Posts tagged: PYTHON

Python and WSGI

This morning I took Mark Ramm’s “Modern Web Development with Python and WSGI” tutorial. Mark had people build stuff during class, which was a great way to have these concepts sink in. I successfully built a little WSGI-powered site in just a few minutes. As Chas promised (but I didn’t actually believe him), it’s pretty simple stuff.

For a long while I’ve pointed people to Joe Gregorio’s Robaccia as a way to understand concepts behind web frameworks, and to get a sense of why you shouldn’t just dive in and make your own without grasping those concepts. Ironically, Joe’s “throwaway” framework has refused to die, and now it’s got a home on Google Code.

On July 4th, which in America is a holiday involving even less attention paid to international events than usual, a wonderful thing happened to Django. On that day the Unicode branch, whose goal was to make it easier to work with non-ASCII character data in Django, was merged into the main development version (or “trunk” in svn-speak). There’s an application porting guide on the Django wiki.

The main reason I’m making this post, though, is because while Malcolm Tredinnick’s blog doesn’t allow comments (nudge) I wanted to make sure he was publicly thanked for all his hard work on this project. While he notes that the project “was in no way a solo effort”, there’s no question that Malcolm deserves a huge round of applause, or many pints of beer, or some other international sign of gratititude. The evidence is hard to refute.

Back in February I mentioned Scott Rosenberg’s book Dreaming in Code. Somehow I never got around to posting more extended comments. Recently I was asked, by someone who had followed the Chandler project but hadn’t seen the book, to clarify why I thought the story was sad. This post is a cobbling-together of my answer to that question as well as some comments I made in the course of our group-interview on the Well. (Short of reading the book, you can learn quite a bit about it from the many interviews Scott has given.)

I just wanted to make a quick post to say thank-you to the 20+ people who showed up for Django.June yesterday. As I said in the morning, without you I just would have been one crazy guy with a wiki and an empty room.

The MEF meeting room worked great. They had some last-minute projector trouble so I brought a replacement borrowed from work. (Thanks to the crack projector troubleshooting team for helping me figure out how to focus. Analog controls, who would have thought!)

That nifty feature Python stole from Haskell (or was it Erlang?), “list comprehensions”, is found in the latest version of Javascript (available in Firefox 2.0) under the name “array comprehensions”. Cool!

via John Resig.

My primary email client for my e-scribe mail is mutt. This came about in an almost accidental way.

Last summer I moved all my websites and mail to a new server. As I was setting it up I realized that I had an opportunity to decide that no passwords for this box would ever be sent in the clear. No telnet and no FTP, that was easy. But given the hassle of setting up encrypted mail authentication, I had in the past let that one slide. So I decided that until I set it up properly, I’d use a terminal-based mail reader over SSH. No unencrypted POP3 or IMAP for me. I looked around and decided mutt looked good.

Back in January I posted about the idea of having a get-together of Django programmers here in Northampton in June, playing on the Django (Reinhardt) in June music festival happening at the same time.

I finally found time to put a page together, and people are beginning to sign up. So if you’re a Django person and you’re within range of Northampton, check it out!