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Items tagged python in Jan, 2010

Filters: Year: 2010 × Month: Jan × python × Sorted by date


Introducing docent. Paul Mison’s clever little Flickr app for viewing galleries that have been added by your contacts. It runs in Python on App Engine and makes extensive use of the Task Queue API. # 28th January 2010, 8:35 pm

Reexamining Python 3 Text I/O. Python 3.1’s IO performance is a huge improvement over 3.0, but still considerably slower than 2.6. It turns out it’s all to do with Python 3’s unicode support: When you read a file in to a string, you’re asking Python to decode the bytes in to UTF-8 (the new default encoding) at the same time. If you open the file in binary mode Python 3 will read raw bytes in to a bytestring instead, avoiding the conversion overhead and performing only 4% slower than the equivalent code in Python 2.6.4. # 28th January 2010, 1:28 pm

World Government Data. Launched last week, this is the Guardian’s meta-search engine for searching and browsing through data from four different government data sites (with more sites planned). Under the hood it’s Django, Solr, Haystack and the Scrapy crawling library. The application was built by Ben Firshman during an internship over Christmas. # 27th January 2010, 12:27 pm

For the Love of Ponies. Bryan Veloso, the discoverer of the Django Pony, makes contact with the artist who released the original drawing on iStockPhoto. # 14th January 2010, 12:05 pm

WildlifeNearYou: It began on a fort...

Back in October 2008, myself and 11 others set out on the first /dev/fort expedition. The idea was simple: gather a dozen geeks, rent a fort, take food and laptops and see what we could build in a week.

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What’s new in Django 1.2 alpha 1 (via) Multiple database support, improved CSRF prevention, a messages framework (similar to the Rails “flash” feature), model validation, custom e-mail backends, template caching for much faster handling of the include and extends tags, read only fields in the admin, a better if tag and more. Very exciting release. # 7th January 2010, 7:31 pm

last.fm for television. Dale Lane’s neat hack to visualise his television watching habits. An Ubuntu / vdx home theatre stores TV events in SQLite, and graphs are generated using Python and Open Flash Chart 2. The really clever bit: the back-end captures nearby bluetooth IDs’ allowing events to be filtered by the people watching based on the presence of their mobile phones. # 7th January 2010, 7:28 pm

Current State of Unladen Swallow (Towards a Faster Python). The Unladen Swallow team are now planning to merge their work back in to the mainline Python 3 branch, adding a powerful incentive for Python developers to port their old Python 2 code (since the official Python 2.x line is extremely unlikely to have Unladen Swallow merged in to it). # 7th January 2010, 12:41 pm

rlisagor’s freshen. A Python clone of Ruby’s innovative Cucumber testing framework. Tests are defined as a set of plain-text scenarios, which are then executed by being matched against test functions decorated with regular expressions. Has anyone used this or Cucumber? I’m intrigued but unconvinced—are the plain text scenarios really a useful way of defining tests? # 5th January 2010, 7:30 pm

Timing attack in Google Keyczar library. An issue I also need to fix in the proposed Django signing code. If you’re comparing two strings in crypto (e.g. seeing if the provided signature matches the expected signature) you need to use a timing independent string comparison function or you risk leaking information. This kind of thing is exactly why I want an audited signing module in Django rather than leaving developers to figure it out on their own. # 4th January 2010, 3:23 pm

Design and code review requested for Django string signing / signed cookies. Do you know your way around web app security and cryptography (in particular signing things using hmac and sha1)? We’d appreciate your help reviewing the usage of these concepts in Django’s proposed string signing and signed cookie implementations. # 4th January 2010, 1:24 pm

PythonInterface—OpenCV (via) OpenCV’s new Python interface looks very nice. I’d love to see some full fledged examples of using it to solve real-world computer vision problems. # 4th January 2010, 11:33 am

Videos from DjangoCon 2009. The videos from September’s DjangoCon are now available, including my “Cowboy development with Django” talk. # 3rd January 2010, 11:02 am

countdown_to_newyear.py. A quick Python / OS X script I knocked up last night to count in the new year (using the OS X “say” command). # 1st January 2010, 4:24 pm