Mailman 3 May 2008 - Python-announce-list

[pygtk] ANNOUNCE: PyGObject 2.14.2
by Johan Dahlin May 23, 2008

May 23, 2008

I am pleased to announce version 2.14.2 of the Python bindings for GObject. The new release is available from ftp.gnome.org as and its mirrors as soon as its synced correctly: http://download.gnome.org/sources/pygobject/2.14/ What's new since PyGObject 2.14.1: - Allow gobject.property work with subclasses. (#523352, Tomeu Vizoso) - Unbreak Source.prepare (#523075, Bryan Silverthorn) - Never override customly set 'tp_new' and 'tp_alloc' (Paul Pogonyshev) - Don't link against libffi if we cannot find libffi on the system. (#496006, Ed Catmur) - Dist .m4 files. (#496011, Ed Catmur) - Don't return NULL after warning of enum comparsion (#519631, Paul Pogonyshev) Blurb: GObject is a object system library used by GTK+ and GStreamer. PyGObject provides a convenient wrapper for the GObject+ library for use in Python programs, and takes care of many of the boring details such as managing memory and type casting. When combined with PyGTK, PyORBit and gnome-python, it can be used to write full featured Gnome applications. Like the GObject library itself PyGObject is licensed under the GNU LGPL, so is suitable for use in both free software and proprietary applications. It is already in use in many applications ranging from small single purpose scripts up to large full featured applications. PyGObject requires GObject >= 2.8.0 and Python >= 2.3.5 to build. -- Johan Dahlin jdahlin(a)async.com.br

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[ANN] Mayavi sprint in July 2008
by Prabhu Ramachandran May 23, 2008

May 23, 2008

Hi, This is to announce a Mayavi sprint between 2nd July to 9th July, 2008. The sprint will be held at the Enthought Office, Austin Texas. Here are the details: Dates: 2nd July 2008 to 9th July 2008 Location: Enthought Office at Austin, TX Please do join us -- even if it is only for a few days. Both Gaël Varoquaux and myself will be at the sprint on all days and there will be developers from Enthought joining us as well. Enthought is graciously hosting the sprint at their office. The agenda for the sprint is yet to be decided. Please contact me off-list if you plan on attending. Thanks! About Mayavi ------------ Mayavi seeks to provide easy and interactive visualization of 3D data. It is distributed under the terms of the new BSD license. It is built atop the Enthought Tool Suite and VTK. It provides an optional rich UI and a clean Pythonic API with native support for numpy arrays. Mayavi strives to be a reusable tool that can be embedded in your applications in different ways or combined with the envisage application-building framework to assemble domain-specific tools. For more information see here: http://code.enthought.com/projects/mayavi/ cheers, -- Prabhu Ramachandran http://www.aero.iitb.ac.in/~prabhu

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ANN: tinypy 1.1 released
by dwhall May 22, 2008

May 22, 2008

On behalf of Phil Hassey, I would like to announce that tinypy 1.1 is released. Tinypy is a small Python (subset) VM. Download: http://tinypy.googlecode.com/files/tinypy-1.1.tar.gz Main Site: http://www.tinypy.org/ Code site: http://code.google.com/p/tinypy/ Group & mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/tinypy Author's blog: http://www.philhassey.com/blog/category/tinypy/

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Wing IDE 3.1.1 released
by Wingware May 22, 2008

