Leah Culver discusses making shorter urls for Pownce permalink pages. Related code snippet here: Decimal to Any Base pasted by leah@pownce.com

ShowMeDo will be publishing a five part series on using Google App Engine. Sounds like they will get you up and running with the SDK and coding a little Hello World app in rather short order.

Believe it or not, I’ve never used any version control to manage anything up to this point. So I decided that as of tonight, I’m going to start using it… specifically, Bazaar (bzr). Why that one and not a different one? I dunno… I guess I liked their website. :)

Anyway, I found a blog post called Discovering ‘bzr push’ that was actually quite helpful for a newb like me. Along with the printable reference card, I think I’ll pick this up rather quickly.

Also, feel free to mock/abuse me for using bzr instead of hg in the comments.

Slides from my Lighttpd talk are up in the gallery.

Some of the slides that make use of build-in/out transitions exported to single images, so it doesn’t show each step. For example, in the Web Frameworks slide I included shout-outs to Rails, Django, Merb, Pylons, and TurboGears… but you’ll only see Rails.

If I get motivated, I’ll export it to Flash and upload it.

I have no experience with books from PACKT, and usually lean toward Apress books, but I just ordered Learning Website Development with Django. It has some decent (hopefully authentic) reviews on Amazon, so I figured I would give it a shot.

I was originally going to order The Definitive Guide to Django, but the rather poor reviews of it scared me away. Same with the warnings of typos and errors in the Sams Teach Yourself Django in 24 Hours book.

According to the Wikipedia page, PACKT is an interesting company. Check them out.

Command Line Warriors has a nice summary of PEP8:

Guido, who brought you out of the land of Visual Basic, out of the land of slavery, spake all these words to thee…

Check out the twelve commandments for Beautiful Python code.

CPOSC, the Central PA Open Source Conference, is a one-day, multi-track, low-cost conference about all things open source: software, programming, operating systems, community and more. It will take place on Sunday, October 19th at the ITT Tech campus in Harrisburg, PA.

We have a date and a venue, so now we are currently looking for interesting speakers. I’d personally like to line up some more cool Python related talks (especially Django/Pylons related ones). If you would be interested in speaking, or know someone else who might be, please contact us.

More information is available in the announcement post and the Call for Participation page. The deadline for proposals is July 11, 2008.

Thanks!

Django People: “Django People lists 2164 Django developers from around the world, in 88 different countries. The aim of the site is to help Django developers find like-minded souls near them, and hopefully kick-start some local meet-ups and user groups.”

Django Pluggables: “One of Django’s great strengths lie in its abundant library of 3rd party “pluggable” applications. Need a blog? Grab a few pluggable apps to get you off your feet. The only problem is… they’re so hard to find and keep track of. That’s what we’re here for. We do the work of making sure you’re keeping your pluggables up-to-date.”

Django Snippets: “…a site for users of the Django web framework to come together and share useful “snippets” of reusable code.”

The first release of SPSS was in 1968. I’m rather impressed that SPSS (the company) has remained profitable basically selling one product, SPSS (the program), for four decades.

Here’s a talk from PyCon 2008 about scripting SPSS with Python:

BTW, at Lafayette we used Mathematica which is no spring chicken either. It’s twenty years old this year.

Hamlet D’Arcy has an interesting post about rethinking the progress bar, based on a paper he read on the subject.

If you are adding progress bars to your app, it is well worth reading.