Argolon Solutions says that TurboGears is well worth a look:

…had it installed in minutes and raced throught the example “20 minute Wiki”. We had our proof-of-concept ready in a week. At this point we have only scratched the surface of Turbogears but we have kicked off further investigation so that we can be in a position to potentially use it on our next Web-App development. It is another example of how Python is really helping us deliver for our customer base.

I really think that, for most people, one of the major deciding factors in Python web framework selection will be the quality and availability of documentation and tutorials. It’s not just about who has the best code, but rather who can explain their code the best.

Learning Python tracks the progress of a Python newb’s quest learn Python. Ony three posts so far, but I’m sure there will be good things coming in the future.

Best of luck to the anonymous person behind the site! I recommend they check out my Top 10 List of Python Resources.

Amanda Murphy put together a 3-minute screencast of the Xbox 360 Live dashboard.

Link via Alex Barnett via John Porcaro.

Quoth Titus Brown in his Avogato journal:

The main truth is that it’s clearly too easy to write your own Web framework in Python. It’s less work to code a few hundred lines of Python than it is to understand someone else’s few hundred lines of Python; it’s also easier to continue thinking like you already do than it is to adapt your thinking to someone else’s API. And, most important of all, a few hundred lines of Python is really all you need for a fully functional Web app framework. Thus, our massive proliferation of Web frameworks.

I’m not saying I agree with everything he says, but read the whole thing. Certainly food for thought.

Update: Yep, definitely too easy. Here’s another one called Pylons.

Another update: And yet another Python web framework! Ok, this is sort of funny now. Heh.

While checking out the computer reference section at Borders over the weekend, I saw a book called Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job. Although I have absolutely no intention of interviewing for a programming job, I thought it might be a worthwhile book to pick up.

The first chapter covers the application process, so I can ignore that one. The next chapter covers different approaches to solving programming problems. Subsequent chapters cover various fundamentals of programming (e.g. linked lists, trees, arrays and strings, recursion, etc.). After that, there are two chapters of programming puzzles, and then two final chapters of general programming knowledge questions and answers.

I think this might be a very handy book to get me up to speed with “real” programming in a short amount of time.

Decent reviews on Amazon so far… hopefully I’ll agree after I’ve had a chance to read through the book.

A couple of days ago, Nate sent me a link to mechanoid. Here’s the Cheese Shop description:

Mechanoid is a programmatic browser written in Python. It is intended as a back-end for unusual browsers, such as voice-text interfaces for the handicapped. Mechanoid is a fork of John J. Lee’s mechanize.

According to Nate, the Perl version of mechnize is quite cool and makes automating web tasks very simple. I could see how having a Python fork of that code would be handy. Bookmarked.

In case you missed it, Reddit rewrote their site in Python (formerly Lisp). Now there’s apparently something called web.py that makes web apps because “everything else out there sucked.”

There’s even a tutorial available.

I’ll leave the growing number of python web frameworks vs. tribble comparison as an exercise for the reader.

All sexy pythonistas need an import this t-shirt. Heh.

Last night my goal was to mount a share on my desktop containing ripped DVDs (.vob files) using Samba. Then play the movies over the network with VLC so I can watch then on the TV in the family room. I’ve been using VLC on Windows for a long time and love it, so I figured this should be an easy task. Not so! After emerging VLC and all the library dependencies, I found that I had no GUI.

Here’s what I ended up doing to get VLC to play DVDs mounted on a Samba share…

(more…)

Snakes and Rubies was held yesterday in Chicago, and it sounds like it went extremely well. Based on the reactions I’ve read on various blogs, everyone was very pleased with the results and came away from the event knowing a bit more about both Django and Ruby on Rails.

Some items that seem to stand out:

• There were significant technical difficulties in getting the projector working.
• Overcoming the difficulties, both Adrian and David gave very informative and entertaining presentations… each with their own distinctive style.
• Quite a few people seemed to have come away from the event with the feeling that Django is good for dynamic websites and content, while Ruby on Rails is better for “applications” on the web.
• There will definitely be both video and audio available of the presentations.
• Lots of Java and PHP bashing going on. :)

So here’s a roundup of the various reactions from across the web…

(more…)