May 22, 2008

Hi, Wingware has released version 3.1.1 of Wing IDE. This bug fix release is available for all three product levels of Wing IDE. *Release Highlights* This release includes the following: * Template tool properly supports 2nd+ like-named fields * Several VI mode improvements * Replace in selection fixes * Maintain caret position when auto-strip trailing white space * Avoid trying to use unsupported Python versions * About 20 other bug fixes: see the change log for details: http://wingware.com/pub/wingide/3.1.1/CHANGELOG.txt *Downloads* Wing IDE Professional and Wing IDE Personal are commercial software and require a license to run. A free trial license can be obtained directly from the product when launched. Wing IDE Pro 3.1.1 http://wingware.com/downloads/wingide/3.1 Wing IDE Personal 3.1.1 http://wingware.com/downloads/wingide-personal/3.1 Wing IDE 101 3.1.1 http://wingware.com/downloads/wingide-101/3.1 *About Wing IDE* Wing IDE is an integrated development environment for the Python programming language. It provides powerful debugging, editing, code intelligence, testing, and search capabilities that reduce development and debugging time, cut down on coding errors, and make it easier to understand and navigate Python code. Wing IDE is available in three product levels: Wing IDE Professional is the full-featured Python IDE, Wing IDE Personal offers a reduced feature set at a low price, and Wing IDE 101 is a free simplified version designed for teaching entry level programming courses with Python. System requirements are Windows 2000 or later, OS X 10.3.9 or later for PPC or Intel (requires X11 Server), or a recent Linux system (either 32 or 64 bit). Wing IDE 3.1 supports Python versions 2.0.x through 2.5.x. *New Features in Wing 3.1* This release adds the following features not found in Wing 3.0.x: * Support for zip archives * Support for pkg_resources name spaces and eggs * Support for doctest and nose style unit tests (*) * Scan for sys.path changes such as those used in buildout * How-To and support for Google App Engine * Inline context appropriate templates/snippets integrated with autocompleter (*) * Word list driven auto-completion in non-Python files (**) * Quick navigation to files and symbols by typing a fragment (**) * Improved support for Stackless Python * Preference to strip trailing white space on save * Display gi_running and gi_frame for generators * Improved code analysis for Python 2.5 * Other minor features and bug fixes not found in Wing 3.0.x (*)'d items are available in Wing IDE Professional only. (**)'d items are available in Wing IDE Personal or Professional only. Please see the change log for a detailed list of changes: http://wingware.com/pub/wingide/3.1.1/CHANGELOG.txt *Purchasing and Upgrading* Wing 3.1 is a free upgrade for all Wing IDE 3.0 users. Any 2.x license sold after May 2nd 2006 is free to upgrade; others cost 1/2 the normal price to upgrade. Upgrade a 2.x license: https://wingware.com/store/upgrade Purchase a 3.x license: https://wingware.com/store/purchase -- The Wingware Team Wingware | Python IDE Advancing Software Development www.wingware.com

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Python/ZCA Healthcare Project Announcement
by Tim Cook May 21, 2008

