Looks like MIT will be using Python for at least one of their introductory programming classes.

Via: Titus Brown

Jkx explains how to protect your Python-based blog with Bayesian filters using Reverend.

IBM DeveloperWorks explains how to build a web spider on Linux:

Web spiders are software agents that traverse the Internet gathering, filtering, and potentially aggregating information for a user. Using common scripting languages and their collection of Web modules, you can easily develop Web spiders. This article shows you how to build spiders and scrapers for Linux® to crawl a Web site and gather information, stock data, in this case.

Ruby and Python are the languages used.

Looks like they skipped over Chapters 7 and 8 for now, but Chapter 9 is up.

Tutorialicious is like Digg/Reddit for tutorials, including a Python category. Cool.

According to the Speakeasy Speed Test…

Wow! That’s about twice the speed I was getting back in August… I even tested it twice just to make sure.

There’s a page on the Django code wiki describing “a bare bones installation of Django on a USB stick using Movable Python.” It does not, however, cover getting a database installation on the stick.

Add some RPN to the python interpreter with rpncalc:

The rpncalc package adds an interactive Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) interpreter to Python. This interpreter allows the use of Python as an RPN calculator. You can easily switch between the RPN interpreter and the standard Python interpreter.

Not sure why you’d want that, but must admit that I am a fan of RPN in general.

The latest Python 411 (mp3) is all about “various options for running Python on cell phones.”

As I’ve mentioned before, I use Cacti at home to monitor my systems. If you’ve ever used Cacti, you know that the most common way that people poll their systems is using the PHP poller. Well, today I upgraded MySQL on my server (Gentoo) and that apparently broke PHP.

Running the Cacti poller yielded this error:

/usr/bin/php: error while loading shared libraries: libmysqlclient.so.14: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Matt recommended that I re-emerge PHP, which I did. That fixed it. Everything appears to be back up and running.