Mailman 3 April 2004 - Python-announce-list

Europython update
by jacob＠cd.chalmers.se 14 Apr '04

14 Apr '04

Europython news update ====================== - Due to our earlier delays, we have decided to push the deadline for submitting talks until the 26th of April. While we have a nice set of proposals in several tracks, there are some that neeed a boost. Submit your talk today! - Early Bird registration is open, as is registration for cheap accomodation. Deadline for both of these is 1 May 2004. This deadline will not move. - Our keynote speakers will be Guido van Rossum and Mark Shuttleworth. If you don't know who Mark Shuttleworth is, find out at http://www.markshuttleworth.com/. If you don't know who Guido van Rossum is, you really need to come to Europython to find out. About Europython ================ Europython is a community Python and Zope conference that is now in its third year. It will be held in Göteborg, Sweden from 7 June 2004 until 9 June 2004. There will be many tracks, tutorials, sprints, good food, good weather and lots of fun. Göteborg offers lots of fun things to do, so it is a good opportunity to bring your family. Find out more at http://www.europython.org --

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ATTN: Pamie 1.0a released
by calfdog＠yahoo.com 14 Apr '04

14 Apr '04

This is an alpha release of Pamie. There have been a lot of requests by people in the SQA field for an application like this in Python. So with my very limited knowledge of development I threw Pamie together. PAMIE is Free! I just ask that if you use it, you share the knowledge to make it better. There are no Docs but it should be easy enough to figure out from the example included. It runs right from PythonWin IDE. You use the IDE for all your scripting. ============================================================================= What is Pamie? http://pamie.sourceforge.net/ Pamie allows you to write python scripts in order to drive Internet Explorer. Pamie is a lite python port of SAMIE written in Perl by Henry Wasserman. This is a "free" open source tool written for QA Engineers or Developers as a means to simulate users exploring a web site. Example: Shopper going to a product page, adding items to a cart and making a purchase or perhaps a user registering using an online registration/enrollment form. Pamie is in the begining stages but is still quite useable. Functions available for pam.py verison 1.0a: ClickButton - Simulates a user clicking a button ClickFrameLink - Simulates a user clicking link within a frame ClickFormButton - Simulates a user clicking a form (submit) button ClickImage - Simulates a user clicking an image ClickLink - Simulates a user clicking a link GetFrameNames - Get the names of the frames for that page SetCheckBox - Simulates a user setting a checkbox to "True" or "False"' SetRadioButton - Simulates a user setting a radio button to "True" or "False"' SetFramesEditBox - Simulates a user entering text into a textbox within a frame SetListBox - Simulates a user selecting a listbox item SetTextBox - - Simulates a user entering text into a textbox For more information Contact: rmarchetti(a)users.sourceforge.net This is no support for pop-ups at this time.

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ANNOUNCE: HamCannon 0.1 beta
by Doug Winter 14 Apr '04

14 Apr '04

HamCannon is a Zope/Plone Product for managing outbound email marketing. HamCannon is for sending ham, not spam - it has much support for helping users unsubscribe and none for hiding from them. Please don't use HamCannon to send spam. HamCannon provides all of the tools required to produce personalised email newsletters or other email marketing, with: * subscription management * open tracking, bounce tracking and link tracking * complete statistical reporting * complete personalisation, limited only by your data Newsletters are composed using Zope Page Templates, which are provided with list and user objects, containing all information necessary for rendering themselves for that user. Links are automatically converted to tracked versions, and an opentracking image is inserted after the body tag. Images are downloaded and bundled into the email, to allow them to work offline. HamCannon is in active use, but beta testers are required to help produce a package with complete and useful documentation. Also, HamCannon has only been tested with Plone 1.0.5. Plone 2.0 testers would be appreciated. HamCannon is released under the GNU General Public License. See the website: http://www.hamcannon.com Or the Sourceforge Project for files: http://www.sf.net/projects/hamcannon Doug Winter ICP Europe -- 020 79610341 / 07879 423002 / dwinter(a)icpeurope.net 3 Waterhouse Square, Holborn Bars, 142 Holborn, London EC1N 2NX www.businesseurope.com www.icpeurope.net www.venturedome.com 1024D/1AB26B8C C88E DC6D A578 DEFB C493 A44D 0156 0479 1AB2 6B8C

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ANNOUNCE: Aiakos 0.2 beta
by Doug Winter 14 Apr '04

