Sony Steals Feature From Your PlayStation 3 - those who think Apple's restrictive policy is bad, read this about Sony. If you bought your PS3 because of the possibility to also run Linux and play with the multicore system, you can now participate in a free feature downgrade.
Archive March 2010
EU Commission wants to introduce Internet blocks - proof of how brainless the Commission construct is and how urgently Europe needs to be put on sensible, democratic feet. We now have to deal with this nonsense again, even though it's finally done locally - and European commission bureaucracy is even harder to overcome than Schäuble's fantasies. For Schäuble, one election and a change of ministers was enough, but the time until the next commission composition is long.
Several Dead in Attacks on Moscow Metro - since I am somehow connected to Russia, one looks at such reports with different eyes. A few weeks ago the attack on the train from St. Petersburg and now this in Moscow. The Urals have been very quiet in the last two weeks.
NLTK Home (Natural Language Toolkit) - and if you want something more powerful and flexible, this is so to speak the grab bag for parsers. Focus is on the analysis of natural languages, hence also things like stemmers (stem finding for word forms) are included. Could be overkill for simple embedded languages, though.
Python Package Index : Esrapy 0.5 - a parser and lexer toolkit completely in Python. Might become interesting in some projects later, at least for smaller configuration languages.
Building Skills in Python - Online book about Python for programmers who simply don't know the language yet. Looks very well made at first glance.
Jobo AG & Jobo Labortechnik GmbH are insolvent (updated) | photoscala - great, I just bought a Jobo image tank last year, so firmware updates might become problematic in the near future. Okay, I don't plan to buy new cameras anytime soon (I just renovated my system), but still...
Oscar for Waltz - absolutely deserved. The man was the perfect casting for me in Tarantino's film.
Bottle: Python Web Framework - super-simple Python web framework that comes as a single Python file. No dependencies other than the standard library. No built-in ORM, but very lean and perhaps interesting for projects where you don't need or want a database (or use the file system as a database).
clojure-python - an interesting project that aims to simplify interoperability between Jython and Clojure and raise it to a similar level as it already is between Clojure and Java. Particularly interesting for me, as it would allow me to rely more on Clojure as an alternative - Jython is already a planned component of the toolkit, but has some performance issues that Clojure does not have through more direct Java integration. Moreover, I prefer to write compact Lisp code rather than verbose Java ...
hugoduncan's clj-ssh at master - GitHub - quite an interesting library that enables ssh access in Clojure scripts. For example, very interesting for server automation. Uses Jsch, a native Java ssh library (so no detour via shell-pipes or similar).
Scala: Post-Functional, Post-Modern, or Just Perl++? - interesting post that addresses some of the points that also bother me when looking at Scala. I particularly like the designation as Perl++, as that is exactly the impression that comes to me whenever I delve deeper into Scala. Perl has always fascinated me, but by the time I built larger projects with it and used the advanced features of Perl more intensively, I had some doubts about the maintainability of the result - especially with regard to handing over the work to one of my colleagues for further maintenance. At that time, I switched to Python because it offered me many of the features in a much cleaner language concept. I think this could also explain why I just can't warm up to Scala, even though many aspects of it fascinate me.
digg's lazyboy at master - GitHub - because key-value datastores are currently all the hype (and because they are really more practical for some things than classic databases), I will probably take a look at Cassandra. Simply because reports on the web suggest it offers the best scaling possibilities. And because it is used in some large websites - specifically, for example, at Digg (which I find as a site to be stupid, but hey, they have a lot of traffic and run relatively stably) with lazyboy as the Python binding.
17.6. multiprocessing - much better than external modules for process communication are the tools included with Python since version 2.6 in multiprocessing.
rfc1437 / lazypy / source — bitbucket.org - and another project of mine (again) online. Lazypy is a small library that makes lazy evaluation and futures (thread and process based) available for Python. Very practical for simple concurrent programming. Ok, you can do everything by hand, but I prefer the more functional approach. It's actually from 2004, but I modernized it (the process-based futures to bypass the GIL) and uploaded it again.
Semanchuk.com - Python IPC Modules - inter-process communication with Python.