python
Open Science and climategate: The IPCC/CRU needs to take a leaf out of CERN's Book
- 2009-12-16
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This is not the place to debate the immense subject of climate science but it is necessary to say something about “climategate” in order to explain what happens when scientists and politicians collude to distort, hide and even destroy critical (raw) data and methodologies which, unlike the output of CERN, have absolutely colossal financial implications for every man, woman and child on this planet.
- Gary Richmond's posts
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Open messaging for the Open Web: Installing and configuring Mozilla Raindrop on Ubuntu 9.10
- 2009-11-12
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By the time you read this Karmic Koala will have been released to a waiting world, but I couldn’t wait. A felicitous combination of a desire to do a distribution upgrade to the release candidate and a Twitter arriving on my laptop giving me a link to Raindrop kept me busy for the day. I was intrigued by Raindrop and having used other Mozilla lab experimental software I was determined to see what all the hype was about. If you like the idea of combining a tool for aggregating Twitter, e-mail, RSS and other social Web 2.0 stuff with free and open standards then read on.
- Gary Richmond's posts
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Keeping score in test-driven development with Python, PyLint, unittest, doctest, and PyRate
- 2009-11-10
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Programming is more fun when you keep score. The extreme programming (XP) development model popularized the idea of test-driven development (TDD) with professional programmers in mind. But TDD turns out to be even more useful for lone amateur programmers, because it provides much needed motivation in the form of more visible rewards for your work. This is true even when simple test runners are used, but I decided to make things a little snappier by including a couple of other types of measurement and generating a “scorecard” for the present state and progress of my Python software projects. Here’s how it works, and a download link for my script, which I call “PyRate”.
- Terry Hancock's posts
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- 5135 reads
Moving to an IDE for programming (Eclipse with PyDev)
- 2009-09-30
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In the past, I’ve always shied away from integrated development environments (IDEs), but I recently had a strong enough motivation to finally learn how to use Eclipse — one of the most widely-used free software IDEs available today. Eclipse is known mainly as a Java IDE and it does require Java itself, but it is also a powerful and flexible multi-purpose platform, and adaptations exist for programming in many languages, including Java, C/C++, Lisp, and Python. Python support is available with an Eclipse package called “PyDev”, and I have found it to be a big step up.
- Terry Hancock's posts
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- 7206 reads
Becoming a free software developer, part V: When and where did you learn?
- 2008-09-24
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In my last article I talked about how interest leads people to program. Then life rose up behind me like a giant Doberman pincer and bit me on my backside; so, I didn’t think of programming for over four months. However, just this week something happened that made me want to program again.
I was preparing to teach some students how to use dichotomous keys to identify organisms. Suddenly, while I was staring at a simple teaching key for identifying fruit, my eyes glazed over and I had a moment of clarity.
- Rosalyn Hunter's posts
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Getting Zenoss
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Zenoss is pretty new, and there is no ready-made Debian package of it (or wasn’t at the time of this writing, anyway), so installation will have to be from source. Given that Zenoss is a Python/Zope program, though, this won’t be exceptionally hard, so long as all of the dependencies are taken care of.
Hotwire: a combined terminal/GUI for GNU/Linux
A suitable peacemaker between command-line purists and pragmatists?
- 2008-06-24
- User space | Easy
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There is nothing more guaranteed to ignite a bad tempered, incandescent flame war that an outbreak of hostilities between the rival Gnome and KDE camps. Well, except perhaps a slanging match between the champions of the GUI and the command line. Enter stage left the compromise candidate which might just unite the warring factions: Hotwire.
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Book Review: Professional Plone Development by Martin Aspeli
An open source Content Management System
- 2008-05-15
- Published on web | Easy
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Plone is a well-known Content Management Systems (CMS). Since it’s relatively easy to customize to a specific enterprises style and workflow, there is a healthy trade of services around the core software. Martin Aspeli, the book’s author, is an active contributor to Plone. Heavy involvement in a project that you are writing about always bodes well for the potential value and quality of a book that you, the reader might be considering buying. Aspeli’s book “Professional Plone Development”, published by PACKT, proves this quality point once again.
