Hacking on PyPy
In another great Pycon2012 keynote, David Beazely asked the question, “is PyPy easily hackable?” After a great talk, he answered with a decisive, “I still don’t know.” Having sprinted on Python I’d...
View ArticleTrembling Aspen
Aspen is a unique Python web framework developed by Chad Whitacre. I am still evaluating it, but one thing I can say unequivocally is that it’s different. Very different. Aspen divorces itself from the...
View ArticleHow (not) to screw up timezone processing in Python
If you use pytz without reading the documentation, you might think you can do this: cltime = datetime.datetime( 2012,9,26,1,15,0, tzinfo=pytz.timezone('America/Santiago')) This is an easy way to...
View ArticlePushing Python Past the Present
This is the first time I’ve inserted myself into an exchange between bloggers I don’t know. This topic interests me and I have something to add. Most importantly, I found an alliterative title. So I...
View ArticlePython on Android? First impressions of Kivy
Kivy is a modern cross-platform Python GUI toolkit that runs on mobile devices (Android and IPhone) and supports modern input events (multitouch, accelerometor). I was really skeptical at first, but I...
View ArticleGesture Recognition In Kivy
Kivy is a modern GUI platform that runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. Kivy supports gestures, but the documentation is a as to how to use them. Reviewing the Gesture Board example provides...
View ArticleGitifyhg: Accessing Mercurial repos from GIT
My company uses Mercurial for internal hosting. Other than that, it’s an absolutely terrific place to work. About three quarters of my colleagues are sick of hearing the rest of us complain about...
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Building a Python Kivy App in Android (Easier than it looks, but harder than...
When I introduced Kivy a while back, I mentioned that I had not been able to deploy a Kivy app on Android. I’ve managed to do this now, using the VirtualBox image provided by the Python For Android...
View ArticleOpterator, revisited
A few years ago, I wrote a simple decorator that introspects a main() method signature and docstring to generate an option parser. I never really used it, mostly because back then, I wasn’t too keen on...
View ArticleExcluding tests with py.test 2.3.4 using -k selection
When I use py.test, I often rely on the -k switch to swiftly select the test I want to run. Instead of having to type the full module, class, and test path as is required with unittest and nose, I can...
View ArticleGuido Van Rossum Should Retire (and focus on python)
At the two previous Pycons I’ve attended (2009 and 2012), Guido Van Rossum’s keynotes sounded bored and uninterested, even though the content was meaningful. I was actually wondering if this would be...
View ArticleNext Year: addressing the more subtle sexism at Pycon
From a gender equality point of view, I’d call Pycon 2013 a success, though perhaps a better word is “progress”. The gender ratio apparently doubled to 20% this year. If that continues (depending if...
View ArticleCreating an Application In Kivy: Part 1
This is the first in what I expect to be a series of tutorials on creating user interfaces in Kivy. Kivy is a cross platform user interface framework that allows us to write applications in Python that...
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Creating an Application in Kivy: Part 2
This article continues the tutorial we started in Part 1. In the first part, we set up a Kivy project and developed a very basic Kivy application. We also discussed version control to aid in project...
View ArticleCreating an Application in Kivy: Part 3
This article continues a series on creating a Kivy application. At the end of Part 2, we had a basic form for entering Jabber login details. In this part, we’ll hook up the login button to actually...
View ArticleCreating an Application in Kivy: Part 4
You know, when I was doing my planning, I expected Part 3 of this tutorial to get us all the way to rendering a window containing the buddy list. So it’s somewhat amusing that this time, I don’t expect...
View ArticleCreating an Application in Kivy: Part 5
In Part 4, we took a break from developing Kivy interfaces and focused on improving the interface we already had. In this part, we’ll get back to interface development by creating a widget to display...
View ArticleCreating an Application in Kivy: Part 6
Welcome back, or if you’ve just stumbled across this tutorial, welcome to the middle of something! You might want to jump back to the beginning if that’s the case. Don’t worry, we’ll wait for you to...
View ArticleCreating an Application in Kivy: Part 7
I don’t know about you, but I was pretty excited at the end of Part 6 when I was able to send a message to myself on another account. It’s taken several weeks to get here, but by the end of this part,...
View ArticleCreating an Application in Kivy: Part 8
Sorry for the delay in posting this, folks. I’ve been away on vacation and then at Pycon Canada, which was amazing. And another apology, in advance, that this article is going to be bloody short...
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