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Python-URL! – Weekly Python News and Links (June 30)

QOTW: “Giving full access rights to a secretary or new
programmer ought to insure an occasional random file deletion.” —
Raymond Hettinger

“I always use join, but that’s probably because that method is
more likely to run code that I once wrote. Never trust code written
by a man who uses defines to create his own C syntax.” — Fredrik
Lundh

Discussion

Peter Hansen is right in complimenting Sorin Marti on his
excellent problem description, and helps with reading binary data
from a file.
<http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3EFB0E26.9A069A9C%40engcorp.com>

Fredrik Lundh shows how easy it is to write macro-like
extensions for your Python application.
<http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>

Tim Delaney provides a mutable string class that can be used to
concatenate strings efficiently and easily, instead of using
myPage+=”more html…” or “n”.join(strings).
<http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>

Bengt Richter gives a possible explanation of the (historic?)
distiction between carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF), and how
this bears on problems with “shebang” scripts.
<http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>

Alan Kennedy explains why compiling to C code is not always
guaranteed to speed things up, and why PyPy (Python written in
Python!) could help in the performance department.
<http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>

Raymond Hettinger explains the purpose of some of the recent
iteration constructs (itertools), and why things are this way.
<http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=PmwJa.6109$N%[email protected]>

Edvard Majakari shares interesting opinions on Unit Testing and
test-driven development.
<http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>

Announcements

PyRex 0.8, a language for writing Python extension modules.
<http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python/Pyrex/>

M2Crypto 0.11, a crypto and SSL toolkit for Python.
<http://www.post1.com/home/ngps/m2>

PythonCAD 8th release, a CAD package written in Python.
<http://www.pythoncad.org/>

DocUtils 0.3, a system for processing plaintext documentation
(reStructuredText markup).
<http://docutils.sourceforge.net/>
Scratchy 0.4, an Apache log parser and HTML report generator.
<http://scratchy.sourceforge.net/>

ClientForm 0.0.10 and 0.1.3a, a Python module for handling HTML
forms on the client.
<http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/ClientForm/>

SCons 0.90, a software construction tool (build tool, or make
tool).
<http://www.scons.org/>

Twisted 1.0.6, an event-driven networking framework for server
and client applications.
<http://www.twistedmatrix.com/>

David Mertz, our own Lulu, presents Twisted to a wider
audience.
<http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-twist1.html>

TTFQuery 0.2.4, builds on the FontTools module to allow you to
query TTF font-files for metadata and glyph outlines.
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/ttfquery/>


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/.
[email protected] and
[email protected]
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 <[email protected]>
should get through.

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