14 Apr '04

Aiakos is an innovative distributed authentication system, based on Zope and Plone. Much of the heavy lifting is done using the LDAPUserFolder product by Jens Vagelpohl. Aiakos allows you to provide a central sign-on system for a network of websites. All login and registration activity takes place on the central Aiakos server. Participating sites receive encrypted authentication packages from the authentication server, with which they can authenticate users. Client libraries are provided for Microsoft Windows (as COM objects) and as a Zope Product for Plone 1. The central user database is stored on an LDAP server, and participating sites are provided with access to the LDAP server for complex user-related activity - however, most sites will never need this. In addition a distributed event logging system is included, that allows interesting events to be recorded on participating sites, and then collected by a central server. Aiakos is released under the GNU General Public License. Aiakos is beta software, but is in very active testing. See the Aiakos website for more information: http://aiakos.sourceforge.net Doug Winter ICP Europe -- 020 79610341 / 07879 423002 / dwinter(a)icpeurope.net 3 Waterhouse Square, Holborn Bars, 142 Holborn, London EC1N 2NX www.businesseurope.com www.icpeurope.net www.venturedome.com 1024D/1AB26B8C C88E DC6D A578 DEFB C493 A44D 0156 0479 1AB2 6B8C

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pyAlbum.py is now PyAC
by Premshree Pillai 14 Apr '04

14 Apr '04

Hello, pyAlbum.py is now called PyAC - Python Album Creator. The project has been moved to SourceForge. It's at http://pyac.sourceforge.net If you have created an album using pyAlbum.py (NOT pyAlbum) or PyAC, and are interested in having your album's link placed at the development website, drop a line to pyalbum[AT]rediffmail[DOT]com -Premshree Pillai ===== -Premshree [http://www.qiksearch.com/] ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/

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Hey, Corporate America! Show Taxpayers Some Appreciation!
by robbie＠votenader.org 13 Apr '04

