Re: ImportError with pickle (Python 2.7.9), possibly platform dependent

2015-05-13 Thread Ben Sizer
On Friday, 1 May 2015 13:09:48 UTC+1, Chris Angelico  wrote:
 
 Cool! That's part way. So, can you simply stuff OMDBMap into
 sys.modules prior to loading? It might be a bit of a hack, but it
 should work for testing, at least. Conversely, you could change the
 dump script to import via the name my_wsgi_app to make it consistent.
 
 ChrisA

Sorry for not coming back to this sooner.

In our case we are probably just going to work with a different file format 
because this was something like the 3rd time that the way pickle works caused 
our loading to fail for some reason or other. I think the hoops we need to jump 
through to ensure that the dumping and loading environments match up are too 
high relative to the cost of switching to JSON or similar, especially if we 
might need to load the data from something other than Python in future (god 
forbid).

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Re: ImportError with pickle (Python 2.7.9), possibly platform dependent

2015-05-13 Thread Ben Sizer
On Friday, 1 May 2015 13:34:41 UTC+1, Peter Otten  wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
 
  So... I don't know how to fix this, but I do now know why it fails, and I
  have a satisfactory answer for why it is acting differently on the Linux
  server (and that is just because that is the only one running under WSGI).
  Two out of three isn't bad!
 
 How about moving OMDBMap.py into the parent folder of my_wsgi_app.__file__ 
 or any other folder in sys.path?

That might work, but wouldn't be practical for us because in some 
configurations my_wsgi_app doesn't exist at all (as it is an artifact of 
running under mod_wsgi environment) and when it does, it it at the top of the 
hierarchy - so the rest of the app wouldn't be access modules there.

It could be put into sys.path somewhere else... but that is starting to break 
the project structure just to satisfy pickle. Instead, we'll just use a 
different format in future.

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Re: ImportError with pickle (Python 2.7.9), possibly platform dependent

2015-05-01 Thread Ben Sizer
On Thursday, 30 April 2015 01:45:05 UTC+1, Chris Angelico  wrote:
 On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 2:01 AM, Ben Sizer wrote:
  1) There clearly is a module named OMDBMap, and it's importable - it's 
  there in the 2nd line of the traceback.
 
  Does anybody have any suggestions on how I can go about debugging this? Or 
  refactoring it to avoid whatever is happening here?
 
 Are you half way through importing it when this load() call happens?
 That might cause some issues.

No, we already imported OMDBMap at the top of OMDBSetup.

 Has your current directory been changed anywhere in there?

Good question. It turns out that the current directory seems to be $HOME when 
loading, but is the script directory during saving. This will be because the 
Linux server is running under mod_wsgi, whereas we run the save script 
in-place. Our Windows and Mac tests run via Flask's built-in server so the 
working directory is likely to be the same whether we're running the script 
that does pickle.dump or the whole app that does pickle.load.

 What happens if you catch this exception and print out sys.modules at
 that point?

Another good question, and this gives us the answer. The module lists are quite 
different, as I'd expect because the load happens in the context of the full 
application whereas the dump happens as a standalone script. But literally 
every module that is in the 'before dump' list is in the 'before load' list - 
except OMDBMap. Like the error says! What /is/ in the 'before load' list 
however is my_wsgi_app.OMDBMap. The module has been imported, but the pickle 
algorithm is unable to reconcile the module in the WSGI app's namespace with 
the module referenced in the pickle file.

So... I don't know how to fix this, but I do now know why it fails, and I have 
a satisfactory answer for why it is acting differently on the Linux server (and 
that is just because that is the only one running under WSGI). Two out of three 
isn't bad!

Thanks,
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ImportError with pickle (Python 2.7.9), possibly platform dependent

2015-04-29 Thread Ben Sizer
I'm saving some data via pickle, and loading it in is proving tricky. 

Traceback (most recent call last):
  [...some lines removed...]
File /home/kylotan/OMDBSetup.py, line 44, in get_omdb_map
  __omdb_map = OMDBMap.OMDBMap.load_from_binary(full_path)
File /home/kylotan/OMDBMap.py, line 87, in load_from_binary
  d = pickle.load(binary_file)
File /usr/local/lib/python2.7/pickle.py, line 1378, in load
  return Unpickler(file).load()
File /usr/local/lib/python2.7/pickle.py, line 858, in load
  dispatch[key](self)
File /usr/local/lib/python2.7/pickle.py, line 1090, in load_global
  klass = self.find_class(module, name)
File /usr/local/lib/python2.7/pickle.py, line 1124, in find_class
  __import__(module)
ImportError: No module named OMDBMap

Here are the 2 weird things:

1) There clearly is a module named OMDBMap, and it's importable - it's there in 
the 2nd line of the traceback.
2) This error only arises on Linux. Exactly the same file loads in properly on 
MacOSX, and on Windows 8.


What I've done to try and debug this:

a) I've run an MD5 on the file to make sure the file is identical on all 
platforms, and that nothing is changing the line endings, and I'm also making 
sure to both open and save the pickle with 'rb'/'wb'.
b) I tried both pickle and cPickle - they seem to produce slightly different 
output but the error is exactly the same in each case.
c) I pickle and unpickle from exactly the same file (a file called OMDBSetup.py 
does 'import OMDBMap' and then calls methods in there to save and load the data 
(including the OMDBMap.OMDBMap.load_from_binary which contains the above 
callstack). The intention here was to avoid both the common No module named 
__main__ error, and to hopefully have exactly the same modules imported into 
the namespace at both save and load time.

So my hypothesis is that I've either found some edge case which only acts weird 
on Linux (or only succeeds on the other platforms, whichever way you look at 
it), or there's something wrong with the Linux configuration that means it 
somehow cannot find this module (despite it already having found it to get this 
far).

Does anybody have any suggestions on how I can go about debugging this? Or 
refactoring it to avoid whatever is happening here?

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Creating an object that can track when its attributes are modified

2013-03-06 Thread Ben Sizer
I am trying to make an object that can track when its attributes have been 
assigned new values, and which can rollback to previous values where necessary. 
I have the following code which I believe works, but would like to know if 
there are simpler ways to achieve this goal, or if there are any bugs I haven't 
seen yet.


class ChangeTrackingObject(object):
def __init__(self):
self.clean()

def clean(self):
Mark all attributes as unmodified.
object.__setattr__(self, '_dirty_attributes', dict())

def dirty_vals(self):
Returns all dirty values.
return dict( [ (k,v) for k,v in self.__dict__.iteritems() if k in 
self._dirty_attributes]  )

def get_changes_and_clean(self):
Helper that collects all the changes and returns them, cleaning the 
dirty flags at the same time.
changes = self.dirty_vals()
self.clean()
return changes

def rollback(self):
Reset attributes to their previous values.
for k,v in self._dirty_attributes.iteritems():
object.__setattr__(self, k, v)
self.clean()

def __setattr__(self, key, value):
# If the first modification to this attribute, store the old value
if key not in self._dirty_attributes:
if key in self.__dict__:
self._dirty_attributes[key] = object.__getattribute__(self, key)
else:
self._dirty_attributes[key] = None
# Set the new value
object.__setattr__(self, key, value)


I am aware that adding a new attribute and then calling rollback() leaves the 
new attribute in place with a None value - maybe I can use a special DeleteMe 
marker object in the _dirty_attributes dict along with a loop that calls 
delattr on any attribute that has that value after a rollback.

I also believe that this won't catch modification to existing attributes as 
opposed to assignments: eg. if one of the attributes is a list and I append to 
it, this system won't notice. Is that something I can rectify easily?

Any other comments or suggestions?

Thanks,
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Re: Creating an object that can track when its attributes are modified

2013-03-06 Thread Ben Sizer
On Wednesday, 6 March 2013 16:22:56 UTC, Chris Angelico  wrote:
 
 Effectively, you would need to have a
 subclass of list/dict/tuple/whatever that can respond to the change. 

This is certainly something I'd be interested in having, but I guess that would 
be fragile since the user would have the burden of having to remember to use 
those types.

 What's the goal of this class? Can you achieve the same thing by
 using, perhaps, a before-and-after snapshot of a JSON-encoded form of
 the object?
 

I need to be able to perform complex operations on the object that may modify 
several properties, and then gather the properties at the end as an efficient 
way to see what has changed and to store those changes. Any comparison of 
before-and-after snapshots could work in theory, but in practice it could be 
expensive to produce the snapshots on larger objects and probably expensive to 
calculate the differences that way too. Performance is important so I would 
probably just go for an explicit function call to mark an attribute as having 
been modified rather than trying to do a diff like that. (It wouldn't work for 
rollbacks, but I can accept that.)

