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Content Tagged with Python + technology

I’m very happy with our choice to use Python as one of our core development languages. It has proven to be a great time saver, in overall development costs and allowing an excellent pace of changes. When we started IT Structures we debated over using Java\Linux combo or .Net\Windows duo. Python was pushed in as an “experiment” by Ronnie. Our collective experience was derived from C , C++,JAVA , the hard core programming languages of past decades.

The evening plans didn’t wait for talks to be done. The IRC channel (#oscon on irc.freenode.net) was alive with talk of prospects for dinner and drinks after the conference. I myself was torn between a group going out for Lebanese and another going to Henry’s, but opted to go with my buddies from home to Henry’s.

It was worth it. If you haven’t been, Henry’s Tavern boasts 100 beers and hard ciders on tap (oddly, the beer list is the only menu *not* online - guess it changes too frequently). There are a ton of local beers that you can’t even get on the east coast just waiting for you to try, but there are also some rare treats, like the Belgian Lambic beers, which you don’t often see on tap. The food is a little pricey, but is really good, and the staff is very friendly. A couple of us were in a rush to get back by 7 for the BoF sessions, and when we asked the waittress how easy it was to catch a cab, she immediately informed us that she would have the hostess call one for us. About 2 minutes later we were in a cab on our way back (we wouldn’t have made it back in time if we had to walk back to catch the light rail).

I was not one of those rushing to a BoF, so I did a little poking around the area near the convention center. It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to stray too far, but I did find a couple of points of interest. First, there’s a bank right across the street from the convention center. I’d be willing to bet that the ATM there is less than the $3 the ATM inside the center charges.

Beyond that is a paintball place. It was closed by the time I found it, and I don’t know if they run every day, or anything else, but interested parties might find it open during the lunch breaks or something if you wanted to check it out. The paintball place is located behind a building that is directly across the street from the conv. center. If you see the bank, it’s on the other side of the side street the bank sits on.

Tonight appears to be low-key from what I can tell. There’s currently no chatter on irc, the hotel bar had a few people chatting, and I might go down to catch the rush of people as they return from dinner and BoF sessions. Stay tuned tomorrow for more!

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A simple captcha system for a web application.

"catch is useful [as a] catch-all "high up" in the program... That means its usefulness in libraries is limited (except for IO heavy libs, like FFI bindings to C), it should also probably not be used like try-catch often is used in Python."

With the advent of multi-core processors, CPU bound applications need to use multi-threading in order to be able to scale their performance beyond that offered by a single core. This provides many challenges, but an interesting aspect of this problem is to consider how the threading modules in modern programming languages such as Python and Rubycan either help or hinder this scalability. Yes, there are plenty of other programming languages in use today, but Python and especially Ruby are rapidly rising in popularity and there are some surprising limitations to be aware of when using their threading packages.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with Google App Engine. In case you’ve been living in a cave for the last month; App Engine is a mostly complete, sandboxed, Python 2.5 environment with a WSGI web server and a very interesting Datastore API.

Welcome to the Pylons book website where you can read all the chapters of the forthcoming Definitive Guide to Pylons, an open source book to be published by Apress later this year.

Boring and opinionated mini review of EuroPython 2008.

A presentation I made which contrasts java with other dynamic languages such as python, ruby, PHP and also java based languages such as Groovy, JRuby, Jython. This is not a strictly programming oriented contrasting exercise, it instead attempts to look at it from a architects and a managers view as well.

1) By far, the one tip that’s revolutionized my Django projects is this post by Rob Hudson, Django and Relativity. 2) Nathan Ostgard wrote a post on how to use Django with Gmail and I come back to it all the time. 3) James Bennett‘s django-contact-form is indispensable and I use it all the time.

I hardly ever use destructors in Python objects. I guess Python's dynamic nature often negates the need for destructors. Today though, I needed to write some data to disk when an object was destroyed, or more accurately, when the program exited. So I defined a destructor in the main controller object using the __del__ magic method.

So I’ve been fiddling around with CouchDB lately. Since it’s common to store tree-based data, and it’s kind of a pain to do so in your standard relational DB, I thought it would be a good exercise to see how hard it is to store hierarchical data in CouchDB.

A while back, I came across this post, in which the author implements a couple of different algorithms to generate Fibonacci numbers in Python. What he finally ends up with is an algorithm that essentially does matrix exponentiation by repeated squaring, and it runs fairly fast.

Need to override an operator in your Python class? Ever wonder what all those double-underscore class methods do? Here's your answer. My intention for this article is to be a quick-reference guide: all the information you might need about a method or property condensed into a few lines.

How to unit test Django views in App Engine, using as little mocking as possible.

Python has always limited you to accessing variables in local or global scope, with no way for a nested function to write to non-global variables outside its own scope. Python 3.0 introduces the "nonlocal" declaration to fix that.

So the first analysis was to look at the gadget performance with 40,000 pixels which gives a fair old number of calculations (its 16 iterations for those that want to know). My next consideration was what would happen to a larger image that was further over the threshold. Would that see more issues?

It turns out that Google App Engine DOES have support for full-text search, it's just not documented, because the feature is still in development.