13 Apr '04

Hey, Corporate America! Show Taxpayers Some Appreciation! By Ralph Nader If you work for a corporation, ask your own employer to support Taxpayer Appreciation Day. (Weve included contact information at the end of the article.) Take Action Now! April 15 is just around the corner. Please let us know what action youve taken and what type of response you receive at taxday(a)votenader.org I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that April 15th of each year be designated Taxpayer Appreciation Day, a day when corporations receiving taxpayer subsidies, bailouts, and other forms of corporate welfare can express their thanks to the citizens who provide them. Though it may not be evident, quite a few industries -- and the profits they generate -- can be traced back to taxpayer-financed programs whose fruits have been given away to (mostly) larger businesses. Taxpayer dollars have often funded discoveries made by NASA, the Department of Defense, and the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. In many instances the rights to those discoveries were later given away to companies that brag about them as though they were the fruits of their own investments. Taxpayer dollars have played a major role in the growth of the aviation and aerospace, biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications industries -- to name only a few. Though corporate America insists it must file yearly income taxes just like everyone else, it is responsible for a sharply decreasing portion of federal tax dollars -- despite record profits. Despite record profits, corporate tax contributions to the federal budget have been steadily declining for fifty years and now stand at a mere 7.4% of the federal government income because of the loopholes they driven into our tax laws. The average citizen pays more than four to five times that in federal income tax revenues (with the single exception of payroll taxes). Clearly corporations that believe they are self-reliant are often, in fact, dependent on taxpayer funds to maintain their financial viability. The least they could do is thank us. Which is why we need something like Taxpayer Appreciation Day. Consider the following: General Electric bought RCA (which owned NBC) in the mid-1980s with funds it was able to save by using an outrageous tax loophole passed by Congress in 1981. That loophole allowed GE to pay no federal taxes on three years of profits, totaling more than $6 billion dollars. It also gave them a $125 million refund! That gave GE the money to buy RCA. GE should arrange a media extravaganzas on NBC to say "Thank you, taxpayers. Pharmaceutical companies constantly ballyhoo their discoveries in advertisements. What they don't tell us is that many of the important nonredundant therapeutic drugs -- including most anticancer drugs -- were developed, in whole or in part, with taxpayer money and then given to them by the NIH and the Defense Department. Bristol-Meyers Squibb, for example, controls the rights to Taxol, an anticancer drug developed all the way through human clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health with $31 million of taxpayer moneys. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions on advertisements each year. Perhaps they should consider a big "Thank You, Taxpayers" ad campaign every April 15, if only to remind them where their drug research and development subsidies come from. Mining companies often receive vast sweetheart deals from taxpayers. Under the 1872 Mining Act hard rock mining companies are allowed to purchase mining rights to public land for only $5 an acre, no matter how valuable the minerals on (or in) that land might be. A Canadian company recently mined $9 billion in gold on federal land in Nevada after using the Mining Act to purchase the mining rights to it for about $30,000. Mining companies owe the taxpayers their gratitude. Television broadcasters were given free license to use public airwaves (worth around $70 billion) by a supine Congress in 1997. They too should thank us. What about all those professional sports corporations that play and profit in taxpayer-funded stadiums and arenas? The owners and players should thank the fans/taxpayers who -- in spite of their largess -- still must pay through the nose for tickets. For years McDonalds received taxpayer subsidies to promote its products overseas as part of a foreign market access program. Now McDonalds is a ubiquitous brand name worldwide, but has it ever thanked the taxpayers who underwrote its efforts? Then there are the HMOs, hospitals, and defense contractors that have had their legal fees reimbursed by the taxpayers when our government prosecutes them for fraud or cost overruns. Those companies have great public relations firms that can help them show us their gratitude. Corporate America has taken too much from us for too long. It's time it shows us a little bit of appreciation. Corporate Contacts: General Electric (NBC): David Frail Financial Communications 1--203-373-3387 david.frail(a)corporate.ge.com Bristol-Meyers Squibb: Peter R. Dolan, CEO 345 Park Avenue New York, New York, USA 10154-0037 1-212-546-4000 peter.dolan(a)bms.com Viacom (CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, BET, Paramount Pictures, Viacom Outdoor, Infinity, UPN, Spike TV, TV Land, CMT: Country Music Television, Comedy Central, Showtime, Blockbuster, and Simon & Schuster): Sumner M. Redstone , Chairman and CEO 1515 Broadway New York, NY 10036 1-212-258-6000 (refused to provide email addresses) Walt Disney Co. (ABC): David Eisner, CEO 500 S. Buena Vista Street Burbank, CA 91521 ABC, Inc. 1-818-460-7477 netaudr(a)abc.com McDonalds USA: Jim Cantalupo, Chairman and CEO McDonalds Plaza Oak Brook, IL 60523 1-800-244-6227 Email on-line form. Halliburton (Kellogg Brown & Root): David J. Lesar, Chairman, President & CEO 5 Houston Center 1401 McKinney, Suite 2400 Houston, TX 77010 1-713-759-2600 communityrelations(a)halliburton.com In addition to these, pursue your favorite and let us know what they say! -- address their October 6, 2002 rally in Central Park. Stewart was indicted for passing messages on behalf of her terrorist client Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman. One of the members of NION's Advisory Board, Abdeen Jabara, is a member of the legal advisory board for the American Muslim Council. He is a past president of the Arab-American Ant-Discrimination Committee, a board member of William Kunstler's Center for Constitutional Rights, and a co-counsel with Lynne Stewart for Sheik Rahman, the terrorist convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The American Muslim Council is one of the current members of Al-Arian's NCPPF (the same group to which IFCO's Bernstein belongs). Leaders of the AMC have been quoted as praising Hamas and Hezbollah. Jabara's AMC advisory board colleagues include Fakhri Al-Barzinji. Al-Barzinji is involved in Mar-Jac Poultry, which was raided last year by the FBI for links to Sami Al-Arian. Bashir Ahmad is another of Jabara's AMC advisory board colleagues. Ahmad is a member of the SAMAD Group (a financial operation) and Justice Taqi Usmani works for the SAMAD Group. Taqi Usmani is a suspected major player in the

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ANN: cssutils v0.51 Released
by chris 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

