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Welcome to issue 38 of Python Weekly. This week's issue is sponsored by Sencha. Be sure to check out their offering, they provide few great products.
  

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News

After the spring elections, the Foundation is happy to welcome a new group of members. All members of the PSF are nominated by an existing member for their work in the Python community.
 

Articles, Tutorials and Talks

This post tries to expalin what args, kwargs, * and ** does with a practical example of where we use 'args', 'kwargs' and why we use it. 
 
This video shows a visualization of Python core development. It shows growth of the Python project's source code over time (August 1990 - June 2012). The source code history and relations are displayed by Gource as an animated tree, tracking commits over time. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the Python project.
 
Can eval be made safe? You can't do any harm if you can't use any double underscores, so maybe if exclude any string with double underscores you are safe. Maybe...
 
This article shows how to use redis to build a simple multi-producer, multi-consumer Queue with an interface similar to the python standardlib queue. With this queue you can easily share data between multiple processes or offload time consumig calculations to multiple worker processes.
 
In this 4th episode of A Django Podcast, Bryan and Greg talk with Kenneth Reitz about deploying Django applications on Heroku.
 
In this video, we'll go over a few new commands and layouts, and look into making clever use of functions with arguments to reuse code. The UI we'll be building would be an example UI for a batch process or some other type of UI where you needed the user to input specific information
 
Python is a tremendous asset when you're trying to classify images, track changes in scenes, search for items within images, implement augmented reality, or do the myriad other things that fall under the umbrella of Computer Vision. In this interview, Jan Erik Solem, author of the upcoming book "Programming Computer Vision with Python," describes the uses for some common operations, and choices programmers have.
 
This episode includes an interview with Kristjan Valur Jonsson.
 
A convolution is a way to combine two sequences, x and w, to get a third sequence, y, that is a filtered version of x. This post shows how to implement it in python.
 
A post about using Chaco to embed scientific graphical applications in a Traits UI.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Google has released an early stage version Blockly, which is a web-based, graphical programming language. Users can drag blocks together to build an application. You can export a Blockly program into Python, JavaScript, Dart or XML.
 
metlog-py is a Python client for the "Metlog" system of application logging and metrics gathering developed by the Mozilla Services team. The Metlog system is meant to make life easier for application developers with regard to generating and sending logging and analytics data to various destinations. 
 
It is provides data visualization and analysis for novice and experts. The data mining can be done through visual programming or Python scripting. There are components available for machine learning and add-ons for bioinformatics and text mining.
 
The Larch Environment is an interactive programming environment that brings Python to life.
 
HappyBase is a developer-friendly Python library to interact with Apache HBase.
 
Logster is a utility for reading log files and generating metrics in Graphite or Ganglia. It is ideal for visualizing trends of events that are occurring in your application/system/error logs.
 
This is an attempt to bring djangopeople.net back online and up to date.

Tracerlib is a set of utilities to make tracing Python code easier.
 

New Releases

Some of the new features include
  • PEP 405 - Virtual Environments 
  • PEP 420 - Namespace Packages
  • PEP 3144 - The ipaddress Module
  • Windows Build Upgraded to Visual Studio 2010
In addition, there are fixes across a number of modules, including batches of fixes to IDLE, email, and urllib.

 
 
Upcoming Events and Webinars

This webcast covers an assortment of Python-related App Engine subjects, such as:
  • Using web app frameworks
  • Debugging and troubleshooting
  • Data maintenance
DISQUS is hosting a hack day for kickass tools and applications built on top of Python, usually using Django or Flask.
 
We had a lot of fun in our first Python project night. Let's do it again! This time we will be picking 3 projects to work on in advance of the meetup
 
We typically have a main presentation or a series of lightning talks, followed by discussion and Q&A. 
 

Python Jobs of the Week

Advance Digital provides digital information and connection solutions for local consumers and businesses. The company operates 12 media properties across the U.S. that are the number one local news, information and community hubs in the markets they serve. We need an efficient and agile engineer motivated by solving interesting technical challenges and building new applications quickly.
 


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