After several frustrating weeks learning how to create, edit, and publish a screencast under Linux (about which I will write a separate post), I have now published screencasts of both presentations that I gave at the PyAtl meetup in January. I opened with a talk about the import statement, and where Python packages lived before egg files were invented:

The audience seemed most interested in the last section of the talk, where I discuss three techiques for debugging problems with Python’s import statement; fast-forward to around 3:00 if you want to catch that part by itself.

Next, Jeremy Jones spoke about eggs, Noah Gift introduced virtualenv, and, finally, I got back up to talk about buildout. This was probably my own favorite among the recent presentations I have given, and it’s the one I’ve worked hardest to adapt to a competent screencast:

I have prepared a supplement to the above screencast that gives additional hints and tips about using buildout, as well as a link to the source code of the module that I use as my example.

Finally, if you’re ready to see something a little less polished — something that instead of being a screencast is actually a film of me talking in front of a live audience, and gesturing and jumping around — I filled a vacant lightning-talk slot at our February PyAtl meeting with an impromptu introduction to Kinetic Style Sheets (KSS), using an example application that was still sitting on my laptop after at a Georgia Tech developer’s luncheon earlier that week:

Now I can finally turn my attention to preparing for my upcoming talk at PyCon 2008 in Chicago! I will be talking about the basic “adapter” design pattern, and how a framework like Zope 3 can facilitate its use. Stay tuned for more information!

In this post, I provide the slides and examples from a recent talk that I gave to some fellow software developers at Georgia Tech. Many of them were not familiar with web frameworks, and I wanted to introduce them to two common concepts: the idea of “convention over configuration,” and the practice of passing inert data structures to a page template rather than letting it access live objects directly.

But because I am also really enjoying my work with the new Python web framework Grok, I decided to make it the centerpiece of my presentation (more…)

Over the years I have received many requests from frustrated Windows users, asking for a Windows-native version of my PyEphem astronomy library for Python. For most Windows users, an attempt to build the extension ends abruptly with the terrible and famous message:

error: Python was built with version 7.1 of Visual Studio, and extensions need to be built with the same version of the compiler, but it isn’t installed.

And, as I myself do not have Visual Studio on the small Windows machine that I deign to own for the sake of my photo printer, I have never been able to offer my users much help. But earlier this year, a helpful PyEphem user named Jeff Kowalczyk emailed me a link to Philip von Weitershausen’s post “Cheap binary Windows eggs”, which describes a method for building Python extensions using a freely available compiler.

(more…)