His first post doesn't show much code:
But what happens behind the scenes is quite interesting to me. The URL hits a deployment in the Azure cloud where I’m hosting an IronPython runtime. Then it invokes that runtime on a file that contains this little Python program:He updates this post with a status report:
hello = "Hello world"
Finally, it gets back an object representing the result of that program, extracts the value of the hello variable, and pops it into the textbox.
This is the proof of concept I’ve been looking for.
I’m exploring the viability of Python as a way of programming the newly-announced Microsoft cloud platform, Azure. Partly that’s because I love Python, but mainly it’s because I believe that the culture surrounding Python and other open source dynamic languages can fruitfully cross-pollinate with the culture that infuses Microsoft’s platforms.It isn't as straightforward as he'd hoped - both because of the lack of C extensions used by standard library modules and because of the Azure security policy.
Jon does however turn his proof of concept into "a service in the Azure cloud that aggregates calendar events from Eventful.com and from a diverse set of iCalendar feeds".
Jon explores the problems of working with Azure from IronPython - Azure runs in a 'medium trust' environment, something that only partly works with IronPython. He also talks about the blurring of the lines between static and dynamic languages:
Along the way, I’ve been recalling something IronPython’s creator, Jim Hugunin, said at the Professional Developers Conference back in October. Jim’s talk followed one by Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C#. Anders showed an experimental future version of C# that makes use of the Dynamic Language Runtime which supports IronPython and IronRuby on .NET. The effect was to create an island of dynamic typing within C#’s otherwise statically-typed world. We all appreciated the delicious irony of a static type called ‘dynamic’.His more recent posts track the development of this project, including how his experience of Python development is affecting the C# he writes.
Jim might have sounded a bit wistful when he said: “I’m not sure what a dynamic language is any more.” But I think this blurring of boundaries is a wonderful thing. Many smart people I deeply respect value the static typing of C#. Some of the same smart people, and many different ones, value the dynamic typing in languages like Ruby and Python. If I can leverage the union of what all of those smart people find valuable, I’ll happily do so.
by Fuzzyman (noreply@blogger.com) at January 06, 2009 01:34 PM
Consuming Extension Methods in IronPython
Extension methods are a feature of .NET 3 that allows you to add methods to existing types. These are effectively static methods, but are called as if they were instance methods on the extended type.
Saveen Reddy has a blog entry on using these methods from IronPython.
Saveen Reddy has a blog entry on using these methods from IronPython.
- Consuming Extension Methods in IronPython
One of my projects implemented in C# makes frequent use of extension methods. Recently I started using IronPython to script that project and what I learned is that consuming those extension methods in C# is straightforward but with IronPython some extra work is involved.
by Fuzzyman (noreply@blogger.com) at January 06, 2009 11:11 AM
Armin Ronacher
Opinionated Frameworks
Once again my post about Jinja and the Django template engine appeared on reddit. The second time in the last two weeks, probably because my feeds changed and planets re-displayed it.
I originally wrote the post a few months ago to promote Jinja a bit. I was and still am very happy with Jinja2 and wanted to write some lines about what I like about it and how it works. And I also was hoping that the Django guys have a look at it and copy some features of it. Mainly because every once in a while I contribute code to a Django powered project or have my fingers in some way in such a project's code. And every time I'm kinda puzzled how simple some really complex tasks in Django are.
So what has changed in Django's templates the last four months? Not that much. The only changes in the Django template engine was the addition of {% empty %} blocks in {% for %} loops (which does exactly what Jinja's {% else %} does for loops) and some bug fixing. Is that a problem? I don't know, but probably not.
Django's templates are still slow and limited as they were, but it's not causing problems so that users have to switch. Every once in a while I notice that people switch to Jinja from Django templates because of performance of the limitations, but very often they throw away half the framework because they discover that Python has more to offer than just Django. And with that in mind I guess the Django guys are doing the right thing.
Django is designed for content driven websites not so much for independently deployed applications (like trac, WordPress, MediaWiki and others). So not so much for applications and also not so much for stuff where you need crazy database queries that are not possible with Django. The template engine is designed for simple HTML generation and that's it. If you want more, you often want something different than Django anyways.
I know many successful projects that are running Django without problems and it works out for them, because their requirements match (nearly) exactly what the framework was developed for. And I know many that adopted Django because of the fuzz but what they actually want to do does not fit into the Django style of development.
In many ways Django reminds me a bit of unpacking cool stuff. You download it and are instantly blown away how cool it is. Database just works, templating is awesome, URL routing gives you these incredible neat looking URLs and much more. It's so cool that many are trying to suddenly do everything with it. And that's kinda where the problem lays. You are forcing Django to do things it's not designed for.
I think what is missing is a website that explains the advantages and disadvantages of the particular solutions and what projects work best with what solution. There are Pylons, Werkzeug, Paste, Repoze and a lot more frameworks and utility libraries that focus on different kinds of web applications. And that does not only apply to full blown frameworks or WSGI utilities, but also template engines, database libraries and even databases themselves. It would prevent a lot of frustration if people could find the framework or toolchain of choice before they start developing their project.
