In my last post, I briefly mentioned that there is an ethical discussion in the software community about the relationship between ethics and free software. The crux of this ethical discussion is the relationship between software and civil liberties. Much of this discussion centres around the use of the word ‘free’; or, alternatively, the phrase […]
Category: Data Analytics
Building a Minimalist Blog in Python (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Web Development).
As of today, I have taken my final examination as an undergraduate student of Physics. With my graduate software engineering job beginning in September, I am one graduation ceremony away from being a Software Engineer instead of a Physics Student. Despite the fact that the world needs another programming/tech blog like a hole in the […]
Get user data using django-social-auth
Recently we had to add support for social networks login to an application we are developing and we chose django-social-auth to work with. It is a well documented and easy to use django application for authentication. But we wanted to do more than just authenticating the user, we wanted to get extra data like the […]
Introducing pythonpackages.com
The website for Python egoists™ I have this overwhelming desire to know how many times my favorite Python packages have been downloaded. Don’t you? If so, look no further than pythonpackages.com. Count downloads Where you can enter a package like Django and find out the number of downloads. Count favorites Or click on Count favorites […]
Battlelog: Modern Web Applications are Here
It’s the shooter season of the year and this fall was all about Modern Warfare 3 versus Battlefield 3. And being the kind of game they are they also try to keep their audience playing by introducing some additional level of engagement. Both Call of Duty and Battlefield introduced their own online community websites and […]
Vagrant, Puppet and Mozilla, Oh my
This post is only loosely Python related and not at all Plone related. This post is only loosely Python related and not at all Plone related, but I thought folks might enjoy hearing about Vagrant and Puppet because these tools may help you do your Plone and Python jobs better. For the past couple weeks […]
Calling Scrapy from a Python script
When you need to do some web scraping job in Python, an excellent choice is the Scrapy framework. Not only it takes care of most of the networking (HTTP, SSL, proxies, etc) but it also facilitates the process of extracting data from the web by providing things such as nifty xpath selectors. Scrapy is built […]
Dealing with the Python Import Blackbox
Turns out, this does not work reliably, in fact it will only work when packages are involved. I originally wrote the core for Flask extensions and it appeared to work, but I never verified that it works without extensions being involved. And in fact the module cleanup breaks it. Apparently Python does clean it up […]
You’re So Vain, So Why Not Use Vanity?
A few months ago I created a package called Vanity A few months ago I created a package called Vanity[0] that provides easy access to package download statistics from PyPI. You can find the source code here: https://github.com/aclark4life/vanity. I love this tool, and I use it all the time to gauge the value of a […]
Be careful with exec and eval in Python
One of the perceived features of a dynamic programming language like Python is the ability to execute code from a string. In fact many people are under the impression that this is the main difference between something like Python and C#. That might have been true when the people compared Python to things like C. […]
Common Mistakes as Python Web Developer
A few weeks ago I had a heated discussion with a bunch of Python and Open Source people at a local meet-up about the way Python’s path joining works. I was always pretty sure that people are aware of how the path joining works and why it works that way. However a bit of searching […]
April 1st Post Mortem
This year I decided to finally do what I planned for quite some time: an April’s fool joke. (I did contribute a bit to PEP 3117, but that does not count). This year I decided to make a little joke about Python microframeworks (micro-web-frameworks?) and wrote a little thing, and created a website and screencast […]
A Sane Buildout For repoze.zope2 + Plone
This is a follow-up to Martin Aspeli’s introduction to repoze and Plone from last year A Tale of Two Buildouts There are two stories going on here, both of which Martin Aspeli recently described in great detail and Chris McDonough tackled last year. For the purposes of this blog entry, I’ll refer to the issue […]
Help Me Upgrade plone.org
Because plone.org should run the latest Plone You may be wondering why plone.org is not running the latest version of Plone. Well wonder no more! By the end of this month, it will be. I have been working onthe various bits and pieces needed to upgrade for months, including: Testing the “live” Data.fs against the […]