Wednesday, 18th February 2009
The History of Python: Adding Support for User-defined Classes. Guido designed the run-time representation first, and tried to design the syntax to include as few new parsing concepts as possible. The origins of explicit self are also explained. # 11 pm
DB2 support for Django is coming. From IBM, under the Apache 2.0 License. I’m not sure if this makes it hard to bundle it with the rest of Django, which uses the BSD license. # 10:58 pm
Found in space. The Astrometry bot on Flickr (which detects which part of the night sky is contained within your photo and adds notes to some of the more interesting stars) is the most delightful use of the Flickr API I’ve ever seen. This interview provides some background, including a link to a paper on the “scale and rotation invariant hashing algorithm” that is used to build the index. # 10:52 pm