May 21, 2008

Hi All, I apologize for the length of and the cross posting of this announcement in advance but I believe it will be of value to you if you have ANY interest in the healthcare IT field. Even if you do not have interest now; you may well after you realize the staggering growth that is occurring in this sector. The healthcare sector is a very complex information management space. Healthcare IT applications are notorious for their lack of real interoperability. This of course increases the overall healthcare costs due to lost and/or missing information. While the rate of adoption of IT in direct patient care scenarios has been slow in the past; it is expected to increase dramatically over the next few years. A recent study shows that there will be a demand for an additional 40,000+ healthcare information technology workers IN THE US alone: http://medir.ohsu.edu/~hersh/hit-workforce-hersh.pdf The current situation for funding healthcare IT projects is that agencies will have a specific healthcare information management need and can only fund for that project. Examples are; a diabetes registry or an AIDS treatment tracking application. The result is that they get the application that fills that need but the information is in a specific format for that project and is, more often than not, incapable of being shared with any semantic meaning with any other application. Can the business of healthcare IT continue in this way? While there has been much work done over the last 40 years on healthcare IT standards, we still aren't ahead of the game on any major scale. However, a core group of people have been working for almost two decades with a primary principle of 'implementation'. Basically, if it can't be implemented then it doesn't work. A history of their research and development efforts is worth the quick read: http://www.openehr.org/about/origins.html Implementation is already proven in an opensource Eiffel reference implementation as well as an opensource Java implementation of the Reference Model. There is also a significant C# commercial implementation by Ocean Informatics http://oceaninformatics.biz/CMS/index.php These are complimented with various opensource tools for working in this environment (see the Software link at http://www.openehr.org ). The Python/Zope/Plone community will be very familiar with the concepts of two-level modeling that is represented in the openEHR specifications: http://www.openehr.org/releases/1.0.1/roadmap.html In a nutshell, the openEHR specs. define a very broad, core reference model, that is constrained by a knowledge model (called archetypes). Any implementation of the reference model knows how to deal with the structure of an archetype and therefore information expressed in an archetype instance can be exchanged between applications. These specifications are becoming more and more widely known. In fact, the Archetype Definition Language (ADL) is now part of a CEN (European) health record standard and is an ISO candidate. As you may have noticed, there is a non-profit foundation established to care for the IP and insure that it is and always will be open. The openEHR Foundation is open to membership by other organizations. In fact, the Python or Zope foundations could easily become an influential member. There are also governance processes in place to vet the changes in the specifications. The project that I am announcing is the Open Source Health Information Platform (OSHIP). I (as others) have tinkered with Python/Zope/Plone over the past several years in healthcare applications. These have met with mixed results mostly due to the same problem; lack of interoperability (search SourceForge for more info). The concept of OSHIP is that it can be an application framework for interoperable healthcare applications. This should be especially appealing to governments and funding agencies worldwide. OSHIP operation is envisioned as taking the archetypes expressed in ADL and store them in an Archetype Repository as Python objects. These instances are then available to developers to use in healthcare applications. Knowledge workers can create/edit the ADL files (using existing opensource tools) to create whatever knowledge model may be needed for a specific application. The current state of OSHIP is that I have entered the specifications as ZCA interfaces and basic implementations. But as I said, I am a 'tinkerer'. I need your help in evaluating this basic implementation and fleshing out the classes according to the specifications. The functioning components already include a parser for the ADL files and an (almost complete) object builder to store these in the ZODB for use by OSHIP users. While I am now appealing to the broader Python/Zope communities for participation. There is already interest in OSHIP. There is a workshop scheduled ( http://www.oshipworkshop.if.uff.br )for July 21, 2008 where we will be spending 10 days on health informatics, openEHR and OSHIP. The goal is to actually develop one or more OSHIP applications as examples. There is at least one PhD student that is using these ideas for his project. OSHIP is already considered to be the Python reference implementation of the openEHR specs. (BTW: for anyone interested there is a Ruby implementation underway as well). In order to promote the widest use of the openEHR specifications; OSHIP is licensed under the Mozilla tri-license http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/boilerplate-1.1/mpl-tri-license-txt If you have any interest in helping move this project ahead please join the developer's list at the SourceForge Project site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/oship The sourcecode will be placed on the openehr.org SVN server by 31 May, 2008. I also plan to put an egg on the SF site. This will be 'alpha' level code, though I hope that we can move to a beta stage at a fairly rapid pace (mid July?). I do not envision that the Zope experts will need to do the actual manual labor of fixing a lot of this code. If I can get some helpful suggestions then I will gladly do the work as well as manage others helping out. As an aside, one of the key benefits to this project is that the core documentation is already complete. The openEHR specifications do that for us. We just need to finish the implementation and some top-level ZCA specific docs. Thank you very much for your kind attention to this project that holds such a deep passion for me. Sincerely, --Tim Cook -- Timothy Cook, MSc Health Informatics Research & Development Services LinkedIn Profile:http://www.linkedin.com/in/timothywaynecook Skype ID == timothy.cook ************************************************************** *You may get my Public GPG key from popular keyservers or * *from this link http://timothywayne.cook.googlepages.com/home* **************************************************************

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PyODB v0.7 Released
by Neil Moses May 20, 2008

May 20, 2008

I would like to announce release 0.7 of PyODB. This release fixes a problem with Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 (64bit). When running an ODBC query using FreeTDS with a connection to MS SQL 2005 caused the fetch from a column containing a string value to return an empty (null) result. Many thanks to Jaco Du Toit for supplying this fix. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=119175 Regards, Neil Moses.

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MDP: A Simple Feed Forward Network
by blaine May 19, 2008