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Re: Creating an object that can track when its attributes are modified

2013-03-06 Thread Ben Sizer
On Thursday, 7 March 2013 00:07:02 UTC, Steven D'Aprano  wrote:
 On Wed, 06 Mar 2013 08:56:09 -0800, Ben Sizer wrote:
 
  I need to be able to perform complex operations on the object that may
  modify several properties, and then gather the properties at the end as
  an efficient way to see what has changed and to store those changes. Any
  comparison of before-and-after snapshots could work in theory, but in
  practice it could be expensive to produce the snapshots on larger
  objects and probably expensive to calculate the differences that way
  too. Performance is important so I would probably just go for an
  explicit function call to mark an attribute as having been modified
  rather than trying to do a diff like that. (It wouldn't work for
  rollbacks, but I can accept that.)
 
 Premature optimization.
 
 Unless you have been eating and breathing Python code for 15+ years, your 
 intuition of what is expensive and what isn't will probably be *way* off. 
 I've been using Python for ~15 years, and I wouldn't want to try to guess 
 what the most efficient way to do this will be.

I admit, I've only been using Python for 10 years, but I've learned a lot about 
optimisation and what needs optimising from my time as a game developer. This 
code needs to be fairly high-performing due to the role it plays in my server 
and the frequency with which the behaviour gets called.

 Actually I lie. I would guess that the simple, most obvious way is 
 faster: don't worry about storing what changed, just store *everything*. 
 But I could be wrong.

The use case I have is not one where that is suitable. It's not the snapshots 
that are important, but the changes between them.

 Fortunately, Python development is rapid enough that you can afford to 
 develop this object the straightforward way, profile your application to 
 see where the bottlenecks are, and if it turns out that the simple 
 approach is too expensive, then try something more complicated.

I don't see a more straightforward solution to the problem I have than the one 
I have posted. I said that a system that took snapshots of the whole object and 
attempted to diff them would probably perform worse, but it would probably be 
more complex too, given the traversal and copying requirements. 

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Re: Installing PyPy alongside Python 2.7 on Windows?

2011-07-13 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jul 13, 7:29 am, cjrh caleb.hatti...@gmail.com wrote:
 You can just extract the windows pypy 1.5 distribution to any folder and run 
 pypy.exe from there as if it was called python.exe.  This is how I have 
 been using it.  In fact, pypy has been the default python for my portable 
 eclipse for a good while now.

That doesn't give access to existing site-packages, or allow me to
install binary packages that it can access. Hence me asking about that
specifically.
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Installing PyPy alongside Python 2.7 on Windows?

2011-07-12 Thread Ben Sizer
I'd like to evaluate the recent build of PyPy on the project I'm
currently working on, but am not sure how best to go about it. So my
question is simply - how would I go about installing PyPy alongside
Python 2.7 on Windows? In particular, unzipping PyPy and adding it to
the PATH is easy enough, but what about getting setuptools and
easy_setup working to install various packages for it? Is there a
virtualenv-based method I can use here? (And is pip a decent
replacement for setuptools on Windows yet?)

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Re: Confusion over etree.ElementTree.Element.getiterator

2010-07-05 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jul 4, 7:33 am, Stefan Behnel stefan...@behnel.de wrote:
 BenSizer, 04.07.2010 00:32:

  On Jul 3, 11:12 pm,BenSizerkylo...@gmail.com  wrote:

   for el in root.getiterator():

  ...        print el
  [much output snipped]
  Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a at d871e8
  Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a at d87288
  Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}script at d87300
  Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}script at d87378

  Hmm, I think I've worked it out. Apparently the XML namespace forms
  part of the tag name in this case. Is that what is intended?

 Sure.

  I didn't see any examples of this in the docs.

 Admittedly, it's three clicks away from the library docs on docs.python.org.

 http://effbot.org/zone/element.htm#xml-namespaces

Hopefully someone will see fit to roll this important documentation
into docs.python.org before the next release... oops, too late. ;)

It's one of those things that's easy to fix when you know what the
problem is. Unfortunately it makes the examples a bit awkward. The
example on http://docs.python.org/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html
opens up an xhtml file and reads a p tag within a body tag, but
the xhtml specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#strict) states
that 'The root element of the document must contain an xmlns
declaration for the XHTML namespace'. Therefore I don't see how the
example Python code given could work on a proper xhtml file, given
that there should always be a namespace in effect but the code doesn't
allow for it.

That's my excuse anyway! :)

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Confusion over etree.ElementTree.Element.getiterator

2010-07-03 Thread Ben Sizer
It seems that getiterator isn't returning the tags I ask for.

 tree = parse('gdlibs.html')
 root = tree.getroot()
 for el in root.getiterator():
...print el
[much output snipped]
Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a at d871e8
Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a at d87288
Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}script at d87300
Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}script at d87378

 it = root.getiterator('script')
 all_scripts = list(it)
 print len(all_scripts)
0

I would have expected at least 2 script tags to be found, considering
iterating over the whole lot found at least 2 at the end there.

What am I doing wrong?

 import sys
 print sys.version
2.6.4 (r264:75708, Oct 26 2009, 08:23:19) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)]


I will upgrade to 2.6.5 ASAP, but I don't see anything in the
changelog that implies a bug that has been fixed here.

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Re: Confusion over etree.ElementTree.Element.getiterator

2010-07-03 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jul 3, 11:12 pm, Ben Sizer kylo...@gmail.com wrote:

  for el in root.getiterator():

 ...        print el
 [much output snipped]
 Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a at d871e8
 Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a at d87288
 Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}script at d87300
 Element {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}script at d87378

Hmm, I think I've worked it out. Apparently the XML namespace forms
part of the tag name in this case. Is that what is intended? I didn't
see any examples of this in the docs.

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Re: Is pythonic version of scanf() or sscanf() planned?

2009-10-08 Thread Ben Sizer
On Oct 3, 11:06 pm, ryniek90 rynie...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi

 I know that in python, we can do the same with regexps or *.split()*,
 but thats longer and less practical method than *scanf()*. I also found
 that (http://code.activestate.com/recipes/502213/), but the code
 doesn't looks so simple for beginners. So, whether it is or has been
 planned the core Python implementation of *scanf()* ? (prefered as a
 batteries included method)

Perhaps struct.unpack is close to what you need? Admittedly that
doesn't read from a file, but that might not be a problem in most
cases.

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Re: 'Import sys' succeeds in C++ embedded code, but module is not fully visible

2009-01-15 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jan 14, 4:37 pm, Ivan Illarionov ivan.illario...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Jan 14, 1:49 pm, Ben Sizer kylo...@gmail.com wrote:

  No, I don't want to do anything with sys.path apart from see it. I
  just wanted my original question answered, not a guess at my intent
  and a solution for something I'm not doing. ;)  Thanks though!

  Again - why can I not reference sys from within the function?

 Ah, sorry for wrong guess.

 I would try to use ourNamespace_ dict for
 both globals and locals in PyRun_String call.

Yes, this seems to fix it, thanks. But why? Can some Python guru
explain why these two dictionaries must be the same? (Or what steps we
must take if we want them to be separate?) The documentation is not
very clear. I had hoped to be able to clear out the locals dictionary
while leaving useful functions intact in the globals dictionary, but
it would appear that is not practical.

(On a separate note, while trying to debug this it seemed that Python
will look for debug versions of a library when you embed it in debug
mode, and will fail to find a module if you only have the release
versions there. The error message you get isn't too helpful about this
however, and I only worked it out by looking at the very long list of
filesystem calls Python made to try and find it. Anybody wishing to
speed up import times might want to ensure they don't have a long
Python path and as few eggs in site-packages as possible.)

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Re: 'Import sys' succeeds in C++ embedded code, but module is not fully visible

2009-01-14 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jan 14, 1:55 am, Ivan Illarionov ivan.illario...@gmail.com wrote:
 Ben Sizer kylo...@gmail.com wrote:
  What am I doing wrong?

 What are you trying to achieve?
 If you want to modify sys.path I suggest using Python/C API directly:

No, I don't want to do anything with sys.path apart from see it. I
just wanted my original question answered, not a guess at my intent
and a solution for something I'm not doing. ;)  Thanks though!

Again - why can I not reference sys from within the function?

