Jannis Leidel

Welcome to the new jannisleidel.com, after finally being migrated from Wordpress to Django. I’m now a happy user of James Bennett’s Coltrane app. It provides the features I used in the old Wordpress installation and is simple enough to be hacked in the spare time. One thing though was new to me and I want to share this little piece of usefulness with you.


Rick Copeland
I just wanted to let you all know that I've changed from the blogger domain to my own blog.pythonisito.com. You should be redirected there automatically, but if you've noticed some hiccups in feeds or weird redirects from Reddit or Delicious, now you know why.


Python for Intro CS? ( 20 August 2008 )
Titus Brown

I'm surprised I haven't seen this on planetpython yet...

...an emerging consensus in the scripting community holds thatPython is the right solution for freshman programming. Ruby wouldalso be a defensible choice.

(emphasis mine). Originally found via Lambda the Ultimate, and also passed onto meby Rich Enbody.

In other news, there are some rumors coming out of the intro CS course(CSE 231/232) here at Michigan State that the switch to Python fromC++ for the first term, 231, didn't affect the students' performancein the follow-on course, 232. That is, students performed equallywell on the 232 final independently of whether or not they'd hadPython or C++ in 231. I had hoped for an improvement in the scores,but at least it's not a decline!

--titus


Simon Willison

UnicodeDictWriter—write unicode strings out to Excel compatible CSV files using Python. Stuart Langridge and I spent quite a while this morning battling with Excel. The magic combination for storing unicode text in a CSV file such that Excel correctly reads it is UTF-16, a byte order mark and tab delimiters rather than commas.


The Tech of SitePen Support ( 20 August 2008 )
Kevin Dangoor

I’ve just posted an article with some details on how SitePen’s Support system is built. We use Python on the server and Dojo-driven JavaScript on the browser to create a responsive system. The model we use is similar to what I described in my PyCon 2008 talk where the client is driving the interaction rather than the server.

SitePen’s Support service is built using a variety of interesting techniques and technologies. Read on to see how we built a system that treats the web browser as a real client tier and bridges the worlds of JavaScript, Python and PHP seamlessly to provide a great experience for our customers.

[From SitePen Blog » The Tech of SitePen Support]