May 19, 2008

Hey everyone, I was hoping to see some people out on the python list that are familiar with MDP (Modular Toolkit for Data Processing - http://mdp-toolkit.sourceforge.net/)? I am wanting to develop a very simple feed forward network. This network would consist of a few input neurons, some hidden neurons, and a few output neurons. There is no learning involved. This network is being used as a gene selection network in a genetic simulator where we are evolving the weights and connectivity. There are many different types of nodes listed as being supported, but i can't figure out the best one to use for this case. In this situation, we only want to iterate through the network X times. (In the simples version, with no cycles, this would mean that once the output nodes are calculated there would be no additional calculations since the system would be stable and non-learning). Node types are listed at the bottom here: http://mdp-toolkit.sourceforge.net/tutorial.html#quick-start In the more complex version, we would have the same model but instead of having straight connectivity all the way through, we would add a few cycles in the hidden layer so that a few neurons would feed back into themselves on the next time step. This could also be connected to a 'selector' layer, that feeds back on the hidden layer as well. Since we are only running this a finite number of times, the system would not spiral out into instability. Any suggestions for which node types to use, or possibly what other libraries would be helpful? I realize that due to the relative simplicity of this network I could hand code this from scratch. MDP just looks extremely handy and efficient and I'd like to use it if possible. Simple Network: (H is interconnected fully with the Input and Output layer) I -> H -> O I -> H -> O I -> H -> O Cycled Network (Trying to show that the first hidden neuron is connected back to itself) v---| I -> H -> O I -> H -> O I -> H -> O Complex Network (Trying to show that the first hidden neuron is connected to another hidden neuron S that connects back to the input of H. S would be interconnected with the other hidden neurons as well) v--- S <--| I -> H -> O I -> H -> O I -> H -> O Thanks! -Blaine

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Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (May 19)
by Gabriel Genellina May 19, 2008

May 19, 2008

QOTW: "IIRC the idea was so that managers could write programs in English. It failed because nobody could write a parser that would handle something like 'The bottom line is that the stakeholder group requires the situation going forward to be such as to facilitate the variable known as x to provide the same outcome when stimulated by dereferencing as the variable known as y'." - John Machin http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/aefcc0ca19f6d9b3, from his oral history of COBOL A problem with async_chat.push and why it works that way: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-May/491027.html How to remove dictionary entries when iterating over it: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-May/491739.html Classmethods: why do they exist, and its behavior compared with metaclass methods: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-May/491280.html http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-May/491793.html Free PDFs of *Python Magazine* available: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/advocacy/2008-May/000587.html Two problems due to the "all objects are comparable by default" philosophy in Python 2.x: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-May/491600.html http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-May/491388.html A hundred ways of writing the FizzBuzz test - and whether it is effective or not: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-May/490584.html Why to learn Python if one doesn't have to: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-May/490856.html How to create a restricted (safer) Python environment: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-May/490705.html How to emulate the "indexed property" concept from Object Pascal: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2008-May/491354.html ======================================================================== Everything Python-related 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 marvelous 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. Just beginning with Python? This page is a great place to start: http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers The Python Papers aims to publish "the efforts of Python enthusiats": http://pythonpapers.org/ The Python Magazine is a technical monthly devoted to Python: http://pythonmagazine.com Readers have recommended the "Planet" sites: http://planetpython.org http://planet.python.org comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software. Be sure to scan this newsgroup weekly. http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python.announce Python411 indexes "podcasts ... to help people learn Python ..." Updates appear more-than-weekly: http://www.awaretek.com/python/index.html 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/ Python Success Stories--from air-traffic control to on-line match-making--can inspire you or decision-makers to whom you're subject with a vision of what the language makes practical. http://www.pythonology.com/success The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has replaced the Python Consortium as an independent nexus of activity. It has official responsibility for Python's development and maintenance. http://www.python.org/psf/ Among the ways you can support PSF is with a donation. http://www.python.org/psf/donate.html Kurt B. Kaiser publishes a weekly report on faults and patches. http://www.google.com/groups?as_usubject=weekly%20python%20patch Although unmaintained since 2002, the Cetus collection of Python hyperlinks retains a few gems. http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_python.html Python FAQTS http://python.faqts.com/ The Cookbook is a collaborative effort to capture useful and interesting recipes. http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python Many Python conferences around the world are in preparation. Watch this space for links to them. Among several Python-oriented RSS/RDF feeds available are http://www.python.org/channews.rdf http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/pythonware_com_daily.pcgi http://python.de/backend.php For more, see http://www.syndic8.com/feedlist.php?ShowMatch=python&ShowStatus=all 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://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0042/ The online Python Journal is posted at pythonjournal.cognizor.com. editor(a)pythonjournal.com and editor(a)pythonjournal.cognizor.com welcome submission of material that helps people's understanding of Python use, and offer Web presentation of your work. del.icio.us presents an intriguing approach to reference commentary. It already aggregates quite a bit of Python intelligence. http://del.icio.us/tag/python *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.pyth… Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here: http://www.ddj.com/topic/python/ (requires subscription) http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=python-url+group:comp.lang.python*&s… http://purl.org/thecliff/python/url.html (dormant) or http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Python-URL!&as_ugroup=comp.lan… There is *not* an RSS for "Python-URL!"--at least not yet. Arguments for and against are occasionally entertained. Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome. E-mail to <Python-URL(a)phaseit.net> should get through. To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday morning (approximately), ask <claird(a)phaseit.net> to subscribe. Mention "Python-URL!". Write to the same address to unsubscribe. -- The Python-URL! Team-- Phaseit, Inc. (http://phaseit.net) is pleased to participate in and sponsor the "Python-URL!" project. Watch this space for upcoming news about posting archives.

