There’s a new WordPress beta available:

However all of the new functionality is still very rough, so only test the beta if you are comfortable troubleshooting PHP issues, filing tickets, and backing up your data religiously. If you’re interested you can join the wp-testers mailing list and download the beta here.

Tempting, but I’m not sure I want to deal with the potential issues. It looks like, based on a proposed release timeline, they will have a stable 2.3 release out by the end of September.

Buzhug is a “fast, pure-Python database engine” that is supposed to appear to Python programmers. It doesn’t use SQL, using list comprehensions or generator expressions instead. You end up with syntax something like this:

for record in [ r for r in db if r.name == 'pierre' ]: print record.name,record.age

Interesting, but I’m not sure I’d ever actually use it.

Although GVR mentioned it back in 2006, I think a lot of people are still completely unaware that YouTube is almost all Python:

I was completely unaware of the fact that the guys at YouTube, the mega site that serves millions of users daily, use Python. And they don’t just use it, their whole damn server side runs on it.

See! Interpreted languages can be fast! :)

Hrm… Geniusql seems to be getting quite a bit of buzz lately:

Geniusql is a public domain, low-level Object-Relational Mapper for Python applications. If you’re familiar with Martin Fowler’s work, you can think of Geniusql as providing a Data Source layer. It primarily uses a generic Table Data Gateway architecture (as opposed to the more tightly-coupled Active Record architecture recently popularized by Ruby On Rails and Django).

I haven’t personally used it (yet).

Now here’s something that seems unusual… using Django in command-line scripts:

Sometimes, I need to write command-line scripts to populate a database with information from some other source, like a webpage or third-party database. Since Django uses MySQL (among others) for its backend storage, it’s fairly easy to use Perl or any other language for this task. Problem is, it’s very boring and fiddly, so now I tend to use Django instead, which is really easy.

Interesting.

Colin Devroe has an interesting post about how Viddler and Ma.gnolia handle abuse.

Tonight’s CPLUG topics were DenyHosts and Inkscape.

I did the DenyHosts one, and you can check out the slides online. Seemed to go pretty well, with lots of questions and discussion after my talk. Definitely an interesting app for being so simple.

For reference:

europa /var/log $ wc -l /etc/hosts.deny 1360 /etc/hosts.deny

Nice.

I haven’t been doing a lot of Python coding lately, but I have been doing a bit of running. :)