what is it ---------- A Python package to parse and build CSS Cascading Style Sheets. Partly implement the DOM Level 2 CSS interfaces. Additional some cssutils only convenience and (hopefully) more pythonic methods are integrated. Thanks to Cory Dodt for helpful suggestions and some code patches and to David Mertz for his book "Text Processing in Python" and the included statemachine.py which is used for cssutils kind request Cssutils are far from being perfect or even complete, if you find bugs or have suggestions or problems please contact me. changes in this release ----------------------- there have been quite a few changes since the last release, for full details please see the changes.txt. But I think the API will be more stable from now on. NEW - implemented at least partly almost all DOM Level 2 CSS interfaces now - complete rewrite of CSSParser including logging CSSParser writes all error messages to a log now. you can provide your own log. CSSParser might be configured just to log errors or to raise xml.dom.DOMExceptions when finding any bug - most classes shifted to other submodules. please use the stable main modules cssutils.cssparser for parsing cssutils.cssbuilder for building only - added unittests for most classes - made a distribution package complete with setup.py API CHANGES - attribute style of class StyleRule made private (_style) - REMOVED StyleRule.clearStyleDeclaration() - REMOVED class Selector, integrated into rules now - DEPRECATED StyleDeclaration.addProperty - DEPRECATED cssrule.SimpleAtRule and empty now use subclasses of CSSRule (CharsetRule, ImportRule, FontFaceRule or PageRule) instead - cssmediarule.MediaRule init parameter "medias" renamed to "media" - Comment attribute "comment" renamed to "text" - StyleSheet.getRules() returns a RuleList now license ------- cssutils is published under the LGPL. download -------- download cssutils v0.51 - 040412 from http://cthedot.de/cssutils/ Needs Python 2.3. Uses xml.dom.DOMException and subclasses so may need PyXML. Tested with Python 2.3.3 on Windows XP with PyXML 0.8.3 installed. examples -------- parse a CSSStyleSheet Normally a CSS parser should ignore errors in a CSS stylesheet. So the default instantiation of CSSParser (parameter raiseExceptions=False) does not raise any exceptions but writes all errors in a parsed CSS to a log file now. You might provide your own log with parameter log=YOURLOG. This example does not use the log but would stop on the first error. from cssutils.cssparser import CSSParser p = CSSParser(raiseExceptions=True) try: css = p.parseString('body { color :red }') # or p.parse('filename.css') except xml.dom.DOMException, e: print e css.pprint() # prettyprinter s.b. outputs body { color: red; } build a new CSSStyleSheet Not all interfaces of DOM Level 2 CSS are implemented yet. But they will be provided in future versions of the cssbuilder module. The following is a simple example how to build a CSSStyleSheet object. from cssutils.cssbuilder import * # init CSSStylesheet css = StyleSheet() # build a rule r = StyleRule() r.addSelector('body') r.addSelector('b') # a second one d = StyleDeclaration() d.setProperty('color', 'red') # old addProperty is DEPRECATED r.setStyleDeclaration(d) # build @media Rule mr = MediaRule(' print, tv ') d = StyleDeclaration() d.setProperty('color', '#000') r = StyleRule('body', d) mr.addRule(r) # compose stylesheet css.addComment('basic styles') css.addComment('styles for print or tv') css.addRule(mr) css.insertRule(r, 1) # output css.pprint(2) outputs /* basic styles */ body, b { color: red; } /* styles for print or tv */ @media print, tv { body { color: #000; } } thanks christof hoeke http://cthedot.de <P><A HREF="http://cthedot.de/cssutils/">cssutils 0.51</A> - a CSS Cascading Style Sheets library for Python (12-Apr-04)

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pyAlbum.py: EXIF support added
by Premshree Pillai 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

Hello, I've now added an optional EXIF support to pyAlbum.py (http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/271246) A sample album is available at http://premshree.seacrow.com/temp/pics/2004-04-11/index.htm -Premshree Pillai ===== -Premshree [http://www.qiksearch.com/] ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online. http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony/

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TeXML, the XML vocabulary for TeX
by usenet＠datahansa.com 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

Hello colleagues, I'd like to introduce you TeXML, the XML vocabulary for TeX: http://getfo.org/texml/ http://getfo.sourceforge.net/texml/ A processor (written in Python) translates TeXML source into TeX. | Example of TeXML to TeX translation | | TeXML: | | <cmd name="documentclass"> | <opt>12pt</opt> | <parm>letter</parm> | </cmd> | | TeX: | | \documentclass[12pt]{letter} One of the main benefits of TeXML usage is automatic translation of the TeX special symbols. | Example of translation of special TeX symbols | | TeXML: | | <TeXML>\section{No break}</TeXML> | | TeX: | | $\backslash$section\{No~break\} The TeXML processor supports different output encodings and escapes out-of-encoding chars | Example of translation of non-ASCII characters | | TeXML: | | <TeXML>ТеХ</TeXML> | | TeX in ASCII encoding: | | \cyrchar\CYRT \cyrchar\cyre \cyrchar\CYRH | | TeX in Russian encoding | | TeX If you automatically generate TeX files, there are some benefits to generating TeXML instead of TeX: * you avoid painful handling of TeX special characters, * you don't have to bother about encodings, * you can write error-free code more easily. To expand on the last point, if for example, you want to generate | {\bf bold} One of the approaches is to generate "{", then "\bf " (with trailing space) and then "}". It is easy to miss the space or to forget a brace or write an incorrect symbol. But when you use TeXML, it takes care of it for you: | <group><cmd name="bf"/>bold</group> I hope you will find TeXML useful. Your comments are welcome. Regards, Oleg

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ANN: dotamatic poster and "art" creator
by Roger Binns 11 Apr '04

11 Apr '04

dotamatic is a program that allows you to print out images across many sheets of paper, using a variety of styles for the pixels. It was inspired by The Rasterbator http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/ http://dotamatic.sourceforge.net It all started due to a thread on comp.lang.python: http://tinyurl.com/36gwg It is also a demonstration of distributing a program written in Python and wxPython that can be installed without the end users being aware of that, or of needing to have Python or any accessories installed (provided for Windows, Linux and Mac). It also demonstrates printing and online help. Roger

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