Inspired by the reading habits of Eric and Patrick, I’ll be posting quick reviews of some of the books I’m reading. Probably not Python related, but whatever. :) -JPM

The first third of Cesar’s Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems by Cesar Millan is basically his personal story of growing up in Mexico, moving to the United States, and then growing his dog training business with a mixture of luck and talent. What follows is his explanation and examples of his ideas of calm-assertive vs. calm-submissive energy and his mantra of “dogs are not humans.”

Being a regular watcher of The Dog Whisperer, I can’t say I learned much that was completely new in the book. It was, however, nice to have him discuss many of the ideas presented in the show in much greater detail.

As he makes clear in the beginning, this is not a “how to” book that deals with teaching verbals commands and tricks. It’s a discussion of the psychology of dogs, their needs, and how to harness their pack instincts to keep them (and you) happy and balanced. Strongly recommended for people with out of control dogs, but also a decent/quick read for anyone who wants to understand their four-legged friend a little better.

Here’s the bandwidth usage from last night’s Counter-Strike gaming with just Eric and me…

If I’m reading that right, it’s about 40 Kbps each way. Just FYI.

I finally got around to upgrading WordPress to the latest version. Everything seems to have gone well.

I must say that although my Comcast HSI connection has been somewhat less than reliable lately, when it does work…

It’s mighty fast. :)

Quoth Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

I’ve always thought that the sign of a healthy Open Source project is a vibrant ecosystem around that project. That’s why I’ve been thrilled to see that there are a bunch of cool third-party Django add-ons popping up. I thought I’d take a few minutes and give a shout out to some of my favorites…

He lists four projects that sound interesting.

Here’s another simple TODO list manager called iKog. It’s text-only and uses Python. The interactive prompt part of it looks interesting.

Patrick solves his urlview problem with a bit of Python. Not a bad solution, and his script is a decent example of using the Python Curses bindings. Pretty cool.

This seems interesting:

mod_wsgi is an Apache module that provides a WSGI compliant interface for hosting Python based web applications within Apache. The adapter is written completely in C code against the Apache C runtime and for hosting WSGI applications within Apache has a lower overhead than using existing WSGI adapters for mod_python or CGI.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a stable release yet, so you’ll need to checkout a copy from SVN and compile if you want to try it. But I bet something shows up (masked) in Gentoo relatively soon.

And the award for best Ruby vs. Python weblog post title goes to… Python up, Ruby down: If that runtime don’t work, then its bound to drizzown.

Now that Digg has released their new API, it was only a matter of time before someone wrote something like PyDigg:

PyDigg is a Python toolkit for the Digg API. It provides an object-oriented interface to all of the available endpoints of the API. It is offered under the MIT License.

It only has a few basic dependencies and looks like it’s pretty well written. Very cool.