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Re: 'Import sys' succeeds in C++ embedded code, but module is not fully visible

2009-01-14 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jan 14, 4:37 pm, Ivan Illarionov ivan.illario...@gmail.com wrote:

 I would try to use ourNamespace_ dict for
 both globals and locals in PyRun_String call.

I will try it when I get home. However I would like to be able to
treat them as separate dictionaries, as I want to be able to import
some symbols and modules at a global level, but be able to clear out
objects introduced at the local level on a periodic basis, so that I
can have some degree of isolation between distinct 'scripts'. The docs
aren't terribly clear about what the globals and locals parameters to
PyRun_String actually do, though.

I also wonder if this is something specific to the sys module, since
it's already been shown that there are some specific C API functions
for it. I will try with other modules and see if they exhibit the same
symptoms.

And I'm still wondering about the sys.path[0] question. :)


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'Import sys' succeeds in C++ embedded code, but module is not fully visible

2009-01-13 Thread Ben Sizer
I have the following C++ code and am attempting to embed Python 2.5,
but although the import sys statement works, attempting to reference
sys.path from inside a function after that point fails. It's as if
it's not treating it as a normal module but as any other global
variable which I'd have to explicitly qualify.


Py_InitializeEx(0); // the zero skips registration of signal
handlers.
PyObject* ourNamespace_ = PyDict_New();
PyDict_SetItemString(ourNamespace_, __builtins__,
PyEval_GetBuiltins());
PyObject* locals = PyDict_New();

const char* scriptStr =
print '1'\n
import sys\n
print sys.path\n
def debug_path_info():\n
print 'These are the directories Python looks into for
modules and source files:'\n
print '2'\n
for folder in sys.path:\n
print folder\n
print '--'\n
print 'This would be your present working folder/
directory:'\n
print '3'\n
print sys.path[0]\n
debug_path_info()\n;

PyObject* scriptResult = PyRun_String(
scriptStr,  // Python code to execute
Py_file_input,
ourNamespace_,   // globals dictionary
locals);// locals dictionary

if (!scriptResult)
{
std::cerr  Python error:   Unhandled Python exception 
from
script.  std::endl;
PyErr_Print();
}
else
{
Py_DECREF(scriptResult); // don't need result any more
}

Py_DECREF(locals);
Py_DECREF(ourNamespace_);
Py_Finalize();


And the output is like this:

1
['E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-packages\\turbokid-1.0.4-py2.5.egg',
'E:\\code\\
Python25\\lib\\site-packages\\turbocheetah-1.0-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\
\Python25\\
lib\\site-packages\\simplejson-1.8.1-py2.5-win32.egg', 'E:\\code\
\Python25\\lib\
\site-packages\\ruledispatch-0.5a0.dev_r2306-py2.5-win32.egg', 'E:\
\code\\Python
25\\lib\\site-packages\\pastescript-1.6.2-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\
\Python25\\lib\\
site-packages\\formencode-1.0.1-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\
\site-packa
ges\\decoratortools-1.7-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-
packages\\con
figobj-4.5.2-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-packages\
\cherrypy-2.3.0
-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-packages\\kid-0.9.6-
py2.5.egg', 'E:\
\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-packages\\cheetah-2.0.1-py2.5-win32.egg',
'E:\\code\\
Python25\\lib\\site-packages\\pyprotocols-1.0a0-py2.5-win32.egg', 'E:\
\code\\Pyt
hon25\\lib\\site-packages\\pastedeploy-1.3.1-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\
\Python25\\li
b\\site-packages\\paste-1.6-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-
packages\
\sqlobject-0.10.0-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-packages\
\tgfastdat
a-0.9a7-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-packages\
\webhelpers-0.6-py2.
5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-packages\\shove-0.1.3-
py2.5.egg', 'E:\\co
de\\Python25\\lib\\site-packages\\boto-1.3a-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\
\Python25\\lib
\\site-packages\\sqlalchemy-0.5.0beta3-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\
\lib\\sit
e-packages\\turbojson-1.1.4-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-
packages\
\setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-packages\
\turbogear
s-1.0.8-py2.5.egg', 'C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\python25_d.zip', 'E:\\code\
\Python25
\\Lib', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\DLLs', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\Lib\\lib-tk',
'e:\\Visu
al Studio 2008\\Projects\\StacklessEmbed\\StacklessEmbed', 'e:\\Visual
Studio 20
08\\Projects\\StacklessEmbed\\Debug', 'E:\\code\\Python25', 'E:\\code\
\Python25\
\lib\\site-packages', 'E:\\code\\Python25\\lib\\site-packages\\PIL',
'E:\\code\\
Python25\\lib\\site-packages\\wx-2.8-msw-unicode']
These are the directories Python looks into for modules and source
files:
2
Python error: Unhandled Python exception from script.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File string, line 13, in module
  File string, line 7, in debug_path_info
NameError: global name 'sys' is not defined
[12532 refs]


(Incidentally, the Stackless references are because I was originally
trying to embed Stackless, but I reverted to vanilla 2.5 to see if it
was a Stackless specific issue, which it appears not.)

Another interesting thing is that sys.path[0] doesn't appear to be the
current working directory, despite several sources online suggesting
it should be.

What am I doing wrong?

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Re: Plz help..SocketServer UDP server losing lots of packets

2008-11-06 Thread Ben Sizer
On Nov 6, 12:46 am, James Mills [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:

 Try these instead:
  * UDPServer 
 -http://trac.softcircuit.com.au/circuits/browser/examples/udpserver.py
  * UDPClient  
 -http://trac.softcircuit.com.au/circuits/browser/examples/udpclient.py

Since there's no contact details on the Circuits site, and the guest
Trac account doesn't work (it asks the admin to verify the email),
then I'll post here: it appears that the Hello World example is wrong,
trying to add an instance of a 'hello' object that doesn't exist. I've
not tried to run the example, but it certainly confused me when trying
to work out how Circuits works.

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Re: Python GUI interpreter slower than DOS-version?

2008-08-12 Thread Ben Sizer
On Aug 12, 4:04 pm, ssecorp [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Sometimes when running very intensive computations the Python-
 interpreter kind of overheats and stops responding.

 I have gotten the impression that the dos-version is less likely to
 crash. Can that be true and if so, why?

 Is there anyway to get around this? Pretty annoying that it stops
 responding, would be nice to be able to control-c out of it like in
 DOS when you want to terminate a program.

If a Windows app says it's stopped responding, that doesn't mean
it's crashed. It just means it's not servicing the message pump.
Chances are high that the program is still running just as normal.

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Re: Undefined calling conventions in Python.h

2008-07-25 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jul 23, 1:19 pm, Fredrik Lundh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
  You should put the extern block around the #include python.h call
  rather than individual functions, as surely the C calling convention
  should apply to everything within.

 Hello?  Python's include files are C++ safe.  I even posted a complete
 compiler session to show that I'm not making that up.

 /F

In theory, yeah. In practice, if his compiler was somehow not
respecting that, then a quicker fix is to enclose the #include than to
do individual prototypes. Admittedly that might obscure the problem
rather than solve it.

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Re: Undefined calling conventions in Python.h

2008-07-23 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jul 23, 11:43 am, Jaco Naude [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 What Visual C++ is doing is that it is looking for mangled names since
 it does not know the DLL contains C functions. I've managed to work
 around this by declaring the Python functions as follows before using
 them in the C++ application side:

 extern C
 {
     void Py_Initialize(void);

 }

You should put the extern block around the #include python.h call
rather than individual functions, as surely the C calling convention
should apply to everything within.

 It is probably more of a C++ question it turns out, but I would think
 that someone in the Python group would use the Python DLL in C++.

More of a Visual C++ question specifically, since the __clrcall prefix
is a MS specific extension (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/
ec7sfckb(VS.80).aspx). If you're not using managed code in your app,
disable it in the project/build options. If you are, then perhaps you
just need to specify that you're not with this DLL, though I've never
had to deal with anything like that myself.

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Re: Best Python packages?

2008-07-22 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jul 19, 5:59 pm, Kay Schluehr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 In the original post you asked for hidden gems and now it seems you
 just want to know about Madonna or Justin Timberlake.

Not really, and I don't see why you'd say that.

 Maybe a look on this collection helps

 http://wiki.python.org/moin/UsefulModules

Yeah, I saw that. I hoped some people might have some more, but
perhaps not.

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Re: Best Python packages?

2008-07-18 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jul 16, 3:31 pm, Fredrik Lundh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
  make my development a lot easier.

