Excuthe me, do you have any widdle wabbits?

A precious little girl walks into a pet shop and asks, "Excuthe me, do you have any widdle wabbits?"

The shopkeeper's heart melts, he gets down on his knees so that he's on her level, and says, "Do you want a thoft widdle fluffy white wabbit like this one, or a thmart looking bwack wabbit like that one, or one like that cute widdle bwown wabbit over there?"

The little girl blushes, rocks on her heels, puts her hands on her knees, leans forward and whispers ... " I don't weally fink my pet pyfon gives a phuk."

Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released

The first Python 3000 release is out -- Python 3.0a1.

http://python.org/download/releases/3.0/


Excerpts
Python 3000 (a.k.a. "Py3k", and released as Python 3.0) is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed.
This is an ongoing project; the cleanup isn't expected to be complete until 2008. In particular there are plans to reorganize the standard library namespace.
The release plan is to have a series of alpha releases in 2007, beta releases in 2008, and a final release in August 2008. The alpha releases are primarily aimed at developers who want a sneak peek at the new langauge, especially those folks who plan to port their code to Python 3000. The hope is that by the time of the final release, many 3rd party packages will already be available in a 3.0-compatible form.

Jython 2.2 Released

Jython 2.2 is available for download. This is the first production release of Jython in nearly six years,and it contains many new features:

new-style classes
Java List integration
PEP 302 implementation
iterators
generators
__future__ division
support for running on modern JVMs
a new installer
ssl and non-blocking support for socket

Spyrit v0.2 released

Spyrit is a MUSH/MUCK/MOO client written in Python using the Qt toolkit. It aims to be a pleasant, extensible, polished product, and to support all three major platforms.


Spyrit v0.2 is still a few features short of going gold, but should already be usable and pleasant to use.

Version 0.2 implements ANSI format codes rendering, preliminary Telnet negotiation support, SSL encryption where supported, unlimited input history, plus a few minor improvements and speedups.

It also offers experimental binaries for both Windows and Linux. Feedback on those is kindly welcome.

Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=66416

Linux Journal Article: At the Forge - First Steps with Django

Linux Journal has a nice article about starting with Django, check it out here: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9712

pgAdmin III v1.8.0 Beta 3 released

The third beta version of pgAdmin III v1.8.0. has been released.

pgAdmin is the leading graphical administration and development tool forPostgreSQL, EnterpriseDB and most other PostgreSQL-derived DBMSs. It canbe used on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac and Solaris with servers on anyplatform. For more information, please see the website:http://www.pgadmin.org/

To download the beta, please visit the download page athttp://www.pgadmin.org/download/. In addition to the source code, binarydownloads are currently available for Windows, Mac OS X, Fedora 7 andSlackware Linux.

pyglet 1.0 alpha 2 released

pyglet 1.0 alpha 2 released. This alpha release fixes many bugs, includes a new audio and video implementation, and introduces the pyglet Programming Guide. See the downloads page to grab your copy.

about pyglet
pyglet provides an object-oriented programming interface for developing games and other visually-rich applications for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Some of the features of pyglet are:
No external dependencies or installation requirements. For most application and game requirements, pyglet needs nothing else besides Python, simplifying distribution and installation.
Take advantage of multiple windows and multi-monitor desktops. pyglet allows you to use as many windows as you need, and is fully aware of multi-monitor setups for use with fullscreen games.
Load images, sound, music and video in almost any format. pyglet can optionally use AVbin to play back audio formats such as MP3, OGG/Vorbis and WMA, and video formats such as DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, WMV and Xvid.

pyglet is provided under the BSD open-source license, allowing you to use it for both commerical and other open-source projects with very little restriction.

PyCon-Tech '08 Call for Volunteers

Doug Napoleone is asking for help.

We are looking for help at every level. Even if all you do is edit some
of the wiki pages,
this would be greatly appreciated.We are also looking for any and all feedback
on last years system. This feedback should be limited to the web site software
including the schedule, schedule
handouts, talk proposal system, or something we have not yet thought
of.

Get all the details here: http://pycon.blogspot.com/2007/08/pycon-tech-08-call-for-volunteers.html

SchemaCrawler for PostgreSQL announced

SchemaCrawler is free, open-source, operating system independent, command-line tool that can take human-readable snapshots of the schema and data, for later comparison. Comparisons are done using a standard diff tool. SchemaCrawler outputs details of your schema (tables, views, procedures, and more) in a diff-able plain-text format (text, CSV, or XHTML). SchemaCrawler can also output data (including CLOBs and BLOBs) in the same plain-text formats.

SchemaCrawler Grep is another tool that comes with the SchemaCrawler download. SchemaCrawler Grep that allows you to search for certain column names within the database schema.

SchemaCrawler for PostgreSQL is available at SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=148383

The SchemaCrawler website is http://schemacrawler.sourceforge.net/

pgsnmpd version 1.0 released

The pgsnmpd developers are happy to announce the release of pgsnmpdversion 1.0. This version implements RFC 1697 (RDBMS-MIB) for a singleversion 8.x PostgreSQL database. Please see http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgsnmpd/ for more information.

Help with fixing the last 11 unit tests that are still failing for Python 3000

Guido van Rossum writes:

Please help! Here's the list of failing tests:

test_ctypes: Recently one test started failing again, after Martin changed

PyUnicode_FromStringAndSize() to use UTF8 instead of Latin1.

test_email, test_email_codecs, test_email_renamed: Can someone contact the email-sig and ask for help with these?

test_minidom: Recently started failing again; probably shallow.

test_sqlite: Virgin territory, probably best done by whoever wrote the code or at least someone with time to spare.

test_tarfile: Virgin territory again (but different owner :-).

test_urllib2_localnet, test_urllib2net: I think Jeremy Hylton may be close to fixing these, he's done a lot of work on urllib and httplib.

test_xml_etree_c: Virgin territory again.


Get all the details here: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=211842

WPF Designer and the IronPython Integration Sample

If you've had the opportunity to work with WPF/.NET 3.0 yet, you've likely run into the x:Class attribute in XAML. If you specify a x:Class on a XAML page, during compilation the XAML compiler creates a class in code using the registered CodeDomProvider for the given language that you're compiling. This presented some challenges for getting the IronPython sample to work with the new designer.
There were two major problems:

1) The IronPython CodeDomProvider is not registered globally on the machine.
2)IronPython 1.1 does not support compiling to .NET-consumable types.

Read the rest here: http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronmar/archive/2007/08/01/ironpython-integration-sample-and-the-wpf-designer.aspx

Some More Python 3000 Questions Answered

Guido van Rossum answers some more Python 3000 FAQs on this forum

Some of the questions:

Q. Will Python 3000 have feature X (which has not been proposed yet)?

Q. Will implicit string concatenation be removed in Python 3000? (I.e., instead of ("a" "b") you'd have to write ("a" + "b").)

Q. Will the binary API for strings be standardized in Python 3000? (Depending on a compile-time switch, Unicode strings use either a 2-byte wide or 4-byte wide representation.)

Q. Why isn't the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) recursive?

Q. Will we be able to use statements in lambda in Python 3000?

Q. Will Python 3000 require tail call optimization?

Q. Will Python 3000 provide "real" private, protected and public?

Q. Will Python 3000 support static typing?

Q. Why doesn't str(c for c in X) return the string of concatenated c values?