Planet Firedrop

A new version of ConfigObj is now available, version 4.5.3. This version is a minor bugfix release. It fixes a relatively obscure bug, where an exception could be raised when validating a config file with copy=True and __many__ sections [1]. ... [114 words]

Juhu! Meine erste Spam-Mail ist da! Low priced fashion and quality items It is hard to overestimate the importance of having at least one luxury watch. ... [59 words]

Diese Zahlen stehen für aktuelle Netzparanoia. Alles hat harmlos mit einem ICQ-Account ICQ-System angefangen, der bei (fast?) allen ICQ Benutzern aufgetaucht ist. ... [290 words]

Na? Wie lange ist das schon her? Mal von Hinten Mal von Vorne Seit 1993 gibt es Rolf nicht mehr, die fünfstelligen Postleitzahlen sind aber geblieben. ... [65 words]

The esteemed Mr Tartley has been up to his usual tricks. This time he has been playing with the Chipmunk physics engine and Pyglet to flesh out some prototypes for his 'summer-doss-out' game: Sole Scion project v0.1 : A 2D rigid-body Python game - "Version 0.1 merely bounces some circles off an inclined plane" In true freetard style he's made the code available so that you can have fun too, but with a typically odd name.... ... [197 words]

I've just finished chapter 14 of IronPython in Action - well, finished a version I can send to my editor anyway. I had more fun writing this chapter than I expected. ... [342 words]

A while ago I experimented with an interactive Python interpreter that ran in the browser using Silverlight. Unfortunately a couple of bugs with the version of IronPython for Silverlight prevented it from working properly. ... [361 words]

Python is my favourite language, by a very long way. That's not hard though, I've only done serious programming in Python, C# and Javascript and am familiar with the syntax (to lesser or greater degrees) of C, VB.NET and Ruby. ... [1106 words]

William Reade of Resolver Systems has announced a new release of our Ironclad project. Ironclad Home Page Download Binaries and Source for Ironclad Ironclad Mailing List Ironclad is a project to enable you to use CPython extensions implemented in C seamlessly from IronPython. ... [256 words]

This release represents four months of work and includes performance improvements, new features and bug fixes for Resolver One. Resolver One is an IronPython based spreadsheet development environment (fully programmable, object-oriented spreadsheet). ... [325 words]

Kermit - erleuchtet Gretel und die sieben Knüppel Rumpelfroschkönig Knüppelkönig Wie aktiviert man die bescheidene spezifische Dichtkunst Nicht-Germanisten? Man rufe eine Sommerparty aus (danke, K.!) ... [70 words]

Habe gerade zwei Stunden nach einem Fehler gesucht. Mein audacious leidete an einer merkwürdigen Form den Amnesie. Es vergaß immer seine Einstellungen. ... [74 words]

The London Geek Knights hold regular geek meetings on a range of subjects in the London Thoughtworks offices. They're open to all, and on 24th July I'll be presenting on IronPython and Silverlight. ... [67 words]

The May edition of the Python Magazine is out; and technically it's still May so that counts I guess. The major articles are: Handling Configuration Files with ConfigObj LDAP backed initScripts in Python Learning Python with PyGame: The Simplest Thing that Can Possibly Work Writing a Simple Interpreter/Compiler with Pyparsing Both the PyGame and and Pyparsing articles look interesting (I'd love to write a compiler sometime - it's on my list but I might settle for working on PyPy once my book is finished), but of course the most interesting one is the article on ConfigObj - mainly because I wrote it. ... [196 words]

PyCon UK is on 12th-14th September in Birmingham. This year I'm part of the planning committee, and the preparations are making good progress. ... [263 words]

I've finally finished the Silverlight chapter of IronPython in Action. When I started writing this chapter I thought it would be done quickly as I new the material I wanted to cover. ... [363 words]

Endlich mal wieder Zeit mit dem MacBook und Linux zu spielen. Jetzt habe ich herausgefunden, wie man unter Fedora die Fernbedienung in Betrieb nimmt. ... [33 words]

The PDF Toolkit is the Swiss Army knife for modifying PDF document. Among other things it can alter the PDF metadata, as author, subject or keywords. ... [135 words]

I feel very protected... ... [4 words]