Wrapping up PyCON 2007
- 2007-02-27
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Well, I didn’t quite make it to all of day 3 of PyCON, but I got a good piece of it, starting with some very nice presentations of scientific software from Enthought and finishing with some questions about the future of Python packaging for GNU/Linux distributions.
- Terry Hancock's posts
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- 4531 reads
Thrills, chills, and pictures from PyCON 2007
- 2007-02-25
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I’ve come back from day two of PyCON, exhausted and red-eyed, but also really excited. I’ve learned about several different ways to integrate C libraries into Python, including ctypes which, though an old library, has only entered the standard library in Python 2.5 (released earlier this year). I’ve heard the story of modern cyberpunk heros braving the wrath of the information police, patching code on the fly to evade the notice of the oppressive governments they are exposing for their censorship practices (that is so cool).
- Terry Hancock's posts
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One Laptop Per Child kicks off PyCON 2007
- 2007-02-24
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This year’s Python Convention [1], being held this weekend in Dallas Texas, started off with an inspiring presentation by an engineer from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project [2] (Ivan Krstić) , showing off the hardware features of the new “OLPC XO 1” prototype, as well as some “dangerous ideas” about its software design: a large part of the user space code for the laptops will be implemented in Python, mainly because of the ease of manipulating the source code. The OLPC laptop software will be 100% free software, not just in principle, but in spirit as well—the assumption of open source design is literally built into the hardware.
- Terry Hancock's posts
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Python conference 2007 starts tomorrow
- 2007-02-22
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To me, Python represents the quintessential free software programming language: its central design values are the ones that are most import for the free software community—clarity and pragmatism. Yes, I’m sure other people have their own pet languages, but Python is definitely my favorite.
- Terry Hancock's posts
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Book review: Core Python Programming by Wesley J. Chun
- 2006-11-30
- Published on web | Easy
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Programmers and system administrators have many options when it comes to choosing a language to write scripts. One excellent choice is Python, a programming language designed to be easy to learn yet powerful enough to complete real-world tasks and requirements. Core Python Programming, 2nd Ed. by Wesley Chun and published by Prentice Hall is the text that will guide you through the Python language and integration with other applications and programming languages. Mr. Chun presents both basic and advanced Python topics in an excellent manner. If you are looking to brush up on or learn Python, Core Python Programming, 2nd Ed. is the one book you need.
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Becoming a free software developer, part III: Programming for the impatient
- 2006-09-12
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I finally began learning python. I wrote my last program in the 80s in Apple Basic, and here I am again starting to learn a new language. I can already guess what my biggest problem will be. I am incredibly impatient. How can I learn to program when I refuse to read the documentation all the way through? Will I succeed in writing a program or am I doomed to give up? No need worrying about it. I type python on the command-line, and start.
- Rosalyn Hunter's posts
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The programmer's mistress
- 2006-08-25
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Last week I mentioned my decision to learn Python and write a free software program. I found some cool online tutorials. I found my Learning Python book, and I was ready to begin. So like many a programmer I sat down in my chair, opened my books… and watched “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” instead.
- Rosalyn Hunter's posts
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Becoming a free software developer, part II: Free software developer, female
- 2006-08-19
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Why aren’t there more female free software developers out there. In my attempt to find out, I decided to write a program and see what barriers got in my way.
Most free software developers are men. Women are vastly under-represented in the world of free software. Being a woman, I wanted to know why, so I tried to do it myself. The first barrier was my inability to program in any modern computer language, so my first step was to learn a new one.
First I had to pick a language to program in.
Python.
- Rosalyn Hunter's posts
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Becoming a free software developer, part I: Why am I not a free software developer?
- 2006-08-11
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With all of the recent argument over the lack of women in the free software community, especially as relates to the reports from the Free/Libre/Open Source Software Group, which state that only 1.5% of the free software development community is female, and that women are actively discouraged from becoming free software developers. I decided to take a new approach and ask myself, “Why am I not a free software developer?”
- Rosalyn Hunter's posts
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