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Welcome to issue 74 of Python Weekly. Happy Valentine's Day to you all!
 
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Articles, Tutorials and Talks

Exceptions are baked-in to Python at the language level, can lead to cleaner code, and impose almost zero performance impact. If you were hesitant about using exceptions in the style described in this post, don't be. If you've avoided exceptions like the plague, it's time to give them another look.
 
The manage.py command inspectdb inspects the tables in an existing database and creates Python code defining the Django models for those tables. The inspectdb could be used to create Django models for an entirely different system not written in Python, say WordPress, and very easily create Django admin for that system. 
 
This is a series of posts that attempt to port data analyses originally done in R into Python. The objective isn't to just make a key that translates functions and methods in R into Python equivalents. Instead, the goal is to reproduce the results and insights of the analysis in idiomatic Python. Sometimes there will be a direct translation from a line of R to a line of Python; other times Python will suggest an altogether different approach to the problem.
 
This post shows you how to implement  Ribbit, a Twitter clone, using Django.
 
The purpose of this research is to help advance the field of password cracking by developing password rule analysis techniques and deliver tools to help enhance rule-based password cracking attacks. The contributions of this research are techniques for source word reversal, the introduction of the Reverse Levenshtein Path algorithm for password rule reversal and a tool, PACK (Password Analaysis and Cracking Kit) that will produce valid rules and wordlists for use with the Hashcat password cracker. 
 
Start Writing More Classes
This post tries to give a counter argument to the idea that classes are evil by sharing some examples of why the author thinks we can't have enough classes.
 
Web publishing frameworks are great, but sometimes they're just too much and you want a simple, static site that you can rely on for good and consistent performance. Static site generators are a useful hybrid for those occasions when you want the convenience of a web publishing framework without the overhead. Hyde is a popular site generator that provides powerful templating, based on Django, and metadata management. In this article, learn to use Hyde to accelerate development of static websites.
 
Pilot SSH is an iPhone app for server administration, but not yet another shell app. Instead, it generates a simple user interface to launch server side scripts and display their results. This post show you how to write a simple script to illustrate this by writing a Python script displaying the network interfaces.
 

 
 
 
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

PyPLN is a platform for processing and extracting useful information from text. It was conceived to run in the cloud, scale quickly and be easy to use. It integrates many text mining and natural language processing tools, which can be acessed via an easy-to-use Web interface, where you can manage documents, corpora and interact with its analysis/visualizations.
 
Mathics is a free, general-purpose online computer algebra system featuring Mathematica-compatible syntax and functions. It is backed by highly extensible Python code, relying on SymPy for most mathematical tasks and, optionally, Sage for more advanced stuff.
 
This an online course that will give you an Introduction to Python and Django.
 
Lock and unlock your desktop using a USB stick as a key.
 
wdb is a complete web debugger for wsgi project. Unlike other web debuggers, wdb is based on the python bdb debugger framework. This allows step by step debugging during the rendering of the page as well as exception inspection in the very state the exception occured.
 
A simple Python framework to catch exceptions and notify only the developer that wrote the buggy code
 
Django Db Tools is a set of Database tools that are helpful when running applications with Django in production. The primary initial tool allows for flipping a site in and out of a read-only mode.
 
Flask/Jinja2 web app to report various stats about a Raspberry Pi
 
django-parsley is a really easy way to get client side validations from Django-forms.
 
Run commands and manipulate files locally or over SSH using the same interface
 
A python module to simplify reading and writing binary files (or file-like objects, it is also useful for reading and writing network packages for example). This module is a convenience layer on top of standard python module "struct".


Books

This essential reference will guide you through a series of exciting projects that will allow you to automate your very own home. With easy-to-follow, step-by-step examples, diagrams, and explanations you will not only find it incredibly productive but also highly engaging and informative.


New Releases

Jython 2.7b1 brings us up to language level compatibility with the 2.7 version of CPython.  We have focused largely on CPython compatibility, and so this release of Jython can run more pure Python apps then any previous release. Please see the NEWS file for detailed release notes. Some notable new features in this release are: a bytearray implementation, a buffer api, memoryview, and a bz2 module.
 
This release includes several new features as well as numerous bug fixes and refactorings. It supports Python 2.4 - 2.7 and 3.1 - 3.3 and is the last release that supports Python 2.4 - 2.5.


Upcoming Events and Webinars

This live webcast is presented by Wes McKinney author of Python for Data Analysis and will be a somewhat advanced, technical talk connecting computer science concepts like data structure design and algorithms with the details of building intuitive, high performance, and flexible tools for data analysis. It is an accumulation of lessons learned and experience gained building pandas, a widely used, battle-tested data analysis toolkit for Python. Wes will give a number of short code demonstrations as a means of illustrating the various points.
 
Join us for a special PyStar Philly project night. We'll be partnering with Code for America Brigade to learn about building civic apps with open data. We'll be exploring and contributing to several Philly-based civic apps at this event. More adventurous folks might even want to build their own!
 
 
 
 
 

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