William Reade of Resolver Systems has just announced the release of Ironclad version 0.3: Ironclad Home Page Download Binaries and Source for Ironclad Ironclad Mailing List Ironclad is an open source project that aims to allow you to seamlessly use CPython C extensions from IronPython. It basically provides a reimplementation of the CPython API in C#, and maps the C extension (unmanaged code) to creating IronPython objects (managed objects) rather than CPython objects. ... [664 words]

Brauhaus Bönnsch mit eigener Rechtschreibhilfe Pizza 'Propaganda' mit extra Schily, Koch und Springer (am alten Zoll) Heute mal zwei Fundstücke aus Bonn. Einfach mal sehen und schmunzeln... ... [34 words]

I've spent the last week writing a chapter on programming Silverlight with IronPython (which is how I managed a whole week without blogging!). Despite the title of this blog entry it's actually great fun. ... [449 words]

So much to blog about... so little time... one thing... Ever since I put together Mood News, I wanted (and people suggested) having a slider to 'mix' the level of the news. ... [72 words]

Three new chapters have been added to the Manning Early Access Program for IronPython in Action. There are now eleven out of fifteen chapters available. ... [130 words]

Kartrennenauswertung Neulich waren wir mal Kartfahren. Für mich eine Premiere, denn diese Teufelsdinger habe ich noch nie gefahren. Wir waren 11 Leute - das Maximum, was die Bahn gleichzeitig für Amateure hergibt. ... [289 words]

We've now announced the new features in the forthcoming Resolver One 1.1 release: We're now moving toward a feature freeze for Resolver One 1.1. Here's a foretaste of some of the changes you can expect to see: Major performance and memory usage improvements. ... [595 words]

In November 2006, Guido van Rossum gave a public talk at Google about Mondrian, a web tool for code review on the web that he was developing at Google. He was hoping to release it as an Open Source tool, but due to its popularity within Google it became to closely tied to Google's internal infrastructure to disentangle. ... [168 words]

Giles Thomas, the CEO & CTO (or 'dear leader' as he likes to be called) of Resolver Systems has put together some tutorials on using Amazon SimpleDB with IronPython and Resolver One: Amazon SimpleDB and IronPython Importing from Amazon SimpleDB into Resolver One Amazon SimpleDB is a cut-down database system, and as such it structures data quite differently to a normal relational database - in a manner that is actually quite similar to a spreadsheet. Each database is structured into "domains", which can be regarded as similar to worksheets. ... [966 words]

During conference season I fell behind schedule with writing IronPython in Action, so I've taken some time off work. I've just completed the first draft of "System Administration with IronPython" chapter, with only three more chapters to go. ... [616 words]

Part Three now online. A bit more to digest this time. Don't forget Part One and Part Two. Articles are aimed at programmers new to GUI work - anyone experienced in GUI programming should zoom right through them. ... [38 words]

Marta spotted this one... ... [4 words]

Feedburner allows me to monitor my RSS feed and see how many people are clicking through from my blog entry summaries to read the full entry [1]. Feedburner reports that I have a current average of about 830 subscribers. ... [544 words]

The latest issue of the Python Magazine is out. It's subscription only, but well worth it. This month's issue has some great articles: Dive into the gene pool with BioPython (mutable gene sequences - what horrors will this unleash on the world!) ... [383 words]

Recently I had the idea of writing a bit more on the XAML example I put together. Initially it was going to be on the wiki, then a blog post and now it looks like it will be 5 short articles . ... [178 words]

William Reade of Resolver Systems has just announced the release of Ironclad 0.2: Ironclad Download Page Ironclad is a project to implement the CPython C API for IronPython, allowing you to use compiled C extensions from IronPython. Ironclad targets IronPython 2 Beta 1 and CPython 2.5. ... [225 words]

The google summer of code projects are now up. As usual, the PSF has several projects. This year there I don't find many of them particularly exciting (although I'm sure others will). ... [452 words]

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about trying to get Fujitsu-Siemens to honour the warranty on my laptop. The laptop DVD drive fell out and (then later!) ... [446 words]

A couple of links about Python in the Pardus Linux Distribution showed up on the Python Advocacy Mailing List (thanks to David Boddie): Python in Pardus Speeding Up Linux: One Step Further With Pardus On why they chose Python: In simplest case of build operation (configure; make), there isn't much difference between alternative languages. But when cases get more complex, you'll definitely want a language with rich set of datatypes, native support for strings, clean and concise syntax and a standard library with a wide range of useful functions. ... [471 words]