But such a page would have to be designed by someone unbiased. And neither me, nor anyone else who develops on/for a Python powered framework should create such a comparison page. But I would encourage everybody with experiences in multiple frameworks to write down their experiences with different Python frameworks, template engines, database adapters and combinations thereof.
Update: Fixed misleading sentence. Swapped complex and simple.
Go Deh
word differ
My brother was over from France this new year and he asked me to write him a small script for the first time.
He had a problem in that he had some prose in a foreign language, and a list of words that the students should learn. He wanted stats on what words from the list were actually used in his prose.
I wrote the following small script. Interestingly enough, the bit that needed a bit of research was doing the graphical file opening for Windows - I really am that used to a Unix environment :-)
It is a very simple program but, on reflection, I can remember doing similar work twenty years ago in AWK: finding out what is different between two 'things' and printing the differences in a sorted order. Back then I would have used Suns original awk, keeping the two sets of data in associative arrays, doing the set arithmatic in explicit for loops, and calling out to the Unix sort utility to print sorted output. Such specialized diff'ing tasks have crept up regularly for me, and they are now very easy to do in Python (or Perl); and I have never had to resort to C for even the largest datasets I've encountered.
He had a problem in that he had some prose in a foreign language, and a list of words that the students should learn. He wanted stats on what words from the list were actually used in his prose.
I wrote the following small script. Interestingly enough, the bit that needed a bit of research was doing the graphical file opening for Windows - I really am that used to a Unix environment :-)
It is a very simple program but, on reflection, I can remember doing similar work twenty years ago in AWK: finding out what is different between two 'things' and printing the differences in a sorted order. Back then I would have used Suns original awk, keeping the two sets of data in associative arrays, doing the set arithmatic in explicit for loops, and calling out to the Unix sort utility to print sorted output. Such specialized diff'ing tasks have crept up regularly for me, and they are now very easy to do in Python (or Perl); and I have never had to resort to C for even the largest datasets I've encountered.
word_differ.pyw
Here is the program word_differ.pyw:# -*- coding: cp1252 -*-
'''
Find the difference in words used in two documents
Asks for two files which then have their words extracted and compared.
Most punctuation, and all words of just numbers are dropped.
(C) 2009 Donald 'Paddy' McCarthy. paddy3118@gmail.com
'''
import Tkinter, tkFileDialog, re, datetime, sys
root = Tkinter.Tk()
root.withdraw()
def wordsinfile(f):
words = set()
txt = f.read()
words = set( w.lower() for w in re.split(r"""[ \t\n\-,;:\.\?@#~=+_!"£$%^&\*\(\)<>|\\\[\]{}`]""", txt)
if w and not all( c in '0123456789' for c in w) )
return words
f1 = tkFileDialog.askopenfile(parent=root,initialdir="/",title='First text file for word diffing')
if not f1: sys.exit()
f2 = tkFileDialog.askopenfile(parent=root,initialdir="/",title='Second text file for word diffing')
if not f2: sys.exit()
f3 = tkFileDialog.asksaveasfile(parent=root,initialdir="/",title='Save output as file (end with .txt to create a windows text file)')
if not f3: sys.exit()
set1 = wordsinfile(f1)
set2 = wordsinfile(f2)
print >>f3, "Output from program word_differ.py (Author Donald McCarthy: (C) 2009)."
print >>f3, " Generated on: " + datetime.datetime.now().isoformat()
print >>f3, " First File: " + f1.name
print >>f3, " Second File: " + f2.name
print >>f3, " Output to: " + f3.name
print >>f3, "\nWords in the first file that are not in the second:"
for w in sorted(set1 - set2):
print >>f3, " ", w
print >>f3, "\nWords in the second file that are not in the first:"
for w in sorted(set2 - set1):
print >>f3, " ", w
print >>f3, "\nWords common to both files:"
for w in sorted(set1 & set2):
print >>f3, " ", w
f1.close(); f2.close(); f3.close()
Example word list: word list.txt
back black jump bored hair missile lamb little played sent
Example prose: rhyme.txt
Mary had a little lamb Who's hair was long and black. She played with it, Got bored with it And then she sent it back! By Paddy McCarthy - 2009-01-04.
Example output: diff.txt
Output from program word_differ.py (Author Donald McCarthy: (C) 2009). Generated on: 2009-01-04T07:20:18.890000 First File: C:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Documents/Paddys/word_differ/word list.txt Second File: C:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Documents/Paddys/word_differ/rhyme.txt Output to: C:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Documents/Paddys/word_differ/diff.txt Words in the first file that are not in the second: jump missile Words in the second file that are not in the first: a and by got had it long mary mccarthy paddy she then was who's with Words common to both files: back black bored hair lamb little played sent
by Paddy3118 (noreply@blogger.com) at January 06, 2009 06:45 AM
Alec Thomas
Moving house
I am moving my blog to Posterous and taking the opportunity to separate concerns.
Technical articles will be posted to http://swapoff.posterous.com while personal stuff (probably mostly rants) will go to http://alecthomas.posterous.com.
It seems that a longer and more detailed explanation may be helpful.
