Mailman 3 June 2009 - Python-announce-list

Moovida Media Center 1.0.2 Release
by Olivier Tilloy 05 Jun '09

05 Jun '09

Dear Python users, The Moovida team is happy to announce the release of Moovida Media Center 1.0.2, code-named "Acid Rain". Moovida, formerly known as Elisa, is a cross-platform and open-source Media Center written in Python. It uses GStreamer [1] for media playback and pigment [2] to create an appealing and intuitive user interface. This release is a lightweight release, meaning it is pushed through our automatic plugin update system. Additionally a windows installer is available for download on our website. As usual, for users already running Moovida, the upgrade to 1.0.2 should be done automatically via the plugin repository. A complete list of the issues fixed can be found at: http://launchpad.net/elisa/+milestone/1.0.2 This is also summarised in the (attached) release notes. Installers and sources can be downloaded from http://www.moovida.com/download/ Bug reports and feature requests are welcome at http://bugs.launchpad.net/elisa/+filebug Have a media-centered week-end, Olivier, for the Moovida team [1] http://www.gstreamer.net/ [2] https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac Moovida 1.0.2 "Acid Rain" ========================= This is Elisa 1.0.2, second release of the 1.0 branch. Bugs fixed since 1.0.0: - 308892: [linux] pulseaudio: files containing an audio stream do not play - 379439: [win32] Moovida cannot play or index files with non-ascii path on Windows XP - 381307: [win32] Moovida does not start after updates on XP with a non-ascii user name - 381404: Most of Moovida is unusable after auto update of database plugin (race condition) - 267959: Default to local cover art for albums - 375275: Blank screen with no feedback when no last/most watched TV shows in playlist - 376160: Impossible to type 'K', 'E' or 'Y' in text entry widget - 379438: [win32] can not access "This Computer" or "Attached Devices" - 380206: [win32] Cannot do recategorization of videos - 380520: [linux] DAAP shares not appearing in UI - 381593: Music album infos: Cover not displayed anymore - 381702: Cannot access resources in plugins which name contains a dash - 267772: Traceback when querying the Amazon cover retriever - 380478: When USB plugged in, OSD player disappears - 380878: Modal popup is always an error one - 381019: Playing a TV episode should enqueue the whole season - 381020: Playing a track should enqueue the whole album - 381366: The --shell option does nothing - 354571: fix a bug in poblesec/widgets/player/button.py - 356178: [win32] Wrong encoding of some characters in the license text control of the installer - 381177: [linux] Incorrect info on linux packages installation page Download You can find source releases of Moovida on the download page: http://www.moovida.com/download Moovida Homepage More details can be found on the project's website: http://www.moovida.com Support and Bugs We use Launchpad for bug reports and feature requests: https://bugs.launchpad.net/elisa/+filebug Developers All code is in a Bazaar branch and can be checked out from there. It is hosted on Launchpad: https://code.launchpad.net/elisa Contributors to this release: - Anna Wojdel - David McLeod - Fernando Casanova Coch - Florian Boucault - Guillaume Emont - Jesús Corrius - Jutta Mailander - Lionel Martin - Loïc Molinari - Maxwell Young - Michał Sawicz - Olivier Tilloy - Philippe Normand - Xose Pérez

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Announcing jsonlib2 1.5 - the simplejson release
by alecf 04 Jun '09