The next Python bug days are going to be a bit different. Instead of just a bug day we're going for 'Sprint Weekends'. ... [229 words]

The Microsoft UK developer newsletter MSDN Flash, has published an article of mine on Getting Started with IronPython. This is one of their first experiments in publishing articles by non-Microsoft employees! ... [272 words]

This was the second year for the RuPy Ruby and Python conference in Poznan, Poland. Last year there were 80 attendees and this year the conference had grown to 250. ... [1328 words]

I've just returned home after a week away attending and speaking at the Expert Zone and RuPy conferences. I'm beginning to get sick of hotel rooms (poor me) and it will even be nice to return to work. ... [613 words]

Well I hadn't intended this to be my first blog entry after returning from RuPy and Expert Zone, in fact I should be going to bed. However, this blog entry on whether large test suites prove Python is not suitable for large projects is a subject dear to my heart. ... [912 words]

Some changes for this link dump - more description of the link from the feed. Is is too long? 'World peace' hitcher is murdered A female Italian artist hitch-hiking to the Middle East in a wedding dress to promote world peace is murdered in Turkey.... ... [1014 words]

There's been a fair bit of blogging about Twitter and people 'getting it' or not. Sure, it is a great networking site and far more fun than the likes of Bebo but that's not Twitters strength which lies in its API which makes a great platform. ... [211 words]

Executive summary: don't buy a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop if you anticipate the possibility of ever having to use the warranty. In January 2007 I bought an Amilo Pa1510 laptop to replace an ageing IBM Thinkpad T30 - a move that was a mistake in any case as the Thinkpad was the better machine... ... [447 words]

I've just returned from the ACCU Conference in Oxford. This is an annual occurrence, which started as a C/C++ conference but in recent years has had a thriving dynamic languages track (this year the 'flavour-de-jour' was functional programming). ... [886 words]

Two pieces of good news for Resolver Systems. Firstly we have a big corporate customer. This is great news for us. ... [846 words]

Internet News is running an article on 'Python in the Enterprise' (now there is a subject to chill the bones). It is based on interviews with me, Kevin Dangoor and David Goodger. ... [307 words]

Been playing around with IronPython and XAML lately. It is pretty cool to work with and the end results look really good. ... [99 words]

Ich habe mir ein ganz minimalistisches, kleines und flaches Piding Guifications Theme gebastelt. Es ist nichts großartiges, aber vielleicht ist es noch jemandem außer mir ein nützlicher Helfer. ... [38 words]

iserlohn.jpg">iserlohn-tn.jpg" alt="Fanka ze Bytomia" title="Fanka ze Bytomia" width="200" height="150" /> Fanka ze Bytomia Oj, jaki ten świat jest maleńki. Toż jesteś u kolegi na weselu w{}- bądź co bądź niemieckim{}- Iserlohn i co znajdujesz w gablocie lokalu? ... [57 words]

Eiskruste aus dem Kühlschrank Schon mal ein Kühlschrank in der Uni gesehen? Ich meine von Innen? Es kann eine bewegende Erfahrung im Leben sein... ... [72 words]

I'm giving a talk at the ACCU Conference 2008 next week, on IronPython & Dynamic Languages on .NET. I've finished my talk slides (well - 3rd or 4th draft at least) and just need to practise now. ... [275 words]

Harry Pierson recently twittered about how he missed the Powershell syntax, for piping objects between commandlets, in Python. After exchanging emails with him, he actually prefers something like the F# syntax - which uses '|>' rather than '|' as a pipe. ... [870 words]

Just a collection of interesting links from the intarwebz today: Report: Mac sales up 60% in February The report shows growth in Mac unit sales up 60 percent from 2007 In dollar terms, NPD has Apple capturing a full 25 percent of the U.S. computer market last month. ... [162 words]

A week before PyCon [1] I was at a very different conference: the Academic IT Festival organised by three universities in Krakow, Poland. I was also accompanied by my erstwhile colleague, Jonathan Hartley (who has currently abandoned us for Mexico to get married.) ... [1940 words]

