Recently, Google has stepped up its presence in the cloud computing arena. Google's new App Engine (aka "AppSpot") lets you design and run web applications using Google's existing infrastructure. Their (free) basic account offers up to half a gigabyte of storage plus the computing power to push approximately 5 million page views per month. That's a nice starting point for anyone who might be looking into a web-based application environment.

In recent months, many people considering taking up Python have asked me what Python beginners should do about the release of Python 3.0. Here's your answer.

Download and Install Python, Your First Python Program, Variables,Loop and Conditional Statements, Functions Tuples, Lists, and Dictionaries in Python. Classes, Modules, File I/O, Exception Handling and so on.

Spring Python has just released 0.9.0. This release includes a key update to springpython.security.web module, where authorization has been patched to support CherryPy 3.1. Sylvain helped by providing key patches to integrate Spring Wiki with CherryPy 3.1, and I adapted these to support the PetClinic app. This valuable feature will help demonstrate all the various features of Spring Python during the "Introduction to Spring Python" demo scheduled later this week during the SpringOne conference.

Nowadays, I've more or less abandoned chess... But strangely enough, I remembered my childhood refuge once again today, just by seeing some Sudoku puzzle in a magazine... and decided to take another swing at it. With much better tools than pen and paper :-)

If you need to speed up your Python program there are several possible approaches, with varying degree of effort needed, here is (probably not complete) overview:

Now you can run Python on Java Portals with the help of Jython and a small project I have been working on: portlet.py.

CorePy is a Python package for developing assembly-level applications on x86, Cell BE and PowerPC processors. Its simple APIs enable the creation of complex, high-performance applications that take advantage of advanced processor features, including multiple cores and vector instruction sets (SSE, VMX, SPU), usually inaccessible from high-level languages.

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, Book 1

I've found a small MUD-like single player game that I did with Python several years ago. Thought it would be nice to share the source. So here it is.

I forget where exactly I found this, but the other day I needed a quick Python method to send an HTML email — in my case, it was in response to a Web CGI request, but this example below is usable anywhere. The bits that need to be changed for different situations should be evident (’somefile.txt’ for example). You will also need to point the smtplib to an actual mail server if you don’t run one on the local machine.

Agilo for Scrum is the only open source solution designed exclusively for Scrum Teams, Scrum Master and Product Owner. It streamlines agile and lean software development. Agilo for Scrum is easy to configure and empowers multiple agile teams to: • work in parallel • actively manage iterations and release cycles • define individual Backlogs, like e.g. Release Backlog or Bug Backlog • create and maintain the Sprint Backlog easily etc.

Now I’m starting in on learning Erlang. It’s not because I want to learn Erlang so much as I want to learn how to think in the ways that Erlang functions. Particularly the concurrency and how Erlang does it’s stuff.

One way that a daemon process differs from a normal backgrounded task is that a daemon process disassociates from its calling process and controlling terminal. This recipe outlines the standard procedure for creating a daemon process. This procedure includes forking once, calling setsid to become a session leader, then forking a second time.

If you want to learn the DLR and IronRuby fast, I suggest you start playing with the DLR Console as much as you can first then download the Silverlight Dynamic Language SDK.

Along with today’s launch of NetBeans 6.5, Sun, in cooperation with the NBPython community, are releasing an early access version of Python support for NetBeans. This is a result of the collaboration between Sun people and the NBPython project that I wrote about back in July. This release has been tested by folks in the NetBeans community and some folks from Sun’s NetBeans QA team, and it’s in pretty good shape for an early access release. We’re interested in getting people’s feedback. We would also love to see more people get involved with NBPython.

Byteflow is promising Django-based blog engine written in python. In this article described how to setup Byteflow on Jython with all dependencies.

The original Python Sidebar is actually unusable due to the python 2.6 documentation refactoring... Here is the updated Python 2.6 Sidebar for Firefox.

IronPython is an easy-to-learn yet surprisingly powerful language for .NET development. Find out how it differs from C# and Visual Basic while still leveraging your existing .NET knowledge.

Some tips to make reusable Django Apps.

The Pyjamas Book Online is being developed as a comprehensive guide and reference to developing Pyjamas Applications in Python. Pyjamas allows the developer to escape from AJAX and Javascript and program exclusively in Python, if desired, for the creation of Rich Internet and Desktop applications, using the same Python source code for both Desktop and Web. Pyjamas is a port of GWT to Python.

Paypal has a comprehensive API to use their services programatically. The ExpressCheckout API allows you to get the user’s details and then process the payments on your servers. They include a SOAP and NVP API. With NVP you do a GET to the Paypal servers with Url encoded values, get responses in plain text and work with them.

How-to write batch image processing scripts using Python and the Python Imaging Library (PIL). Includes examples such as a thumbnail generator, PNG to GIF covnersion and image resizing.

Following the previously-announced schedule, today the Django team has released Django 1.0.1. This is a bugfix-only release containing fixes and improvements to the Django 1.0 codebase, and is a recommended upgrade for anyone using or targeting Django 1.0.

Delves into using Google App Engine Patch to seamlessly run Django on App Engine. Also discusses App Engine Patch's integration on boto SQS that lets you call Amazon's Simple Queue Service from Google App Engine. That's just cool since it gets around GAE's limitation on long-lived processes -- you can just send it over to Amazon for processing and keep your GAE app moving.