04 Jun '09

I've just revved jsonlib2, the C-based json parser used at metaweb for freebase.com. Compared with simplejson, my initial tests have it between 21 and 25 times faster for loads() and around 10x faster for dumps() http://code.google.com/p/jsonlib2/ For those of you who have never used jsonlib/jsonlib2, all you have to know is that with this version, jsonlib2 is much more compatible with simplejson/json. Got a ways to go but for most applications it should be a drop-in replacement. This is the first C Python extension I've ever written, and I actually inherited most of the code when I forked jsonlib because of differences with the author. This means I'm very interested in patches/ critiques/etc. For those using jsonlib or jsonlib2: Version 1.5 is a big API change - loads() and dumps() are now almost completely compatible with simplejson's loads() and dumps() - so it really should be a drop-in replacement. Here are a few things that have been possible with simplejson, but not with jsonlib2: 1) looser enforcement of json spec - allowing stuff like: >>> jsonlib2.dumps({None: "foo"}) '{"null": "foo"}' >>> jsonlib2.dumps(None) 'null' 2) full support for Infinity, NaN, in both dumping AND parsing, by default: >>> jsonlib2.dumps(1e10000) 'Infinity' >>> jsonlib2.loads(jsonlib2.dumps(1e10000)) inf I've actually imported the simplejson unit tests, and this library passes 26 of 32 tests, and most failures are just due to the fact that jsonlib2 prefers to output in utf8 rather than unicode, for faster output from a web server. Alec

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Treat C FILE* as C++ streams
by Michele De Stefano 04 Jun '09

04 Jun '09

Hello to everyone. I'm an Italian engineer and I'm approaching to Python, particularly to Python extension through C++ (because I'm an experienced C++ programmer). I've seen that Python files are basically managed through the C FILE pointer. I've recently released on Google Code a very small library which allows to treat the C FILE* as a C++ stream and I think this should be useful to Python developers. The link is this: http://code.google.com/p/mds-utils/ The library uses Boost.Iostreams. Think to this situation: you have some C++ classes or functions that take a C++ stream or fstream as parameter. You want to make a Python extension from this library but you want to pass a Python file object to your C++ code. Using my library, you can wrap the underlying FILE* into an object that behaves like a C++ stream. I've not yet built an on-line documentation, but the library comes with detailed doxygen documentation and useful examples. I hope my library will be useful to the Python community and I'd like to see a link to it on the Python web site. Best regards to all of you. Michele -- Michele De Stefano http://www.linkedin.com/in/micdestefano http://xoomer.virgilio.it/michele_de_stefano

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ANN: HDF5 for Python (h5py) 1.2 *BETA*
by Andrew Collette 03 Jun '09