 Knowing what kind of development you do might help, of course.  Some
 libraries are excellent in some contexts and suck badly in others...

Sure. Mostly I'm just interested in what's out there though. In C++
you have Boost which everybody knows are a source of high quality
libraries, covering a fairly wide set of applications. Obviously
that's more low-level and less application specific, and the Python
standard libs do pretty much everything that is in Boost, but it's
that sort of peer-reviewed and widely-applicable list that I'd like to
see.

I (attempt to) use TurboGears for web development and that depends on
a whole bunch of libraries - SQLObject, PyProtocols, RuleDispatch,
SimpleJson, FormEncode, etc - and I would never have heard of these if
TurboGears' exposure of its internals wasn't so common. Some of these
are web-specific but some are not. And I'd never know to look for them
specificially, because in many cases it wouldn't occur to me that they
exist. (eg. Object-Relational Mappers like SQLObject may be obvious if
you come from certain areas of IT, but I'd never heard of them before
I started with TurboGears.)

For what it's worth, my main areas of interest are gaming, multimedia,
and web development. But I just like to hear about anything that
people might use which makes their life a lot easier and which perhaps
is not application specific - like ORMs or something similar.

 Looking at things that larger projects and distributions use can also be
 a good idea.  For example, if you're doing scientific stuff, go directly
 to enthought.com.  If you're doing web stuff, look at the libraries big
 Django applications use.  Etc.

Sadly, I know just as little about what major applications are out
there as I do about what libraries are out there!

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Best Python packages?

2008-07-16 Thread Ben Sizer
Although the standard library in Python is great, there are
undoubtedly some great packages available from 3rd parties, and I've
encountered a few almost by accident. However, I don't know how a user
would become aware of many of these. http://pypi.python.org/pypi/
presumably lists most of the decent ones, but there's a lot there and
little indication as to quality or popularity - great if you know
exactly what you need, but not so great for just browsing. I'd love to
have some way of finding out what hidden gems are out there in the
Python world which could make my development a lot easier. Any
suggestions?

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Re: Create list from string

2008-06-13 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jun 13, 3:15 pm, ericdaniel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hi,

 I'm new to Python and I need to do the following:

 from this:   s = 978654321
 to this :      [978, 654, 321]

What are your criteria for splitting this string? Every 3 characters?
If there isn't an even multiple of 3, which group should be shorter,
the first, the last, or maybe some other?

And do you even really need this as a string at all? Perhaps you
really just wanted to format the output of an integer? (I think that
may be done via the locale, but I am not sure.)

Often it's best to specify why you want to do something, as when using
a new language there is often a better way to achieve what you want
than the first way that occurs to you.

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Using an object-relational mapper to convert between databases

2008-05-28 Thread Ben Sizer
Hello,

I'd like to be able to do the following:

 - open a connection to a MySQL or PostgreSQL database
 - read the schema and contents for one or more tables
 - create a new sqlite database file and open a connection to it
 - write out the previously-read tables and their contents to this new
database

I get the impression that the various object-relational mappers such
as SQLAlchemy and SQLObject can make this easier, especially if using
something like SQLAlchemy's autoloading capability to query the schema
from the DB rather than me having to explicitly specify it. But then
how easy is it to make a corresponding sqlite table and write the same
objects to it? I don't know how practical this is with SQLAlchemy, or
if a different ORM library would be more useful for this. And since
objects tend to be closely related to the database they are mapped to,
I don't know how easy it is to reflect them onto a second database.

I'd just like some advice and pointers from anybody who's tried
something similar to this or who knows the packages well enough to
point me in the right direction.

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Re: The Future of Python Threading

2007-08-11 Thread Ben Sizer
On Aug 10, 5:13 pm, Chris Mellon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On 8/10/07, Ben Sizer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  On 10 Aug, 15:38, Ben Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  wrote:
   Last I checked, multiple processes can run concurrently on multi-core
   systems. That's a well-established way of structuring a program.

  It is, however, almost always more complex and slower-performing.

  Plus, it's underdocumented. Most academic study of concurrent
  programming, while referring to the separately executing units as
  'processes', almost always assume a shared memory space and the
  associated primitives that go along with that.

 This is simply not true. Firstly, there's a well defined difference
 between  'process' and a 'thread' and that is that processes have
 private memory spaces. Nobody says process when they mean threads of
 execution within a shared memory space and if they do they're wrong.

I'm afraid that a lot of what students will be taught does exactly
this, because the typical study of concurrency is in relation to
contention for shared resources, whether that be memory, a file, a
peripheral, a queue, etc. One example I have close to hand is
'Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming', which has no
mention of the term 'thread'. It does have many examples of several
processes accessing shared objects, which is typically the focus of
most concurrent programming considerations.

The idea that processes have memory space completely isolated from
other processes is both relatively recent and not universal across all
platforms. It also requires you to start treating memory as
arbitrarily different from other resources which are typically
shared.

 And no, most academic study isn't limited to shared memory spaces.
 In fact, almost every improvement in concurrency has been moving
 *away* from simple shared memory - the closest thing to it is
 transactional memory, which is like shared memory but with
 transactional semantics instead of simple sharing.

I think I wasn't sufficiently clear; research may well be moving in
that direction, but you can bet that the typical student with their
computer science or software engineering degree will have been taught
far more about how to use synchronisation primitives within a program
than how to communicate between arbitrary processes.

 There's nothing undocumented about IPC. It's been around as a
 technique for decades. Message passing is as old as the hills.

I didn't say undocumented, I said underdocumented. The typical
programmer these days comes educated in at least how to use a mutex or
semaphore, and will probably look for that capability in any language
they use. They won't be thinking about creating an arbitrary message
passing system and separating their project out into separate
programs, even if that has been what UNIX programmers have chosen to
do since 1969. There are a multitude of different ways to fit IPC into
a system, but only a few approaches to threading, which also happen to
coincide quite closely to how low-level OS functionality handles
processes meaning you tend to get taught the latter. That's why it's
useful for Python to have good support for it.

  Hardly. Sure, so you don't have to worry about contention over objects
  in memory, but it's still completely asynchronous, and there will
  still be a large degree of waiting for the other processes to respond,
  and you have to develop the protocols to communicate. Apart from
  convenient serialisation, Python doesn't exactly make IPC easy, unlike
  Java's RMI for example.

 There's nothing that Python does to make IPC hard, either. There's
 nothing in the standard library yet, but you may be interested in Pyro
 (http://pyro.sf.net) or Parallel Python
 (http://www.parallelpython.com/). It's not erlang, but it's not hard
 either. At least, it's not any harder than using threads and locks.

Although Pyro is good in what it does, simple RPC alone doesn't solve
most of the problems that typical threading usage does. IPC is useful
for the idea of submitting jobs in the background but it doesn't fit
so well to situations where there are parallel loops both acting on a
shared resource. Say you have a main thread and a network reading
thread - given a shared queue for the data, you can safely do this by
adding just 5 lines of code: 2 locks, 2 unlocks, and a call to start
the networking thread. Implementing that using RPC will be more
complex, or less efficient, or probably both.

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Re: The Future of Python Threading

2007-08-10 Thread Ben Sizer
On 10 Aug, 15:38, Ben Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
 Justin T. [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
  The truth is that the future (and present reality) of almost every
  form of computing is multi-core, and there currently is no effective
  way of dealing with concurrency.

 Your post seems to take threading as the *only* way to write code for
 multi-core systems, which certainly isn't so.

 Last I checked, multiple processes can run concurrently on multi-core
 systems. That's a well-established way of structuring a program.

It is, however, almost always more complex and slower-performing.

Plus, it's underdocumented. Most academic study of concurrent
programming, while referring to the separately executing units as
'processes', almost always assume a shared memory space and the
associated primitives that go along with that.

  We still worry about setting up threads, synchronization of message
  queues, synchronization of shared memory regions, dealing with
  asynchronous behaviors, and most importantly, how threaded an
  application should be.

 All of which is avoided by designing the program to operate as
 discrete processes communicating via well-defined IPC mechanisms.

Hardly. Sure, so you don't have to worry about contention over objects
in memory, but it's still completely asynchronous, and there will
still be a large degree of waiting for the other processes to respond,
and you have to develop the protocols to communicate. Apart from
convenient serialisation, Python doesn't exactly make IPC easy, unlike
Java's RMI for example.

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Re: something similar to shutil.copytree that can overwrite?