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ANN: Python and Plone Boot Camps in Chapel Hill, NC
by Chris Calloway May 19, 2008

May 19, 2008

Triangle (NC) Zope and Python Users Group (TriZPUG) is proud to open registration for our fourth annual ultra-low cost Plone and Python training camps, BootCampArama 2008: http://trizpug.org/boot-camp/2008/ Registration is now open for: PyCamp: Python Boot Camp, August 4 - 8 Plone Boot Camp: Customizing Plone, July 28 - August 1 Advanced Plone Boot Camp: Plone 3 Techniques, August 4 - 8 All of these take place on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in state of the art high tech classrooms, with free mass transit, low-cost accommodations with free wireless, and convenient dining options. Plone Boot Camp is taught by Joel Burton, twice chair of the Plone Foundation. Joel has logged more the 200 days at the head of Plone classrooms on four continents. See plonebootcamps.com for dozens of testimonials from Joel's students. PyCamp is taught by Chris Calloway, facilitator for TriZPUG and application analyst for the Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing System. Chris has developed PyCamp for over 1500 hours on behalf of Python user groups. Early bird registration runs through June 30. So register today! PyCamp is TriZPUG's Python Boot Camp, which takes a programmer familiar with basic programming concepts to the status of Python developer with one week of training. If you have previous scripting or programming experience and want to step into Python programming as quickly and painlessly as possible, this boot camp is for you. PyCamp is also the perfect follow-on to Plone Boot Camp: Customizing Plone the previous week. At Plone Boot Camp: Customizing Plone you will learn the essentials you need to build your Plone site and deploy it. This course is the most popular in the Plone world--for a good reason: it teaches you practical skills in a friendly, hands-on format. This bootcamp is aimed at: * people with HTML or web design experience * people with some or no Python experience * people with some or no Zope/Plone experience It covers using Plone, customizing, and deploying Plone sites. At Advanced Plone Boot Camp: Plone 3 Techniques you will learn to build a site using the best practices of Plone 3 as well as advance your skills in scripting and developing for Plone. The course covers the new technologies in Plone 3.0 and 3.1 intended for site integrators and developers: our new portlet infrastructure, viewlets, versioning, and a friendly introduction to Zope 3 component architecture. Now, updated for Plone 3.1! The course is intended for people who have experience with the basics of Plone site development and HTML/CSS. It will cover what you need to know to take advantage of these new technologies in Plone 3. For more information contact: info(a)trizpug.org

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ANN: Urwid 0.9.8.2 - Console UI Library
by Ian Ward May 19, 2008

May 19, 2008

Announcing Urwid 0.9.8.2 ------------------------ Urwid home page: http://excess.org/urwid/ Tarball: http://excess.org/urwid/urwid-0.9.8.2.tar.gz RSS: http://excess.org/feeds/tag/urwid/ About this release: =================== This is a maintenance release that fixes a number of bugs that have been found in 0.9.8.1. New in this release: ==================== * Fixed incompatibilities with Python 2.3 * Fixed Pile cursor pref_col bug, WidgetWrap rows caching bug, Button mouse_event with no callback bug, Filler body bug triggered by the tutorial and a LineBox lline parameter typo. About Urwid =========== Urwid is a console UI library for Python. It features fluid interface resizing, UTF-8 support, multiple text layouts, simple attribute markup, powerful scrolling list boxes and flexible interface design. Urwid is released under the GNU LGPL.

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