Matt Poepping has a Python class called GCal that allows you to access the Google Calendar API, as well as some classes to import/export Exchange calendar items.

I personally don’t use Google Calendar, but I would imagine a lot of people do.

There’s a tutorial at dAlchemy called End to End Unicode Web Applications in Python by Martin Doudoroff that seems to be quite useful. Even if you aren’t building a web application, I think the tips contained in the article would still be useful. You never know when encoding issues might pop up.

Panda3D is a free 3D engine with a set of Python bindings. According to the site, the library is “unusual in that its design emphasis is on supporting a short learning curve and rapid development.”

There are some screenshots and videos available to demo what it can do.

It’s official… this is post number three-hundred!

When I started posting back in November, I had no idea how popular this site would become. It has always been, to me, more of a place for me to write down my thoughts in an effort to learn Python. Somewhere along the way a lot of people have started to follow along with me, and that’s really cool. There was even that little Digg effect incident in March.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who has been reading the site. It’s been fun.

Grig Gheorghiu notes that many of the PyCon 2006 presentations are online at Python.org.

This is good news for the Ruby users out there:

“Our customers are finding Ruby on Rails to be incredibly valuable in shaping their online presence,” said Bob Parsons, GoDaddy.com CEO and Founder. “We are pleased to be able to offer support for a framework that increases the utility of the sites we host.”

Also notable is the fact that they are offering Python CGI on some of their plans as well.

Via: John Collins

Richard Dooling wrote a quick guide showing how to install ActivePython and write the basic Hello World program in about seven minutes. For some reason it’s quite popular on Digg right now.

So according to Andy’s page, MySQLdb is now obsolete. I tried SQLObject, and while it seems to be pretty cool for creating new databases and managing them, it seems to be a pain to get it to play nicely with existing databases.

All I want to do is query an existing MySQL database and table and get a list of the rows. Is there some easy and non-deprecated way of doing that with Python? What am I missing here?

Update: Doh! MySQLdb is not deprecated, I was just confused. The project is now maintained at SourceForge (which I knew) and was updated as recently as 4/2/2006. The latest version is 1.2.1. See Sebastjan’s comment below.

After a very long time, I finally decided it would be a good idea to upgrade MythTV. In the course of the upgrade, I ended up switching from XFree86 to Xorg. Thankfully I was able to just copy over my old XF86Config file to /etc/x11/xorg.conf and it pretty much just worked. I did get the following keyboard errors (just like Matt said I would):

(EE) Failed to load module "Keyboard" (module does not exist) (EE) No Input driver matching `Keyboard' No core keyboard

The fix is to just change the keyboard driver in the config from Keyboard to kbd:

Identifier "Keyboard1" Driver "kbd"

Next, Mythfrontend was failing to update the database schema, claiming there were duplicate columns. To make a long story short, I used the advice given on the mythtv-dev list from 2004 and manually dropped some columns using phpMyAdmin:

ALTER TABLE recorded DROP COLUMN lastmodified; ALTER TABLE recorded DROP COLUMN filesize;

For what it’s worth, I didn’t have to drop the ‘oldprogram’ column mentioned in the post.

After that, everything seemed to work fine…

I didn’t even lose my old recordings or programming schedules in the upgrade. I’m shocked!

I installed the Tiger Admin plugin for WordPress today, and so far I’m really impressed. It doesn’t change the functionality, but it manipulates the CSS to make the entire interface much more usable. Highly recommended.