2007-06-22 Thread Ben Sizer
On 22 Jun, 02:34, Justin Ezequiel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
 def copytree(src, dst, symlinks=False):
 Recursively copy a directory tree using copy2().

 The destination directory must not already exist.

 XXX Consider this example code rather than the ultimate tool.

 
 names = os.listdir(src)
 if not os.path.exists(dst): os.makedirs(dst) # add check here

That's the easy bit to fix; what about overwriting existing files
instead of copying them? Do I have to explicitly check for them and
delete them? It seems like there are several different copy functions
in the module and it's not clear what each of them do. What's the
difference between copy, copyfile, and copy2? Why do the docs imply
that they overwrite existing files when copytree skips existing
files?

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Re: something similar to shutil.copytree that can overwrite?

2007-06-21 Thread Ben Sizer
On 20 Jun, 11:40, Justin Ezequiel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
 On Jun 20, 5:30 pm, Ben Sizer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  I need to copy directories from one place to another, but it needs to
  overwrite individual files and directories rather than just exiting if
  a destination file already exists.

 What version of Python do you have?
 Nothing in the source would make it exit if a target file exists.
 (Unless perhaps you have sym-links or the like.)

I have 2.5, and I believe the behaviour I saw was that it exits if a
directory already exists and it skips any files that already exist. It
certainly wouldn't overwrite anything.

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something similar to shutil.copytree that can overwrite?

2007-06-20 Thread Ben Sizer
I need to copy directories from one place to another, but it needs to
overwrite individual files and directories rather than just exiting if
a destination file already exists. Previous suggestions have focused
on looking at the source for copytree, but it has several places where
exceptions can be raised, and the documentation for the shutil
functions that copytree is implemented in terms of isn't exactly clear
about which exceptions get raised and when. This makes duplicating a
one-line shell operation a non-trivial task.

Has anybody got any pre-written code that does what I'm looking for?

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Re: Windows build of PostgreSQL library for 2.5

2007-06-13 Thread Ben Sizer
On 30 May, 16:20, Ben Sizer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On 30 May, 15:42, Frank Millman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  On May 30, 4:15 pm,BenSizer[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

   I've been looking for a Windows version of a library to interface to
   PostgreSQL, but can only find ones compiled under Python version 2.4.
   Is there a 2.5 build out there?

  Is this what you are looking for?

 http://stickpeople.com/projects/python/win-psycopg/

 It may well be, thanks.

On second thoughts, is there one anywhere without an extra multi-
megabyte dependency? This seems to rely on the eGenix 'mx' library.

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Windows build of PostgreSQL library for 2.5

2007-05-30 Thread Ben Sizer
I've been looking for a Windows version of a library to interface to
PostgreSQL, but can only find ones compiled under Python version 2.4.
Is there a 2.5 build out there?

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Re: Windows build of PostgreSQL library for 2.5

2007-05-30 Thread Ben Sizer
On 30 May, 15:42, Frank Millman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On May 30, 4:15 pm, Ben Sizer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  I've been looking for a Windows version of a library to interface to
  PostgreSQL, but can only find ones compiled under Python version 2.4.
  Is there a 2.5 build out there?

 Is this what you are looking for?

 http://stickpeople.com/projects/python/win-psycopg/

It may well be, thanks.

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Re: pygame and python 2.5

2007-02-10 Thread Ben Sizer
On Feb 10, 6:31 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Feb 9, 11:39?am, Ben Sizer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  Hopefully in the future, some of those convoluted steps will be fixed,
  but that requires someone putting in the effort to do so. As is often
  the case with Python, and indeed many open source projects, the people
  who are knowledgeable enough to do such things usually don't need to
  do them, as their setup already works just fine.

 So you're saying the knowledgeable people's attitude
 is fuck everyone else as lomg as it's not MY problem?

 And you people complain about Microsoft.

Am I one of those people? You don't exactly make it clear.

But yes, there is a lot of well, it works for me going around. If
you do that long enough, people stop complaining, so people wrongly
assume there's no longer a problem. This is partly why Python has
various warts on Windows and why the standard libraries are oddly
biased, why configuring Linux almost always ends up involving hand-
editing a .conf file, why the leading cross-platform multimedia
library SDL still doesn't do hardware graphics acceleration a decade
after such hardware became mainstream, and so on.

However, the difference between the open-source people and Microsoft
is the the open-source people aren't being paid by you for the use of
their product, so they're not obligated in any way to help you. After
all, they have already given freely and generously, and if they choose
not to give more on top of that, it's really up to them. Yes, it's
occasionally very frustrating to the rest of us, but that's life. The
best I feel I can do is raise these things on occasion, on the off-
chance that I manage to catch the attention of someone who is
altruistic, knowledgeable, and who has some spare time on their hands!

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Re: pygame and python 2.5

2007-02-10 Thread Ben Sizer
On Feb 10, 8:42 am, Steve Holden [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hendrik van Rooyen wrote:
  [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Ben Sizer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  Ben Python extensions written in C require recompilation for each new
  Ben version of Python, due to Python limitations.

  Can you propose a means to eliminate this limitation?

  Yes.   - Instead of calling something, send it a message...

 I suppose you are proposing to use the ISO 1.333 generic
 message-passing interface for this? The one that doesn't actually call a
 function to pass a message?

I'm assuming you're being facetious here..?

Of course, functions get called at the ends of the message passing
process, but those functions can stay the same across versions while
the messages themselves change. The important part is reducing the
binary interface between the two sides to a level where it's trivial
to guarantee that part of the equation is safe.

eg.
Instead of having PySomeType_FromLong(long value) exposed to the API,
you could have a PyAnyObject_FromLong(long value, char*
object_type_name). That function can return NULL and set up an
exception if it doesn't understand the object you asked for, so Python
versions earlier than the one that implement the type you want will
just raise an exception gracefully rather than not linking.

The other issue comes with interfaces that are fragile by definition -
eg. instead of returning a FILE* from Python to the extension,  return
the file descriptor and create the FILE* on the extension side with
fdopen.

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Re: pygame and python 2.5

2007-02-09 Thread Ben Sizer
On Feb 9, 1:48 pm, siggi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 @Ben Sizer

Lucky I spotted this...

 As a Python (and programming ) newbie  allow me a  - certainly naive -
 question:

 What is this time consuming part of recompiling an extension, such as
 Pygame, from source code to Windows? Is it a matter of spare time to do the
 job? Or do you have to wait for some Windows modules that are necessary for
 compiling?

The problem is something like this:
 - Python extensions written in C require recompilation for each new
version of Python, due to Python limitations.
 - Recompiling such an extension requires you to have a C compiler set
up on your local machine.
 - Windows doesn't come with a C compiler, so you have to download
one.
 - The compiler that Python expects you to use (Visual Studio 2003) is
no longer legally available.
 - The other compiler that you can use (MinGW) is requires a slightly
convoluted set of steps in order to build an extension.

Hopefully in the future, some of those convoluted steps will be fixed,
but that requires someone putting in the effort to do so. As is often
the case with Python, and indeed many open source projects, the people
who are knowledgeable enough to do such things usually don't need to
do them, as their setup already works just fine.

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Re: pygame and python 2.5

2007-02-09 Thread Ben Sizer
On Feb 9, 5:53 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Ben Python extensions written in C require recompilation for each new
 Ben version of Python, due to Python limitations.

 Can you propose a means to eliminate this limitation?

By putting an intermediate layer between the extensions and the
language. I suppose this is essentially what ctypes does, except from
the other direction.

If someone could explain the limitation in detail, I expect ways could
be found around it. After all, I don't know of any other systems that
require you to recompile all the extensions when you upgrade the
application.

Winamp is one application that comes to mind which has kept plugins
working across many upgrades. I doubt they're still compiling with
Visual Studio 6. Perhaps it works because they have a more restrictive
API that isn't passing non-primitive types across the DLL boundary.

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Re: pygame and python 2.5

2007-02-09 Thread Ben Sizer
On Feb 9, 9:01 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Ben If someone could explain the limitation in detail, I expect ways
 Ben could be found around it. After all, I don't know of any other
 Ben systems that require you to recompile all the extensions when you
 Ben upgrade the application.

 Python used to work that way.  You'd then silently get errors if the API
 changed between version A and version B and you neglected to recompile the
 extensions you compiled against version A.  Maybe the Python extension API
 is mature enough now that it can be frozen, but I sort of doubt it.

