Today's Topics

Next episode: episode #15.

Topics for #15

2.7 is out

PSF: Funding for sprints

PyCon AU announces program: http://pycon-au.org/2010/conference/

rev80724: py3k changes for Thread Sanitizer

Guido's Python: Yaniv Aknin's series of weblog posts on Python internals http://tech.blog.aknin.name/tag/guidos-python/

Discussion of Mark Shuttleworth's cadence idea.

Topics for #13

**recorded; needs to be edited**

PSF stuff:

• new board
• funding
• include Tim Couper discussion in here?

New PEP: 3147: PYC repository directories

• will happen in Python 3.2 (code already committed)
• makes it easier to share Python code among multiple versions/implementations.

• instead of writing out a .pyc/.pyo in the same directory as the .py, will write to a pycache directory.

• will ignore .pyc if no .py exists

Short items:

2.7beta1 released

• What's New not completely updated.

GSOC (Summer of Code) selection process now underway.

• program aimed at college-level students
• through which they can learn how to work on open-source projects.
• students write proposals describing what they want to work on.
• students work w/ mentors, who are existing developers.
• students are paid roughly $3-4K, so this replaces a summer job.

SEC to mandate use of Python for expressing algorithms?

• SEC = US Securities & Exchange Commission

• Mission is "to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation."
• Draft rules for asset-backed securities state:
  • In addition, we are proposing to require, along with the prospectus filing, the filing of a computer program of the contractual cash flow provisions expressed as downloadable source code in Python, a commonly used open source interpretive programming language.
• ABSes would have to post their assets as XML, and the Python program would read and analyze it to produce the resulting cashflow.
• Motivation is: "We believe that, with the waterfall computer program and the asset data file, investors would be better able to conduct their own evaluations of ABS and may be less likely to be dependent on the opinions of credit rating agencies."
• Requests for comments: is Python the right language? Other languages that should be used? Closed-source languages OK?

Specific topics

*More* new changes in unittest (addition of -c / -f command line options). New unittest2 release that contains these - 0.3.0. http://pypi.python.org/pypi/unittest2

Before the last podcast Steve raised the issue of how people become Python committers and how good (or otherwise) the core team are at handling bug reports and patches on the tracker. We could discuss that in the CPython segment.

Victor Stinner on fuzzing Python: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.devel/110134

Forking and threading: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.devel/110401

New Jython podcast: Jythonpodcast.com

Interview Jeff Rush about the PSF's meetup funding.

PSF: new sponsor membership levels

Let's talk about Distribute, setuptools, pip sometime.

Python's history: Skype interview with Andrew S. Tanenbaum of ABC?

Regular Features

Python for newbies

Installing on Windows

Installing on MacOS

IDEs

Brett: writing a del method

General Topic Ideas

New checkins

Lengthy threads on python-dev, python-ideas or other SIGs

Interviews

PSF-related stuff

PyCon

Creation of "Python Secret Underground" (the 'Cabal')

User groups, events and community happenings (training sessions for example)

Shameless plugs for Holden Web events!

Python diversity

Major project news (Django, Twisted, TurboGears, Zope, etc)

New books, new projects, tracking the Planet Python blogs for interesting new stuff (we could even 'review' interesting Python related blogs)

Possible format: short news summary, interview, mad ramblings

Standard Format

Intro:

Welcome to a Little Bit of Python, episode X, with <person 1>, <person 2>, and myself, <person 3>.

Intro music (fade down after 8 sec, over 2sec duration).

Bumpers: slice of theme track (fade up over 7sec, full volume for 6sec, fade down over 4sec)

Participants introduce themselves: "I'm <so-and-so>." (Optional: "In <location>.")

Conclusions:

Thank you for listening. We'll be back with another episode soon.

Outro:

Music: fade up theme over 1/2 sec, play for 7sec, lower level beneath the outro text, return to normal level, play for 5 sec, then fade out over 8sec).

This has been a Little Bit of Python, episode X, with <person 1>, <person 2>, and myself, <person 3>.

Please send your comments and suggestions to the e-mail address all@bitofpython.com.

Our theme is track 11 from The Headroom Project's album Haifa, available on the Magnatune label.

Contributors

(in alphabetical order by last name)

• Brett Cannon
• Michael Foord
• Steve Holden
• Andrew Kuchling
• Jesse Noller