I mentioned NodeBox back in June, and since that time it looks like the site got a nice redesign. There are also a few basic tutorials and a gallery of projects.

Doug Napoleone gives an introduction to the tech behind PyCon in a ShowMeDo screencast:

PyCon-Tech is an initiative started by A. M. Kuchling to create an integrated set of tools for running the PyCon conference. In this introduction we give an overview of the PyCon web site public interfaces (wiki, talk archive, schedule) and the technologies used to implement them (pmwiki, zope, django). The technologies are fully integrated into a (mostly) seamless site.

Definitely not the most exciting video in the world, but it’s kind of interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes to organize such a large conference.

Over at The NeoSmart Files, they explain how WordPress spoils developers:

…but every single time it boiled down to WP: No matter what the program, audience, or goal, WordPress just did things better. In a nutshell, the blogging market is c.l.o.s.e.d. – as in no more room, and most importantly, no more competition; because let’s face it, whatever you’ve got, it’s just never going to be good enough.

Read the whole thing (and the clarification) to understand that quote in context, but they seem to have a good point. It’s awfully hard to try to build something that can replace WordPress in features, extensibility, and ease of use.

In fact, that’s the main reason I still haven’t switched this site over to something I wrote with Django. Why bother? WordPress does everything I want to do and more, so other than purely as a learning experience (definitely not a bad reason) it just doesn’t seem to be worth the effort.

Or maybe I’m just really lazy…

If you are still using the Komodo Edit beta release, it’s time to upgrade:

ActiveState’s free multi-language editor for dynamic languages, Komodo Edit 4.0, was released today. Tens of thousands of users already downloaded the Komodo Edit 4.0 beta announced three weeks ago to positive pre-release reviews.

Here’s the start-up screen:

The Windows download is about 23MB at 60 KB/s.

Convert that ugly Java into beautiful Python with java2python. Heh.

If you need manipulate media files in Python, it looks like PyMedia is one way to go. Supported formats include wav, mp3, ogg, avi, divx, dvd, and others. There’s a tutorial available, and it supposedly work under Windows, Linux and cygwin.

Jonathan did an SQLAlchemy talk at the Utah python user group last Thursday, and was kind enough to put his slides online.

PJE says WSGI middleware is hazardous to your API’s health.

There are lots of ways to share a file or two over a network (e.g. Samba, Apache, etc.), but Woof (Web Offer One File) tries to make it a little easier:

[Woof] assumes that everybody has a web-browser or a commandline web-client installed. Woof is a small simple stupid webserver that can easily be invoked on a single file. Your partner can access the file with tools he trusts…

And it uses INI style config files… which is always a plus IMHO.

Make some pretty call graphs with pycallgraph.