The only reason this is an issue is because the system is tightly
bound on a binary level. Decouple that and the problem goes away.
These 'silent' errors will all stem from a small number of specific
things, each of which can be addressed. eg. PyFile_AsFile returns a
FILE*, which is all well and good if both the extension's compiler and
the language's compiler agree on what you get when you dereference
that type, and probably not so good when they don't. The answer there
is not to make assumptions about the structure of complex types across
the boundary. The same may well go for the multitude of macros that
make assumptions about the structure of a PyObject.

It's not really much to do with the maturity, since functions don't
seem to be getting regularly removed from the API. It's more the
choices made about how to implement it.

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Re: when will python 2.5 take in mainstream?

2007-02-06 Thread Ben Sizer
On Feb 5, 4:15 pm, Jean-Paul Calderone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 It's very easy to maintain compatibility in the C API.  I'm much more
 interested in compatibility at the Python layer, which is changed
 incompatibly much, much more frequently than is the C layer.

Really? In all cases I've found, pure-Python extensions written for
2.4 work with 2.5. The same was true for 2.3 to 2.4 as well. And even
if I found one that didn't, it's highly likely I could fix it myself.

The same doesn't apply to any C compiled extensions. Updating Python
breaks these, every time, and users typically have to wait months for
the library developer to compile a new version, every time. Or maybe
they can wade through the morass of how do I compile this library on
Windows threads here. Perhaps the C API remains the same but the real
issue is the binary API between extensions and Python changes every
couple of years or so. That's why I run 2.4 anywhere that needs
extensions.

It would be great if someone could invest some time in trying to fix
this problem. I don't think I know of any other languages that require
recompilation of libraries for every minor version increase.

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Re: when will python 2.5 take in mainstream?

2007-02-06 Thread Ben Sizer
On Feb 6, 3:35 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Aahz) wrote:
 Ben Sizer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 It would be great if someone could invest some time in trying to fix
 this problem. I don't think I know of any other languages that require
 recompilation of libraries for every minor version increase.

 How do you define minor version increase?  If you look at the
 progression from 2.0 through 2.5, it's pretty clear that each version
 doesn't particularly fit minor version increase even though each one
 only increments by 0.1.

I can't say I agree with that. In terms of naming, it's a minor
release because the 'major' release number has stayed at 2. In terms
of time, it's a minor release because it's only happening about once
every 18 months or so - a short period in computer language terms. In
terms of semantics, I'd argue they are minor releases because
generally the changes are just minor additions rather than large
revisions; I don't see much in the way of significant language
alterations for 2.5 apart from arguably 'unified try/except/finally',
nor in 2.4. I don't count addition of new types or modules as 'major'.
The language itself is fairly stable; it's just the way that it links
to extensions which is pretty fragile.

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Re: Python does not play well with others

2007-01-25 Thread Ben Sizer
On Jan 24, 1:50 am, John Nagle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 In the Perl, Java, PHP, and C/C++ worlds, the equivalent
 functions just work.   That's because, in those worlds, either the
 development team for the language or the development team
 for the subsystem takes responsibility for making them work.
 Only Python doesn't do that.

I have much sympathy for your position. I think the problem is that
Python is quite capable in many areas, such that the people in the
community with the expertise to extend the language and libraries, are
usually the ones who've been happily using the polished features for
years and have found they need nothing more. And the ones who need
those features probably got bored of waiting for progress long ago. You
get the responses you do from years of natural selection in the
community. I think that is why many of the SIGs are stagnant, why the
standard library has so much fluff yet still lacks in key areas such as
multimedia and web development, etc.

People can say, if you want it done, why aren't you doing it?, and is
a fair question, but it doesn't alter the fact of Python's deficiencies
in certain areas when compared with other languages.

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Re: pygame and python 2.5

2007-01-12 Thread Ben Sizer
siggi wrote:

 when I rtry to install pygame (pygame-1.7.1release.win32-py2.4.exe, the most
 ciurrent version I found) it requires Python 2.4! Will I really have to
 uninstall my Python 2.5  and install the old Python 2.4 in order to use
 pygame?

For now, yes. This is a long-standing problem with Python really,
requiring extensions to always be recompiled for newer versions. I
usually have to wait about 6 months to a year after any new release
before I can actually install it, due to the extension lag.

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Re: How to modify object attribute by python C API

2007-01-12 Thread Ben Sizer
Huayang Xia wrote:

 PyObject* py_obj_attr1 = PyObject_GetAttrString(obj, attr1);
 PyObject_SetAttrString(py_obj_attr1, attr2,
 PyString_FromString(a));
 Py_DECREF(py_obj_attr1);

 The object py_obj_attr1 is said to be a New reference. It's
 confusing, does it refer to the same object as obj.attr1 in python's
 term?

Yes, it refers to the same object. Each object can have many
references, and is deleted when all the references are gone. The new
reference in this case means that Python has taken note that there's a
new use of that object - your C code. It means it won't delete that
object, even if no more Python code refers to it, because it knows your
C code holds a reference to it. Therefore, when your C code no longer
needs to access the object, you call Py_DECREF.

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Re: Is there a good example on instantiating, calling, using, an API from Python on Windows?

2007-01-12 Thread Ben Sizer
kj7ny wrote:

 To be more exact, I am trying to use Python to talk to a Livelink
 system (http://www.opentext.com/) through their LAPI interface (.dll's,
 I think).  I'll see if I can generate a more intelligent answer to your
 question, but for now, I'm far enough in the dark that this is as good
 as I can get.

API is a vague term referring to the interface to an application, which
could take one of many forms. The form it takes dictates the method you
need to use here.

If indeed it is via DLLs, then the ctypes module may help. Otherwise,
you need to find out precisely what form the API takes.

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Re: creating simple Python scripting interfaces via C++

2007-01-11 Thread Ben Sizer
Ok, my first attempt at this creates proxy objects in Python, and
stores a pointer to the C++ instance in the Python object. I cast that
pointer to an int and pass it as a single parameter to the object's
__init__ function.

static PyObject* Actor_init(PyObject *self, PyObject *args)
{
PyObject* selfParam;
PyObject* ptrValue;
if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(args, OO, selfParam, ptrValue))
return NULL;

PyObject_SetAttrString(selfParam, _cpp_ptr, ptrValue);

Py_INCREF(Py_None);
return Py_None;
}

I have no idea why self is always NULL, when I'm calling the functions
as methods of an object. Any ideas why this is the case? For what it's
worth I attach each method via the PyMethodDef - PyCFunction_New -
PyMethod_New - PyDict_SetItemString(classDict) route.

To get data back from the C++ object to Python, I extract that value
and cast it back to the appropriate pointer type.

static PyObject* Actor_showName(PyObject *self, PyObject *args)
{
PyObject* selfParam;
if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(args, O, selfParam))
return NULL;

PyObject* cppPtr = PyObject_GetAttrString(selfParam, _cpp_ptr);
long cppPtrVal = PyInt_AsLong(cppPtr);
Actor* pActor = reinterpret_castActor*(cppPtrVal);

// Delegate to the C++ object
pActor-ShowName();

Py_INCREF(Py_None);
return Py_None;
}

I've omitted some error checking, but this is the way I'm going for
now. Are there any glaring errors I've made (apart from perhaps
assuming sizeof(pointer) = sizeof(long), that is)? And is there
anywhere else more appropriate that I should be asking this question,
given the lack of responses to this and my other embedding topic so
far?

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Ref count oddness with embedded Python... memory leak?

2007-01-11 Thread Ben Sizer
Here's my test-case:

#include python.h
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
Py_Initialize(); Py_Finalize();
Py_Initialize(); Py_Finalize();
Py_Initialize(); Py_Finalize();
Py_Initialize(); Py_Finalize();
Py_Initialize(); Py_Finalize();
return 1;
}

Here's my output, with Python 2.5 built in debug mode on WinXP, no
modifications:

[7438 refs]
[7499 refs]
[7550 refs]
[7601 refs]
[7652 refs]

Is this normal? It doesn't look very promising to me.

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PyCFunction_New requires a pointer to a static PyMethodDef?

2007-01-09 Thread Ben Sizer
In following the example given at
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/54352, I find
that if I instead try to create PyMethodDef instances on the stack and
create methods that way, rather than providing pointers to a static
array of them, executing the method later raises an exception from
PyCFunction_Call.

Is it required that the PyMethodDef persists throughout the execution
of the Python program? If so, why isn't the information just copied
instead? I was hoping to just create a temporary PyMethodDef on the
stack purely for the duration of creating the method.