03 Jun '09

============================================ Announcing HDF5 for Python (h5py) 1.2 *BETA* ============================================ I'm pleased to announce the availability of HDF5 for Python 1.2 beta! This release represents a significant update to the h5py feature set. Bug reports, questions and complaints are welcome and needed! Downloads, bug tracker: http://h5py.googlecode.com Documentation: h5py.alfven.org Contact email: h5py at alfven dot org What is h5py? ------------- HDF5 for Python (h5py) is a general-purpose Python interface to the Hierarchical Data Format library, version 5. HDF5 is a versatile, mature scientific software library designed for the fast, flexible storage of enormous amounts of data. >From a Python programmer's perspective, HDF5 provides a robust way to store data, organized by name in a tree-like fashion. You can create datasets (arrays on disk) hundreds of gigabytes in size, and perform random-access I/O on desired sections. Datasets are organized in a filesystem-like hierarchy using containers called "groups", and accesed using the tradional POSIX /path/to/resource syntax. In addition to providing interoperability with existing HDF5 datasets and platforms, h5py is a convienient way to store and retrieve arbitrary NumPy data and metadata. What's new in 1.2 ----------------- - Variable-length strings are now supported! They are mapped to native Python strings via the NumPy "object" type. VL strings may be read, written and created from h5py, and are allowed in all HDF5 contexts, even as members of compound or array types. - Enumerated types are now fully supported; they can be used in NumPy anywhere integer types are allowed, and are stored as native HDF5 enums. Conversion between integers and enums is supported. - The NumPy "array" dtype is now allowed as a top-level type when creating a dataset, not just as a member of a compound type. - Many different low-level HDF5 drivers can now be used when creating a file, which allows purely in-memory ("core") files, multi-volume ("family") files, and files which use low-level buffered I/O. - HDF5 exceptions now inherit from common Python built-ins like TypeError and ValueError (in addition to the current HDF5 error hierarchy), freeing the user from knowledge of the HDF5 error system. - Unicode file names are now supported - Groups and attributes now support the standard Python dictionary interface methods, including keys(), values() and friends. Design revisions since 1.1 -------------------------- - The role of the "name" attribute on File objects has changed. "name" now returns the HDF5 path of the File object ('/'); the file name on disk is available at File.filename. - Dictionary-interface methods for Group and AttributeManager objects have been renamed to follow the standard Python convention (keys(), values(), etc). The old method names are still available but deprecated. They will not be removed until h5py 1.4 or equivalent. - The HDF5 shuffle filter is no longer automatically activated when GZIP or LZF compression is used; many datasets "in the wild" do not benefit from shuffling. Standard features ----------------- - Supports storage of NumPy data of the following types: * Integer/Unsigned Integer * Float/Double * Complex/Double Complex * Compound ("recarray") * Strings * Boolean * Array * Enumeration (integers) * Void - Random access to datasets using the standard NumPy slicing syntax, including a subset of fancy indexing and point-based selection - Transparent compression of datasets using GZIP, LZF or SZIP, and error-detection using Fletcher32 - "Pythonic" interface supporting dictionary and NumPy-array metaphors for the high-level HDF5 abstrations like groups and datasets - A comprehensive, object-oriented wrapping of the HDF5 low-level C API via Cython, in addition to the NumPy-like high-level interface. - Supports many new features of HDF5 1.8, including recursive iteration over entire files and in-library copy operations on the file tree - Thread-safe Where to get it --------------- * Main website, documentation: http://h5py.alfven.org * Downloads, bug tracker: http://h5py.googlecode.com Requires -------- * Linux, Mac OS-X or Windows * Python 2.5 (Windows), Python 2.5 or 2.6 (Linux/Mac OS-X) * NumPy 1.0.3 or later * HDF5 1.6.5 or later (including 1.8); HDF5 is included with the Windows version. Thanks ------ Thanks to D. Dale, E. Lawrence and other for their continued support and comments. Also thanks to the Francesc Alted and the PyTables project, for inspiration and generously providing their code to the community. Thanks to everyone at the HDF Group for creating such a useful piece of software.

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Change of List Location
by Pete 03 Jun '09

03 Jun '09

Hi all- Per requests, I've moved the concurrency-sig list to concurrency-sig(a)python.org from it's present home at Google Groups. I'll be shutting down the google list in the next few days. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. --Pete

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web2py 1.63 is OUT
by Massimo Di Pierro 03 Jun '09

03 Jun '09

web2py 1.63 is OUT Check out the new features in this slides: http://www.scribd.com/doc/16085263/web2py-slides-version-163 Massimo P.S. with love and respect to all other python programmers out there!

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Python svn builds
by A. Cavallo 03 Jun '09

03 Jun '09

Python svn build (http://pyvm.sourceforge.net) is a project to create binary distributions for the python interpreter: the source used to build them is the latest svn revision. The builds are made using the OpenSUSE buildserver https://build.opensuse.org and the test results can be seen on the website http://pyvm.sourceforge.net. The final packages in rpm format are available for CentOS/Fedora/Mandriva and OpenSUSE. Regards, Antonio Cavallo

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ANN: Veusz 1.4
by Jeremy Sanders 03 Jun '09

