One of the important advantages of the VirtualBox virtualization solution is powerful public API allowing to control every aspect of virtual machine configuration and execution. Last month I was working on Python and Java bindings to that API. Those bindings are shipped with VirtualBox 2.0 SDK.

A few idiosyncrasies I've encountered with Python. The problems with Lambda's, Scoping, and Number handling.

Django 1.0 has been released and here's a summary of the top 5 changes for Pythons no.1 framework.

A well-supported open source project, Delta3D is a full-function game engine appropriate for a wide variety of modeling & simulation applications (training, education, visualizations, and entertainment).

Just yesterday at work I had a good real-life use case for generic functions which deserved a blog post.

The development team at CohesiveFT has kickstarted a free Django community portal for developers who want to include the 1.0 version of the framework in their apps, test and deploy production-reader servers to the cloud in real-time. Check it out.

Last year when I was going through the various python frameworks, I eventually dismissed Django in favor of TurboGears. From TurboGears I settled on Pylons as my web framework of choice, and excepting some quirks and some bad documentation, I’ve been very happy. Last night I had the privledge of revisiting Django to do a programming problem as part of an interview. I was tasked with making a little blog system that supported pingbacks. Having a lot more experience with frameworks now, I was able to really sit back and think about what I liked and what I didn’t, with respect to Pylons.

multiprocessing is a package that supports spawning processes using an API similar to the threading module. The multiprocessing package offers both local and remote concurrency, effectively side-stepping the Global Interpreter Lock by using subprocesses instead of threads. Due to this, the multiprocessing module allows the programmer to fully leverage multiple processors on a given machine. It runs on both Unix and Windows.

" No, you’re not hallucinating, it’s really here. Around three years ago, Adrian, Simon, Wilson and I released some code to the world. Our plan was to hack quietly on it for a bit, release a solid 1.0 release, and then really get the ball rolling. Well[...]"

A commenter reminds me on Groovy (It was mentioned as part of Grails). His comment makes me curious on what’s the latest on Groovy and how it is stacking up to Jython.

This article explains the new features in Python 2.6 scheduled for release on October 1 2008. The major theme of Python 2.6 is preparing the migration path to Python 3.0, a major redesign of the language. Some significant new packages have been added to the standard library, such as the multiprocessing and jsonlib modules, but there aren’t many new features that aren’t related to Python 3.0 in some way.

Maybe these are old news for a lot of people in the community, but I just found these three great lectures about Python over at google code university

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where they believed the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks these dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then—for both developers and the application development managers who determine the corporate programming language strategy.

Generators is a concept that was introduced in Pyethon at version 2.2, back then they were unidirectional that only allowed information to be passed out of the generator and not back into it, which limited their use to simple iterators and not much else. This was changed / enhanced in Python 2.5 when both data and exceptions now can be passed back into to generator. The changes made in 2.5 allowed for generators to be used as coroutines enabling them to function in complex event-driven programming such as asynchronous I/o, games, etc.

Playing with Google App Engine has been fun, but not without a few problems.

How to learn Regular Expression in Python? You can follow the steps...

The documentation refactor is in: the docs for the upcoming 1.0 release have been tidied up, rearranged and ported to a new documentation system based on Sphinx. The URL has also changed to docs.djangoproject.com.

A list, and descriptions, of 10 great Python programming books that are available in full online.

This writing explains the basics of thread programming, for a beginner, the concept of thread programming is often intimidating with the complexities involved in it, therefore its very important to get the basics right. This article explains the basics of threads, creating multiple threads of control from the main program using a simplified syntax and also some slightly advanced concepts like acquiring and releasing locks.

So here is my own personal gentle introduction to using pdb. It assumes that you are not using any IDE -- that you're coding Python with a text editor and running your Python programs from the command line.

After working in Django I keep getting a shock when I need to re-write features and basic functionality. I know Django is a framework and PHP is a language (although, not according to some people). However, I’ve not yet found a PHP framework that I’ve liked, one that has empowered me while not feeling like it is getting in my way. They usually feel verbose and awkward, but my favourite is the Zend framework (I just hope they can make it easier to use with namespaces soon!).

Do you need to encrypt small text data, like serial numbers or customer numbers in your web application? With the amount of data being transmitted online and the increasing need to protect customers against identity theft, encryption is the one and only choice to keep customers safe. Unfortunately, implementing encryption is a daunting task and the circumstance often leads to security holes. Like most developers, we aim to protect our customers, and keeping on top of the latest encryption techniques is easily a full time job.

The way to see if a varible exists in the namespace is by catching exceptions when trying to access the variable

Fredrik Lundh is almost certainly a benevolent alien in disguise, sent to Earth to help the pitiful human race drag itself up out of the muck. In a recent post, he touched on something that burned me BAD when I first started slinging pythion: using mutables as default parameters. My particular run-in was a cousin of what Fredik describes, using a mutable as a default class attribute.

Python code doesn’t typically use the get and set methods so common in PHP. Normally, when writing PHP code, you carefully protect your instance variables by making them private, so callers can only interact with them via getter and setter methods