(Google doesn't find any instance of PyCFunction_Call on
docs.python.org. This might explain the Cookbook's comment that one
hardly ever sees Python class objects built in C extensions!)

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creating simple Python scripting interfaces via C++

2007-01-08 Thread Ben Sizer
I have Python embedded in a C++ application (yes, yes, I know, I'd
prefer it the other way around too) and essentially need to expose some
read-only values and functions to Python so it can be used to script
the host application.

When scripting a similar app in TCL, it's possible to associate each
command with some client data, so that the command can be written in
the script as a free function but it actually executes in some sort of
context, accessed via the client data pointer in C++. In Python, there
doesn't appear to be this mechanism, so I think I'd have to inject the
context in another way, either as some sort of module-level global, or
as an object, implementing the previously free functions as methods.

Is this correct? If so, what is the simplest way of implementing the
former method - inserting the pointer to the required context as a long
(via PyDict_SetItemString(globals, context, PyInt_FromLong(pointer))
or similar) and then converting it back in the bound function? And for
the latter method, is it possible to make an arbitrary object and then
attach methods and the context data? Or will I have to create a whole
Python class for this (as in
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/54352)?

I'm not interested in wrapping whole C++ objects at this stage, and
libraries like Boost::Python aren't currently an option. I just need a
few pointers on doing it the low-level way for now.

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Re: Why does Python never add itself to the Windows path?

2007-01-03 Thread Ben Sizer
Chris Lambacher wrote:
 On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 09:08:41AM -0800, Ben Sizer wrote:
  Chris Lambacher wrote:
   The python part of the 'python setup.py install' idiom needs to be 
   omitted on
   Windows, but that does not mean that the solution is to automatically add 
   it
   to PATH.
 
  Firstly, that solution only works for actual Python scripts; it doesn't
  solve the utility scripts that are often installed to the /scripts
  directory. It's a shame that many responses on this thread don't
  address that half of the issue. Am I the only person who installs
  packages that add scripts (not all of which are Python ones)?

 Nope, but just adding the scripts directory to the PATH does not solve the
 problem.  You also need to either create an executable launcher (.bat  or
 .exe) for the script or mess with environment variables to tell Windows to
 treat .py files a executable.  This issue is solved in Unix by toggling the
 executable bit on the file in the file system.

Many of the scripts that are installed come as batch files or other
executables. They just assume the directory is in your PATH already,
which they aren't, until you set it that way.

  Secondly, it's still a significant difference from the Unix-based
  installs.

 Its not really.  Unix installs default to being installed to the prefix /usr,
 which just happens to put the executable in your path.  It does not modify the
 user's path in any way.

I was talking more in terms of the end-user experience. I don't know of
any binary package on the distros I've used (Mandriva/Mandrake, Fedora
Core, and Kubuntu) that install Python without it going into your path,
nor of any that allow you to avoid that while using their standard
package managers. It may be incidental in some meaning of the term, but
it's expected and apparently intended.

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Re: Why does Python never add itself to the Windows path?

2007-01-03 Thread Ben Sizer
Martin v. Löwis wrote:

 Ben Sizer schrieb:
  Firstly, that solution only works for actual Python scripts; it doesn't
  solve the utility scripts that are often installed to the /scripts
  directory.

 Those packages should install .bat files into /scripts on Windows.

Which still need their location to be be fully qualified, due to
/scripts not being in the path. This is not my experience with Linux
installations of the same packages.

 Please submit a patch that does so, then. Make sure you add user
 interface to make it an option.

 These things are *not* easy, and claiming that they are is
 misleading.

I will look into it.

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Re: Why does Python never add itself to the Windows path?

2007-01-02 Thread Ben Sizer
robert wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
  My opinion is that this is not as big a problem as some may feel that
  it is. Unlike Unix systems, the PATH variable is rarely used.

 It is a big problem.

 It is not less than the majority of Python users (at least those who do 
 things on the command line) who deal with multiple Python versions.

So you think most Python users have more than one version of Python
installed? I disagree - but even if it is true, how come this isn't a
big problem on Unix? Can you name a single distribution that doesn't
install Python to the path?

 This would create funny PATH variables - almost a psychic behavior with 
 history.

It is quite trivial to see if Python is already on the path, and act
differently based on that.

 Windows is at all less a multi user system. I don't even know a case where 
 two (Python) Programmers use _one_ box and then also want separate Python's - 
 just know home mates (parasites) who occasionally share the web browser or 
 so...

So... that's another reason why there's rarely a problem in setting
that PATH variable.

 Linking also a default python.exe into the system32 upon a (non-default) 
 checkbox mark in the installer should be simple, clear and do everything what 
 99.9% want - and most compatible to *nix.

No, it doesn't : the /scripts directory is also important for many
Python packages and that isn't addressed by shifting python.exe into
system32.

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Re: Why does Python never add itself to the Windows path?

2007-01-02 Thread Ben Sizer
Tom Plunket wrote:
 vbgunz wrote:

  Some if not most python documentation assumes Python is on the path...

 Really?  I must live in different places in the docs, but I can't recall
 encountering any such documentation.

I have posted a few examples above: Installing Python Modules
(http://python.org/doc/2.2.3/inst/inst.html) is a key example. 3rd
party packages often expect you to type python setup.py install.
Setuptools/easyinstall will give you an 'easy_install' script, but then
notes that you have to manually fix up the PATH yourself.

 Users who want it in their paths are certainly capable of putting it
 there.

By that logic, users who want Python are probably capable of unzipping
the archive and putting it somewhere semi-suitable. So why provide an
installer?

If you're going to provide an installer, it should do the whole job,
and get Python in a state that is reasonably consistent across all
platforms, where practical. Adding to the PATH variable isn't
impractical.

 I am in the camp that detests apps that automatically install
 tons of crap everywhere without prompts.

Why use hyperbole here? Is 13 or 14 bytes optionally added to a single
environment variable tons of crap? And did anybody insist that the
installer would have no prompts?

 Certainly, though, the
 suggestion that one pane in the installer offer to put it in the path
 would leave the default as it is today (don't edit PATH), though,
 right?  Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to add a new option and
 default it to something completely different from the old behavior, does
 it?

I have no problem with something being configurable, but I do have a
problem with Windows users being forced to jump through unnecessary
hoops that Unix and MacOS users don't have to endure. And I think the
default should be to edit the PATH and allow you to explicitly disallow
this: changing from the current behaviour is the right thing to do
because the current behaviour is wrong, in terms of cross-platform
compatibility and usability.

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Re: Why does Python never add itself to the Windows path?

2007-01-02 Thread Ben Sizer
Gabriel Genellina wrote:

 At Saturday 30/12/2006 21:55, Ben Sizer wrote:

 python setup.py install
 
 On Unix, you'd run this command from a shell prompt; on Windows, you
 have to open a command prompt window (``DOS box'') and do it there; 
 
 Pretty much none of the instructions in that part of the docs will work
 without you altering your path beforehand. Python's cross-platform
 nature means people rightly expect the same instructions to work on
 Linux and Windows from a standard installation. Right now, they don't.

 Notice that there is NO need to alter the system path. You just have
 to tell Windows where python.exe resides; there is a per-application
 path located at
 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths.
 In order to launch Python just writing python at the command
 prompt, the installer should -instead of playing with the system
 path- create a new key below App Paths, named python.exe, and set
 its default value to the full path of the installed python executable.
 See
 http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/shell/programmersguide/shell_basics/shell_basics_extending/fileassociations/fa_perceived_types.asp

From what I can tell, that is solely for file associations. If so, it
will work if you type setup.py install but not if you type python
setup.py install. For instance, I have an entry for Firefox in that
part of the registry, but if you try executing firefox at the command
line, it fails.

It also doesn't solve the issue of utility scripts being added to
Python's scripts directory.

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Re: Why does Python never add itself to the Windows path?

2007-01-02 Thread Ben Sizer
Chris Lambacher wrote:

 On Sat, Dec 30, 2006 at 04:55:09PM -0800, Ben Sizer wrote:

  Yet many scripts and applications require parameters, or to be executed
  from a certain directory. For example, setup.py. Or the various
  turbogears scripts. Or easy_install.

 Martin's point was that if you need to pass arguments, you can call the script
 from the command line like so:
 setup.py install

 The python part of the 'python setup.py install' idiom needs to be omitted on
 Windows, but that does not mean that the solution is to automatically add it
 to PATH.

