I first heard about Blaze from NumPy’s original developer’s blog back in December 2012. A few days ago, InformationWeek announced that DARPA was funding the project to the tune of $3 million dollars to get some big data libraries written for Python. There will be two new projects, Blaze and Bokeh. Blaze will be an
Python Gets Funded by DARPA for Big Data Project: Blaze Read More »
I was approached by a representative from No Starch Press, the publisher of Python For Kids, to review their book. They provided me with a free dead tree copy and an eBook (PDF) version. This book appears to be in direct competition with Manning’s
Book Review: Python For Kids – A Playful Introduction to Programming Read More »
The other day, I was trying to figure out if there was an easy way to grab a class’s defined attributes (AKA “instance variables”). The reason was that we were using the attributes we created to match up with the fields in a file we parse. So basically we read a file line-by-line and each
How to Get a List of Class Attributes in Python Read More »
I forgot to get this article done for the first of the year as I have in the past. I hope you find some interesting reading material from this tardy post. I also hope my readers have had wonderful holidays and are looking forward to the upcoming year! Note: I use Google Analytics to help
Top Ten Articles of 2012 Read More »
If you do much system administration, then you know that sometimes you have to write scripts that can move files between servers. I’m not really a system administrator by trade, but I did have to do this sort of thing in some of my programs anyway. Python has several 3rd party packages that provide this
Python 101: How to Move Files between Servers Read More »
The Python Software Foundation recently put out an announcement about a central Python events calendar. I thought that was really cool, so I’m reproducing their announcement here. Spread the word! ________________________________________________________________________ ANNOUNCING Central Python Events Calendars maintained by the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and a group of volunteers ________________________________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION The PSF has put together
Central Python Events Calendar Announced Read More »
Python provides robust exception handing baked right into the language. Exception handing is something every programmer will need to learn. It allows the programmer to continue their program or gracefully terminate the application after an exception has occurred. Python uses a try/except/finally convention. We’ll spend some time learning about standard exceptions, how to create a
Python 101: Exception Handling Read More »
There are a lot of computer languages that include the ternary (or tertiary) operator, which is basically a one-line conditional expression in Python. If you’re interested, you can read about the various ways it’s rendered in other languages over on Wikipedia. Here we will spend some time looking at several different examples and why you
Python 101: The Ternary Operator Read More »
Some people complained about my last logging article, wondering if it was even necessary since the docs and Doug Hellman have already written on the topic. I sometimes wonder why I write on these topics too, but usually when I do, I get lots of readers. In this case, I’ve gotten almost 10,000 hits just
Python logging with lggr Read More »
The other day, I stumbled across a question on StackOverflow asking how to get the children widgets of a BoxSizer. In wxPython, you would expect to call the sizer’s GetChildren() method. However, this returns a list of SizerItems objects rather than a list of the actual widgets themselves. You can see the difference if you
wxPython: How to Get Children Widgets from a Sizer Read More »
People keep on asking fun wxPython questions on StackOverflow. Today they wanted to know how to make “flashing text” in wxPython. That’s actually a pretty easy thing to do. Let’s take a look at some simple code: import random import time import wx ######################################################################## class MyPanel(wx.Panel): “””””” #———————————————————————- def __init__(self, parent): “””Constructor””” wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent) self.font
wxPython: How to make “flashing text” Read More »
This week I bought Rick Copeland’s MongoDB with Python and Ming eBook from Amazon. It just came out in July 2012, so I figured I should check it out and see what all the fuss is with MongoDB and the whole NoSQL fad. Quick Review Why I picked it up: Mainly because I’ve been interested
eBook Review: MongoDB with Python and Ming Read More »
I am currently working on a book review for a college course Python book that uses the Python turtle module and Tkinter to help teach the Python programming language. Hopefully I’ll have that book done by the end of the month. In the mean time, it made me decide to give the turtle module a
Python: Using Turtles for Drawing Circles Read More »
Earlier this week, I wrote a simple post about Python’s Queues and demonstrated how they can be used with a threading pool to download a set of PDFs from the United States Internal Revenue Service’s website. Today I decided to try “porting” that code over to Python’s multiprocessing module. As one of my readers pointed
Python Concurrency: Porting from a Queue to Multiprocessing Read More »