Dave Kuhlman’s Pylons Quick Site Development page looks like a great crash course in building Pylons based web apps.

I know that Django is the framework that seems to get all of GVR’s love and all the buzz, but there’s something about Pylons that always seemed good to me. I’ve honestly never used it to any extent where I could really say much about it, but I really think it’s worth checking out… even if you decide it’s not right for you.

If you need manipulate media files in Python, it looks like PyMedia is one way to go. Supported formats include wav, mp3, ogg, avi, divx, dvd, and others. There’s a tutorial available, and it supposedly work under Windows, Linux and cygwin.

It’s already considered old school to do the undetectable noscope monitor hack (heh!) in Counter-Strike. But writing on my monitor with a permanent marker doesn’t sound like a great idea to me. So based on a suggestion from someone in #cplug the other night, here’s my offering…

Background: In games like Counter-Strike source, most standard weapons display a crosshair at the center of the screen/HUD. In an effort to make gameplay more “realistic” (relatively speaking), sniper rifles do not display a crosshair unless you zoom in with the scope. However, zooming in dramatically reduces your field of view and makes you move slower…

And thus was the low-tech no-scope hack born!

Step 1: Get a pack of those self-adhesive page reinforcers.

Step 2: Start up Counter-Strike and select a weapon that displays a crosshair (e.g. the default pistol). Make sure you are aligned with your monitor like you normally are while playing, and stick the page reinforcer right over the crosshair.

Step 3: Select any of the sniper rifles, and blast away. At reasonably close distances, your shots will all land within the diameter of the page reinforcer.

w00t!

Update: Obviously, this only really helps if you are relatively close to your target. For long distance shots, you’ll still need to zoom in.

Digg: Like it? Digg it!

Jonathan did an SQLAlchemy talk at the Utah python user group last Thursday, and was kind enough to put his slides online.

Simon Willison (source of many good links) mentions ezPyCrypto and gives a quick overview of how it works.

PJE says WSGI middleware is hazardous to your API’s health.

There are lots of ways to share a file or two over a network (e.g. Samba, Apache, etc.), but Woof (Web Offer One File) tries to make it a little easier:

[Woof] assumes that everybody has a web-browser or a commandline web-client installed. Woof is a small simple stupid webserver that can easily be invoked on a single file. Your partner can access the file with tools he trusts…

And it uses INI style config files… which is always a plus IMHO.

Matt Riggott and Ed Wroblewski have created a one page Django cheat sheet (PDF).

Looks like some fun Python weather geekery is going on over at Kritikal.

Oooooh, nice.