The first release of SPSS was in 1968. I’m rather impressed that SPSS (the company) has remained profitable basically selling one product, SPSS (the program), for four decades.

Here’s a talk from PyCon 2008 about scripting SPSS with Python:

BTW, at Lafayette we used Mathematica which is no spring chicken either. It’s twenty years old this year.

The peeps in #python.web have put together a list of reasons why you should not use mod_python.

FWIW, I’ve tried both Apache/mod_python and Lighttpd/SCGI, and found mod_python to be rather a pain to configure and maintain.

If you’ve ever wondered what the heck a Plone is, then you may want to check out this video.

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.

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

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.

Yet another Python IDE, this one is called PIDA:

PIDA is different from other IDEs in that it will use the tools you already have available rather than attempting to reinvent each one. PIDA is written in Python with the PyGTK toolkit, and although is designed to be used to program in any language, PIDA has fancy Python IDE features.

I still like Komodo, but the PIDA screenshots don’t look horrible.

Tim Bray explains why XML doesn’t suck.

Earlier tonight I loaded DimDim on my home server and did a quick test. Looks pretty good.

I was able to connect to it from my desktop and stream a presentation (audio, slides, desktop sharing, etc.) to my laptop on the LAN as well as to Nate over the net. According to IPCop it was using about 70Kbps each way on average, bursting up to about 300Kbps each way at times.

After I do some more testing, I’ll try to post some instructions on how to get it set up. It wasn’t hard, but I did have to switch my Java VM from Blackdown to Sun’s Java VM.

More later…