03 Jun '09

Veusz 1.4 --------- Velvet Ember Under Sky Zenith ----------------------------- http://home.gna.org/veusz/ Veusz is Copyright (C) 2003-2009 Jeremy Sanders <jeremy(a)jeremysanders.net> Licenced under the GPL (version 2 or greater). Veusz is a Qt4 based scientific plotting package. It is written in Python, using PyQt4 for display and user-interfaces, and numpy for handling the numeric data. Veusz is designed to produce publication-ready Postscript/PDF output. The user interface aims to be simple, consistent and powerful. Veusz provides a GUI, command line, embedding and scripting interface (based on Python) to its plotting facilities. It also allows for manipulation and editing of datasets. Changes in 1.4: * Dates can be plotted on axes * Bar graph component, support bars in groups and stacked bars with error bars * Improved import - text lines can be ignored in imported files - prefix and suffix can be added to dataset names - more robust import dialog * Markers can be "thinned" for large datasets * Further LaTeX support, including \frac for fractions and \\ for line breaks. * Keys show error bars on datasets with errors * Axes can scale plotted data by a factor More minor changes * Mathematical expressions can be entered in many places where numbers are entered (e.g. axis minima) * Many more latex symbols * Text labels can also be placed outside graphs directly on pages * Dataset expressions can be edited * Data can be copied out of data edit dialog. Rows can be inserted or deleted. * Mac format line terminators are allowed in import files * Preview window resizes properly in import dialog Features of package: * X-Y plots (with errorbars) * Line and function plots * Contour plots * Images (with colour mappings and colorbars) * Stepped plots (for histograms) * Bar graphs * Plotting dates * Fitting functions to data * Stacked plots and arrays of plots * Plot keys * Plot labels * Shapes and arrows on plots * LaTeX-like formatting for text * EPS/PDF/PNG/SVG export * Scripting interface * Dataset creation/manipulation * Embed Veusz within other programs * Text, CSV and FITS importing Requirements: Python (2.4 or greater required) http://www.python.org/ Qt >= 4.3 (free edition) http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/ PyQt >= 4.3 (SIP is required to be installed first) http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/ http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/sip/ numpy >= 1.0 http://numpy.scipy.org/ Optional: Microsoft Core Fonts (recommended for nice output) http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ PyFITS >= 1.1 (optional for FITS import) http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits For documentation on using Veusz, see the "Documents" directory. The manual is in pdf, html and text format (generated from docbook). Issues with the current version: * Due to Qt, hatched regions sometimes look rather poor when exported to PostScript or PDF. * Due to a bug in Qt, some long lines, or using log scales, can lead to very slow plot times under X11. This problem is seen with dashed/dotted lines. It is fixed by upgrading to Qt-4.5.1 (the Veusz binary version includes this Qt version). * Can be very slow to plot large datasets if antialiasing is enabled. Right click on graph and disable antialias to speed up output. This is mostly a problem with older Qt versions, however. If you enjoy using Veusz, I would love to hear from you. Please join the mailing lists at https://gna.org/mail/?group=veusz to discuss new features or if you'd like to contribute code. The latest code can always be found in the SVN repository. Jeremy Sanders

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ANN: Resolver One 1.5 released (corrects previous message)
by Giles Thomas 03 Jun '09

03 Jun '09

We are proud to announce the release of Resolver One, version 1.5. Resolver One is a Windows-based spreadsheet that integrates Python deeply into its recalculation loop, making the models you build more reliable and more maintainable. For version 1.5, we've added a console; this new command-line window gives you a way to interact with your spreadsheet using Python statements. Here's a screencast showing why this is worth doing: <http://www.resolversystems.com/screencasts/console/> We have a 31-day free trial version, so if you would like to take a look, you can download it from our website: <http://www.resolversystems.com/download/> If you want to use Resolver One in an Open Source project, we offer free licenses for that: <http://www.resolversystems.com/opensource/> Best regards, Giles -- Giles Thomas giles.thomas(a)resolversystems.com +44 (0) 20 7253 6372 Win up to $17,000 for a spreadsheet: <http://www.resolversystems.com/ competition/> 17a Clerkenwell Road, London EC1M 5RD, UK VAT No.: GB 893 5643 79 Registered in England and Wales as company number 5467329. Registered address: 843 Finchley Road, London NW11 8NA, UK

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Dabo 0.9.2 released
by Ed Leafe 03 Jun '09

03 Jun '09

At long last, we are finally releasing Dabo 0.9.2. This fixes the errors that were found in 0.9.1; adds a brand-new Web Update implementation that should make keeping current much easier, as well as a whole bunch of improvements under the hood. You can grab the latest version at http://dabodev.com/download. -- Ed Leafe

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