Python-URL! – Weekly Python News and Links (June 2)

QOTW: “There is a certain charm to seeing someone happily
advocate a triangular wheel because it has one less bump per
revolution than a square wheel does.” — Chuck Swiger

“It took me years to realise how deep and important the divide
is between wanting an SDK and wanting to know the underlying
protocol.” — Tim Bray

Discussion:

Bengt Richter works out (with a few revisions, and variants from
other posters) how to make a switch-case work-alike by abusing
exceptions.

<http://groups.google.com/groups?th=535044209d026bb#link9>

Carl Banks demonstrates an introspective technique for
“declaring” local variables.

<http://groups.google.com/groups?th=b2a660906391cc6c#link5>

A draft essay explaining descriptors, by Raymond Hettinger.

<http://users.rcn.com/python/download/Descriptor.htm>

Announcements:

Python 2.2.3: A bug fix release for the Python 2.2 code
line.

<http://www.python.org/2.2.3/>

Voting for the 2003 Active Awards for open-source programmers
starts June 3.

<http://www.activestate.com/Corporate/ActiveAwards/>

EmPy 3.0: a system for embedding Python expressions and
statements in template text.

<http://www.alcyone.com/pyos/empy/>

gdmodule 0.41: A Python wrapper for the GD graphics module.

<http://newcenturycomputers.net/projects/gdmodule.html>

McMillan Installer 5b5_3: A utility for distributing Python
applications; this is a bug fix release.

<http://www.mcmillan-inc.com/installer_dnld.html>

managesieve 0.2: A MANGAGESIEVE client library for remotely
managing Sieve scripts, including an interactive ‘sieveshell’.

<http://www.crazy-compilers.com/py-lib/managesieve.html>

msnp.py 0.3: A pure-Python implementation of the MSN instant
messaging protocol.

<http://msnp.sf.net/>

PyGDChart Alpha 2: A Python interface to the GDChart graphing
library.

<http://www.nullcube.com/software/pygdchart2.html>

PyOSG 0.4.0: Python bindings for the OpenSceneGraph real-time
visualisation library.

<http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyosg>

yawPyCrypto 0.02: A more full-featured PyCrypto wrapper.

<http://ph0enix.homelinux.org/~heiko>

Everything you want is probably one or two clicks away in these
pages:

Python.org’s Python Language Website is the traditional center
of Pythonia

http://www.python.org
Notice especially the master FAQ

http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html

PythonWare complements the digest you’re reading with the daily
python url

http://www.pythonware.com/daily
Mygale is a news-gathering webcrawler that specializes in (new)
World-Wide Web articles related to Python.

http://www.awaretek.com/nowak/mygale.html
While cosmetically similar, Mygale and the Daily Python-URL are
utterly different in their technologies and generally in their
results.

comp.lang.python.announce
announces new Python software. Be sure to scan this
newly-revitalized newsgroup at least weekly.

http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python.announce

Brett Cannon continues the marvelous tradition established by
Andrew Kuchling and Michael Hudson of summarizing action on the
python-dev mailing list once every other week.

http://www.python.org/dev/summary/

The Python Package Index catalogues packages.

http://www.python.org/pypi/

The somewhat older Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collects
references to all sorts of Python resources.

http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/

Much of Python’s real work takes place on Special-Interest Group
mailing lists

http://www.python.org/sigs/

The Python Business Forum “further[s] the interests of companies
that base their business on … Python.”

http://www.python-in-business.org

The Python Software Foundation has replaced the Python
Consortium as an independent nexus of activity

http://www.python.org/psf/

Cetus does much of the same

http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_python.html

Python FAQTS

http://python.faqts.com/

The old Python “To-Do List” now lives principally in a
SourceForge reincarnation.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=355470&group_id=5470&func=browse

http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0042.html

The online Python Journal is posted at pythonjournal.cognizor.com/.
editor@pythonjournal.com and
editor@pythonjournal.cognizor.com
welcome submission of material that helps people’s understanding of
Python use, and offer Web presentation of your work.

*Py: the Journal of the Python Language*

http://www.pyzine.com

Archive probing tricks of the trade:

http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python&num=100

http://groups.google.com/groups?meta=site%3Dgroups%26group%3Dcomp.lang.python.*

Previous – (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! – messages are listed
here: http://www.ddj.com/topics/pythonurl/
http://purl.org/thecliff/python/url.html
(dormant) or

http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Python-URL!&as_ugroup=news:comp.lang.python

Suggestions/corrections for next week’s posting are always
welcome. E-mail to <Python-URL@phaseit.net>
should get through.

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• The Python-URL! Team–

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