BBC apologizes for erroneous reporting on Israel Solution sought over embryo vote views.py for wikinear.com SkySails Test Results In! 20% Fuel Savings! ... [108 words]

A tree fell down in our nearby park. Oddly it wasn't windy but probably the cold that brought it down, the inside of the trunk was hollow near the base. ... [43 words]

After PyCon I stayed on for the sprints, spending most of the time with the core-Python guys. Brett's introduction to developing Python was very good. ... [950 words]

I really enjoyed PyCon. It was great that the conference has grown so much but still has a real 'community' feeling where you can stop and talk to people you don't know. ... [729 words]

Instead of posting my PyCon talk slides, I've turned them into a series of articles instead, which should be easier to follow. All the examples are available online and for download. ... [450 words]

In Python you can't raise arbitrary objects as exceptions with the raise statement, for obvious reasons. From this introduction you should be able to work out what this code does: {+coloring} class MyException(Exception): def __new__(cls): return None try: raise MyException except MyException, e: print e {-coloring}That's right, the except statement catches None as an exception. ... [174 words]

Ironclad is an MIT licensed Open Source by Resolver Systems. The goal of Ironclad is to allow you to seamlessly import C extension modules (for CPython) in IronPython. ... [1121 words]

Sorry, not the shortest title in the world. I've just arrived home from PyCon with a world class case of jetlag and a blogging backlog. ... [263 words]

Schneegans Im Dortmunder Zoo kann man Patenschaften für Tiere übernehmen - man entrichtet einen gewissen Obulus an den Zoo und bekommt dafür ein buntes Schildchen am Zooeingang. Wenn der Obulus groß genug war, dann sogar eins am Gehege. ... [70 words]

So, Notebook ist wieder da und funktioniert. Es war bei "Reperatur" bei H&G, die haben jedoch nichts dazu beigetragen, dass es wieder funktioniert. ... [395 words]

One of the big announcements of the Microsoft Mix 08 conference in Las Vegas, that has just finished, was Silverlight 2. Silverlight 2 is the version of the browser plugin previously known as 1.1, and is now out of alpha and into beta! ... [1076 words]

Right going to burn through a few topics fast tonight since I was up at 5am... pythonnews now has 24 followers. ... [186 words]

We've released a new version of Resolver One, version 1.0.1. This release mainly focusses on fixing usability bugs, but includes a couple of new features and some performance improvements. ... [241 words]

There was a bug in release 4.5.1 of ConfigObj, so there is now an updated release: ConfigObj 4.5.2 Validate 0.3.2 The bug affected the use of None as a default value in configspecs and is now fixed. What are ConfigObj and Validate?ConfigObj is a simple to use but powerful configuration file management library. ... [463 words]

A big mix as usual but a lot of Middle East Ones! Wubi Arrives: a Look at Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5 Saudi men arrested for 'flirting' Palestinians 'may declare state' Ahmadinejad Imam row grows Israeli MP blames quakes on gays Iranians urge Dutch to ban film Iran guards predict Israel demise New Material Can Selectively Capture CO2 Pleas for Saudi 'witch' to be saved Williams in synod Sharia address No more bridge tolls Carey weighs into Sharia law row CUBS AND BEAVERS PLANT TREES Controversy Over Wikipedia's Use Of Muhammad Image Bionic Arm Might Go Into Clinical Trials Vista SP1 Released to Manufacturing Good food 'boosts earning power' Pope Denounces Some Biotech as Affront to 'Human Dignity' Gunfire at Israeli embassy Microsoft wants to purchase Yahoo ... [126 words]

Sheesh... I have been busy but I want to do a Python news project (newsletter and podcast plans shelved sadly) this year and I needed a small project that would suit sporadic yet regular short updates. ... [73 words]

Well, I almost feel like a real author now. IronPython in Action is now available for pre-order from Amazon: IronPython in Action on Amazon I even have my name in the URL. ... [395 words]

Python 2.5.2 [1] has just been released, but more importantly the work at Resolver Systems on C Extensions for IronPython has finally born fruit: Ironclad Project Goes Public and Version 0.1 Released William Reade (who has done most of the work) posted the following along with the announcement: It's not very impressive yet, and it's still win32-only, but it will import the bz2.pyd module from CPython 2.5; the compress() and decompress() functions should work, as should the BZ2Compressor and BZ2Decompressor types. Sadly, BZ2File still needs quite a lot of work. ... [357 words]

Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been playing catchup. I've just finished the first draft of a 4000 word article on ConfigObj for the Python Magazine. ... [416 words]

Here are some fun snippets of Python, which may or may not do what you expect. {+coloring} >>> isinstance(type, object) True >>> isinstance(object, type) True {-coloring}This really just illustrates Python's object orientation. ... [402 words]

Today I've been switching my desktop environment over to the Mac. I've also moved all my important files into a subversion repository, which makes switching easier. ... [227 words]

I've implemented a client-side module that allows you to specify what modules your code 'requires'. After user-confirmation, a required module that isn't available will be downloaded and on the import path. ... [184 words]

Resolver One is a great program, but it can be hard to explain to people why it is radically different from existing spreadsheets. Giles Thomas recently presented Resolver One at the Lang.NET 2008 conference, and we got some great feedback as a result. ... [216 words]

Two weeks ago I attended a.NET conference in London. The conference was organised by "the community", and was an an open spaces conference. ... [676 words]

I'm still settling in after moving house. We've only moved half a mile down the road (closer to the train station and the red light district), and its our first house that we've bought. ... [417 words]

My colleague Jonathan Hartley has been experimenting with Pyglet to unleash his creative genius. He has written a great article, and as he isn't on Planet Python here's a link. ... [36 words]

After one year and two days since the last release, there is a new release of ConfigObj. ConfigObj 4.5.1 Validate 0.3.1 This release adds a few new features, plus has several bugfixes and minor performance improvements. ... [499 words]

Doof, wenn man auf einem Notebook das Betriebssystem aktualisieren will und es nach einem BIOS Passwort zum Booten von CD verlangt. Viel doofer, wenn man sich überhaupt nicht daran erinnern kann, jemals ein Passwort an dieser Stelle gesetzt zu haben - geschweige denn eine Ahnung zu haben, welches. ... [96 words]

We've gone a long way... Zeitlich zumindest. Damals in den guten alten Zeiten (vor knapp 2 Jahren), als T-Offline uns ADSL (das sie großzügig bis heute T-DSL nennt) mit blitzschnellen 384kbit/s - also etwa DSL384 - legte. ... [230 words]

My Python style guide was originally posted as a blog entry in April 2006, just before I lost my amateur status and became a professional programmer. I recently saw it referred to in a newsgroup posting and revisited (and updated) it. ... [57 words]

This is an early announcement of a new project: Python-System, an implementation of the BCL and other .NET libraries in pure Python. Before you decide I'm completely mad, let me explain my motivation. ... [211 words]

Today I was working with Christian on an optimisation and memory use story. Those are usually fun as they mean poking around inside the guts of Resolver and thinking about data-structures and algorithms. ... [545 words]

It's been nearly a year since the last release of ConfigObj and validate. In that time ConfigObj has become more widely used. ... [433 words]

There have been some great new blog entries and projects on TDD recently: Six Reasons to Develop Your Tests First A great blog entry, with pretty pictures, explaining why test first is such a good idea. Pyspec Behavior Driven Development Framework for Python (presumably based on Rspec for Ruby). ... [232 words]

What do you expect the following code to do? int(3.2) No that's not a trick question. Would it surprise you if I said that in Python 3 it could raise an exception? ... [338 words]

Well the PyCon 2008 Schedule is up [1]. My talk is on 12.10pm on Sunday, which means I will spend the first two days worrying about my talk and probably miss the other talks on Sunday in panicked last minute preparation. ... [336 words]

When I went to the Microsoft TechEd developers conference, in Barcelona back in November, I did an interview with the Virtual TechEd crew. I previously linked to a five minute version of this interview, but finally they have posted a longer ten minute version: Commercial Development with IronPython MP4 (iPod) Version WMV Low Quality Direct Link WMV High Quality Direct Link The interview is about the Resolver One spreadsheet and developing with IronPython. ... [73 words]

Well I did it, a whole week without blogging! This is mainly because I have just moved house. Because of the move I didn't get into work until Thursday. ... [348 words]

Pocket Gamer have couple of handy articles for new (or non-hardcore) D