Pyglet 1.0 was released not too long ago. It’s a “a cross-platform windowing and multimedia library for Python” and looks like it might be a good Pygame replacement.

Sometimes knowing what not to do when coding (in this case Python) is almost as important as knowing what to do.

I’m an Apple user now. And I’m attending my second Ruby meeting next week. Crazy days my friends, crazy days.

Tim Chase posted an interesting list of potential interview questions to comp.lang.python:

While I haven’t interviewed precisely for Python, I’ve been on the other (interviewing) end and can offer a few of the sorts of things I ask. I don’t expect perfect answers to all of them, but they show me a range of what the interviewee knows.

They are grouped by difficulty (basic, broader, advanced, etc.) and seem to be pretty reasonable. Worth taking a look if you want to assess where you fall in the spectrum of Python coders.

Christian Flickinger talks about setting your Facebook status via the API:

Welll, it appears that one month after Facebook asked me, and others, to remove my little cURL ‘hack’ for updating your Facebook Status, Facebook has finally implemented a users.setStatus() method in their API.

Interesting.

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.

It’s from 2006, but Kristian Dupont Knudsen’s Top Ten of Programming Advice NOT to Follow is worth checking out.