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.

The PLEAC Python page is interesting:

Following the Perl Cookbook (by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, published by O’Reilly) spirit, the PLEAC Project aims to gather fans of programming, in order to implement the solutions in other programming languages.

There are PLEAC pages for quite a few other languages as well.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.5 today. New admin interface and lots of internal changes. w00t!

Link via the CrowdVine blog

The peeps in #python.web have put together a list of reasons why you should not use mod_python.

FWIW, I’ve tried both Apache/mod_python and Lighttpd/SCGI, and found mod_python to be rather a pain to configure and maintain.

This happened about a month ago, but somehow I missed it. Adrian posted some info about his (now dead) Chicago Crime website:

It’s with mixed feelings that I announce the end of one of my projects, chicagocrime.org. This site has been serving Chicago residents since May 2005. I hope you’ll indulge me in a brief retrospective.

The site used EC2 which automatically makes it leet in my eyes. Worth reading.