Software

Part 1: In Which We Begin at the Beginning

Preface

Someone recently posted to the Twisted mailing list asking for something like the “Twisted introduction for people on a deadline”. Full disclosure: this isn’t it. On the spectrum of introductions to Twisted and asynchronous programming in Python, it may be on the exact opposite end. So if you don’t have any time, or any patience, this isn’t the introduction you are looking for.

I was browsing my list of free programmers’ editors and discovered some broken links. It seems a couple of editors have gone the way of all bits. Farewell, ManyaPad! Goodbye, lpe! We shall mourn your loss and taste your power no more.

In the plus column, I found a living editor: Gobby, a free real-time collaborative editor with support for programming lanuage syntax highlighting.

Up until recently, if I needed to launch a child process from a Python program, I would use the system() function in the os module, because it was the easiest one for me to remember how to use. This is despite the fact that system() is rarely what I actually wanted.

For starters, os.system() runs the command in a shell, so unless you are actually using the shell redirection operators or argument expansion, the function is just launching a shell in order to run the program you really wanted to start in the first place. Second, the shell is going to interpret your arguments the way shells do – splitting arguments on spaces, expanding wildcards, etc. If one of the arguments is a filename with spaces and shell special characters, you have to escape it very carefully (and in a system-specific way) to prevent the shell from messing with it. Naturally, I often just wouldn’t bother and thus my commands would fail whenever a strange filename showed up.

Okee dokey, I just finished my Python script to turn my book database into wordpress blog entries.  Instant wordpress blog history, it’s like I’ve been blogging for years! Back when it wasn’t cool.

An excellent introduction to the intriguing programming language and distributed software framework Erlang.

I just found a cool piece of music software: Solfege.

Solfege is an open source ear training program where you can practice identifying intervals,  chords, scales, rhythms, etc.

Beth has a new website to help launch her acting career. We had the look designed at Appropriate Solutions and I did the programming in Django.

I started learning to play the guitar a few years ago and I recently decided to try home recording. I’m going to post my recordings here as I get comfortable with the equipment and learn how to use the recording software.

I’m happy to say that all my recording software is open source, running on my Debian Linux system. My limited experience with audio on Linux several years ago led me to believe I would have to get myself a Macintosh and some commercial recording software like Pro Tools.

A serviceable guide to network programming in Python.

From the title, I expected this to be a thorough reference to the standard Python modules, but instead it is a collection of sample scripts which illustrate the basic usage of the standard modules. In that respect it is similar to the Python Cookbook, but the Cookbook has better recipes and more in-depth discussions of the recipes. Also, this book only covers up to Python 2.0 and is thus somewhat out of date. For example, it covers the obsolete ‘rfc822’ module, but not the new ’email’ module. Also, this book has at least one glaring error – it claims that XML is an application of SGML, which is simply not true. XML is a full-blown meta-markup language like SGML.