1,161 posts tagged “python”
The Python programming language.
2010
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.
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.
[... 558 words]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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
Videos from DjangoCon 2009. The videos from September's DjangoCon are now available, including my "Cowboy development with Django" talk (also on the Internet Archive).
I talked about building Wildlife Near You on a /dev/fort trip to Alderney and the MP's expenses project at the Guardian.
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).
2009
Web Sockets in Tornado. Bret Taylor has a simple class making it trivial to experiment with the Web Sockets protocol (now shipping in Chrome) using the scalable Tornado application server. He also raises the million dollar question: what will existing load balancers and proxies make of the new protocol?
Socket Benchmark of Asynchronous Servers in Python. A comparison of eight different asynchronous networking frameworks in Python. Tornado comes out on top in most of the benchmarks, but the post is most interesting for the direct comparison of simple code examples for each of the frameworks.
Django | Multiple Databases. Russell just checked in the final patch developed from Alex Gaynor’s Summer of Code project to add multiple database support to Django. I’d link to the 21,000 line changeset but it crashed our Trac, so here’s the documentation instead.
Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses
As you may have heard, the UK government released a fresh batch of MP expenses documents a week ago on Thursday. I spent that week working with a small team at Guardian HQ to prepare for the release. Here’s what we built:
[... 2,081 words]Django-Jython 1.1.0 released. Django on Jython matches its minor version numbers to Django, so this new release is compatible with Django 1.1.
Guardian iPhone app. Released today, ad-free, £2.39 for the application, has an excellent offline mode. I helped build the backend web service, which is a Django app running on EC2.
Fixing Django Management Commands. Zachary Voase proposes dramatically improving Django’s management command API for Django 1.3. I’m in favour—management commands are one of the only APIs in Django that I have to look up every single time I use. My optfunc library was written partially with management commands in mind—Zachary favours the argparse library.
Python’s Moratorium—Let’s think about this. Jesse Noller explains the thinking behind the Python Language Moratorium (no new language features until Python 3.3) in great detail. It’s principally about allowing both end users and alternative implementations to catch up. The standard library will continue to evolve as normal.
What’s coming in Django 1.2 (presentation notes). I wrote up some background notes for the talk on Django 1.2 I gave at DJUGL last week.
Namespaces. Python’s approach to imports is possibly my favourite feature of the language. I love being able to scan up to the top of a file in my text editor and see exactly where every symbol comes from, no IDE required.
Haystack 1.0 Final Released. I’ve used Haystack on a number of projects recently, and it has proved itself as a completely painless way of adding full-text search (using Solr or Whoosh—I haven’t tried the Xapian backend yet) to a Django ORM powered project in just a few minutes. Congratulations, Daniel + contributors.
Djangopeople JSON parser. Awesome—Andy McKay has compensated for the lack of an official DjangoPeople API by creating a JSONP screen scraped API and hosting it on App Engine. As far as I’m concerned this is an officially supported feature—I’ll make sure future site changes don’t break it, and when I do add an API I’ll try to keep it compatible and help Andy set up redirects.
Request Routing With URI Templates in Node.JS. I quite like this approach (though the implementation is a bit “this” heavy for my taste). JavaScript has no equivalent to Python’s raw strings, so regular expression based routing ala Django ends up being a bit uglier in JavaScript. URI template syntax is more appealing.
Woof—simply exchange files (via) Ultra simple file sharing for local networks: run “woof filename” to start a local web server which will serve up that file, just once, and then terminate. Can also serve up an entire directory as a compressed archive. Written in Python, as a single script which you can drop in to your ~/bin. “woof -s” serves the script itself, so you can easily pass it to someone who has a file you want.
django-batch-select (via) A smart attempt at solving select_related for many-to-many relationships in Django. Add a custom manager to your model and call e.g. Entry.objects.all()[:10].batch_select(“tags”) to execute two queries—one pulling back the first ten entries and another using an “IN” query against the tags table to pull back all of the tags for those entries in one go.
Debugging in Python. The missing manual for Python’s powerful pdb debugger.
Drupal or Django? A Guide for Decision Makers. A surprisingly interesting comparison—the author describes Django as “a framework with CMS-like tendencies” and Drupal as “a CMS with framework-like tendencies”, then explores the benefits of those two different approaches.
How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools. This is the trick I’ve been using to generate choropleths at the Guardian for the past year: figure out the preferred colours for a set of data in a Python script and then rewrite an SVG file to colour in the areas. I use ElementTree rather than BeautifulSoup but the technique is exactly the same. The best thing about SVG is that our graphics department can export them directly out of Illustrator, with named layers and paths automatically becoming SVG ID attributes. Bonus tip: sometimes you don’t have to rewrite the SVG XML at all, instead you can generate CSS to colour areas by ID selector and inject it in to the top of the file.
Writing good documentation (part 1). Jacob explains some of the philosophy behind Django’s documentation. Topical guides are particularly interesting—many projects skip them (leaving books to fill the gap) but they fill an essential gap between tutorials and low-level reference documentation.