Tim Bray explains why XML doesn’t suck.

IEC is a python library “designed to help you automate and control an Internet Explorer window.” Quoth the project page:

You can use this library to navigate to web pages, read the values of various HTML elements, set the values of checkboxes, text boxes, radio buttons etc., click on buttons and submit forms.

Sounds cool… if you use IE. Bleh.

The Snyppets page contains “a bunch of miscellaneous Python code snippets, recipes, mini-guides, links, examples, tutorials and ideas, ranging from very (very) basic things to advanced.”

Python for Fun has a collection of simple scripts that each demonstrate some basic tasks:

They are aimed at intermediate programmers; people who have studied Python and are fairly comfortable with basic recursion and object oriented techniques. Each program is very short, never more than a couple of pages and accompanied with a write-up.

A simple game, some GUI building, the classic Towers of Hanoi, and others are included.

Peter Norvig has an article up about how to write a spelling corrector that’s getting quite a bit of attention. The explanation of the code and theory behind it is really interesting stuff.

As might know, I recently completed the Couch-to-5K running plan and used a Garmin Forerunner 205 to track my progress. The Garmin Training Center software for the device isn’t too bad, but it would be nice to not have to rely on it.

Well as it turns out, Bob Rudis wrote a Python script to read the gtc database files:

If you’ve got python and it’s sqlite library installed, then this script will be a half-decent example of how to pull data from “.gtc” database for each entry in the stored history. If not, have no fear, I hope to release a small app to let you extract the data on your own and I’m still thinking about that widget.

The cool part is that, as Bob pointed out earlier, the Training Center database files are nothing more than SQLite files! How awesome is that?

Urwid is a “console user interface library” for Python, and it looks pretty darn cool. If you check out the examples, you can get an idea of what you can do with it.

The Python wiki has some tips for starting your user group. It’s certainly not the most helpful document in the world (at least in its current form), but there are some decent tips in there.

Update: The Recipe for a Successful Linux User Group is (obviously) LUG focused, but I think all of the tips apply for a PUG as well.

Matthew Huntbach talks about what’s wrong with Ruby.

Update: Wow.

I have to admit that I only skimmed the article before posting it. Now that I’ve taken the time to read Nate’s comments below, and the actual article… I almost regret posting it.

I’m not sure if Matthew is actively just trying to troll for hits, or if he’s really that confused/shallow in his review. He ranges from downright cheap shots (e.g. his comments re: Why’s Guide) to a very odd complaint about lists. For some reason, in his mind if you have a list of ["apple", "banana", "grape"] and add that to a list of ["pork", "beans", "rice"], the language should perform operations based on pairings of the items… rather than sensibly just yielding a list of all the elements combined.

In the end, he claims to say what’s wrong with Ruby, but mostly he just complains about the free tutorials he came across or that he found the marketing materials for a specific book to be hyperbolic (you don’t say!). The article is, in essence, no more than one complaint about how lists are handled and then a few more complaints that basically come down to personal preference.

A weak article indeed. Blah.

In case you missed it… Pylons 0.9.4.1 was released back in January. Never used Pylons? Here’s the blurb:

Pylons combines the very best ideas from the worlds of Ruby, Python and Perl, providing a structured but extremely flexible Python web framework. It’s also one of the first projects to leverage the emerging WSGI standard, which allows extensive re-use and flexibility — but only if you need it.

I have yet to use it in any significant way, but Pylons does some really cool stuff. Check it out.