Firstly, that solution only works for actual Python scripts; it doesn't
solve the utility scripts that are often installed to the /scripts
directory. It's a shame that many responses on this thread don't
address that half of the issue. Am I the only person who installs
packages that add scripts (not all of which are Python ones)?

Secondly, it's still a significant difference from the Unix-based
installs. You're right, the solution doesn't automatically have to be
adding it to the PATH - but I'm yet to see a good argument for choosing
not to, apart from I don't like it when apps do that.

 The documentation is misleading... time for a but report:
 http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detailaid=1626300group_id=5470atid=105470

Fixing the docs is better than nothing, but I believe fixing the
install to encourage uniform usage across all platforms is preferable,
and that in this regard the documentation shows how it 'should' work.

  There appears to be a freely-available binary at this address that may
  suffice:
  http://legroom.net/modules.php?op=modloadname=Open_Sourcefile=indexpage=softwareapp=modpath

 Unfortunately the Python installer is not an InnoSetup installer.

The page I linked to is a bit misleading but there is an executable on
that page. All you then have to do is invoke it with the relevant
parameter.

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Re: Why does Python never add itself to the Windows path?

2006-12-30 Thread Ben Sizer
Martin v. Löwis wrote:

 Ben Sizer schrieb:
  I've installed several different versions of Python across several
  different versions of MS Windows, and not a single time was the Python
  directory or the Scripts subdirectory added to the PATH environment
  variable. Every time, I've had to go through and add this by hand, to
  have something resembling a usable Python installation. No such
  problems on Linux, whether it be Mandrake/Mandriva, Fedora Core, or
  Kubuntu. So why is the Windows install half-crippled by default?

 For several reasons:
 1. Python can be used just fine without being on PATH. Python
scripts run fine both when double-clicked and when invoked in
the command line, and if you want to use an interactive
interpreter, you can find it readily on the Start menu.

Yet many scripts and applications require parameters, or to be executed
from a certain directory. For example, setup.py. Or the various
turbogears scripts. Or easy_install.

 2. Many windows users (including myself) dislike setup routines that
manipulate PATH.

My opinion is that this is not as big a problem as some may feel that
it is. Unlike Unix systems, the PATH variable is rarely used. Most
applications are launched via the Start Menu, which uses absolute
paths, or via file associations, also done via absolute paths. The
chance of a naming collision only really arises when you start using
the command line, which most people don't do.

However, among those who will use the command line, are some people new
to Python, who will come across instructions like this:

http://docs.python.org/inst/standard-install.html

As described in section 1.2, building and installing a module
distribution using the Distutils is usually one simple command:

python setup.py install

On Unix, you'd run this command from a shell prompt; on Windows, you
have to open a command prompt window (``DOS box'') and do it there; 

Pretty much none of the instructions in that part of the docs will work
without you altering your path beforehand. Python's cross-platform
nature means people rightly expect the same instructions to work on
Linux and Windows from a standard installation. Right now, they don't.

 if Python is to be found in PATH, it
should rather be installed to a directory that is known to live
on PATH (or where CreateProcess searches, anyway, such
as system32). So if the installer had such a feature, it should
be optional, and it should default to off.

It's a lot more anti-social to install to system32 than to modify the
PATH variable. How easy is it to temporarily undo an installation to a
system directory like that? What if you still want Python in your path
but with less precedence than some other user directory?

 3. Most importantly: it is difficult to implement, and nobody has
contributed code to make it work.

There appears to be a freely-available binary at this address that may
suffice:
http://legroom.net/modules.php?op=modloadname=Open_Sourcefile=indexpage=softwareapp=modpath

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Re: Why does Python never add itself to the Windows path?

2006-12-25 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 I don't seem to have any problem running python programs regardless of
 where they are.  My platform is windows xp and I have run both 2.4 and
 2.5 more details about what version of windows you are running might be
 helpfull

I don't think the Windows version is relevant. I did point out that
this happens across different incarnations of Windows (98SE and XP the
2 I have on hand to test), and that the problem wasn't specifically
about running python programs. Basically if you go to a command
prompt and type python, it won't do anything on a plain Python
install on Windows. Try it on Linux, and probably Mac too, and it'll do
something useful.

Similarly, if you install a Python package that adds to the scripts
directory, you can typically expect to run those scripts from the
command line without having to use the full path - not on Windows.

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Re: Why does Python never add itself to the Windows path?

2006-12-25 Thread Ben Sizer
Ross Ridge wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
  I've installed several different versions of Python across several
  different versions of MS Windows, and not a single time was the Python
  directory or the Scripts subdirectory added to the PATH environment
  variable.

 Personally, I hate Windows applications that add themselves to the
 PATH.  So much crap gets put in there that I don't even use the default
 system PATH and just set my own explicitly.

Personally I hate programs that ask to be installed to the root folder
of my hard drive, but Python suggests that as a default too. ;)

In an ideal world, Python should operate pretty much the same across
all platforms. Unfortunately, as it stands, you need to have different
instructions for running things on Windows. eg. The standard python
setup.py install invocation isn't going to do a damn thing unless
you've fixed up the path beforehand. The same goes for python
ez_setup.py, another common favourite. The scripts directory is
important too: TurboGears installs a tg-admin script which you're
supposed to run from your project's directory: which on Windows means
you need to type something like c:\python24\scripts\tg-admin each
time. Half of the people who develop on Mac and Linux don't realise or
acknowledge this. and so the instructions for using their packages
don't work for the average person new to Python who probably just ran
the Windows installer program and thought that would suffice.

 Linux distributions normally install themselves somewhere that's
 normally in the path already.  I suppose you can do the same thing on
 Windows if you want, just choose to install Python into directory
 that's already in your path.  Though installing to something like
 C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 is probably not a good idea.

The Windows way is typically to install things in Program Files and
then point things there as necessary. Installing it the Linux way would
just cause a different set of problems. Adding it to the PATH variable
is not going to cause problems for the vast majority of people, and
it's far easier to edit up the PATH to remove an entry you don't want,
than to move an installed program from one place to another.

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Why does Python never add itself to the Windows path?

2006-12-24 Thread Ben Sizer
I've installed several different versions of Python across several
different versions of MS Windows, and not a single time was the Python
directory or the Scripts subdirectory added to the PATH environment
variable. Every time, I've had to go through and add this by hand, to
have something resembling a usable Python installation. No such
problems on Linux, whether it be Mandrake/Mandriva, Fedora Core, or
Kubuntu. So why is the Windows install half-crippled by default? I just
rediscovered this today when trying to run one of the Turbogears
scripts, but this has puzzled me for years now.

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Re: Using Python scripts in Windows Explorer

2006-10-23 Thread Ben Sizer
MC wrote:
 I use this little batch:

 @echo off
 cd \dev\python
 viewarg.py %*

I try that (with viewarg.py renamed, obviously), and get this error:

'defines.py' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

defines.py is in the same directory as the batch file, but cannot be
executed like this. Double-clicking on it works, as expected.

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Re: Using Python scripts in Windows Explorer

2006-10-23 Thread Ben Sizer
Gabriel Genellina wrote:
 At Friday 20/10/2006 12:20, Ben Sizer wrote:

 I'd like to be able to drag a file onto a Python script in Windows
 Explorer, or send that file to the script via the Send To context-menu
 option, so I can then process that file via sys.argc.
 
 Unfortunately, I can't drag items onto the Python script, because
 Windows doesn't recognise that the script is executable (unless I
 double-click it, upon which it runs as usual, without the command line
 parameter of course)

 Create a shortcut and drop the file over it.

Doesn't work; the mouse cursor changes to the not permitted sign and
when you release the mouse, nothing happens.

 and won't set it as a drop target. And it won't
 even appear in the Send To menu after the usual steps are taken to get
 it there.

 Same here: put a shortcut to the script on your SendTo folder
 (wherever it resides)

That is what I meant by 'the usual steps'. :)  It doesn't work.

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Using Python scripts in Windows Explorer

2006-10-20 Thread Ben Sizer
I'd like to be able to drag a file onto a Python script in Windows
Explorer, or send that file to the script via the Send To context-menu
option, so I can then process that file via sys.argc.

Unfortunately, I can't drag items onto the Python script, because
Windows doesn't recognise that the script is executable (unless I
double-click it, upon which it runs as usual, without the command line
parameter of course) and won't set it as a drop target. And it won't
even appear in the Send To menu after the usual steps are taken to get
it there.

I then tried to wrap it in a batch file, but encounter a problem, where
that batch file is able to execute the Python file if I double-click
the batch file, but if I drag a file onto it it says it can no longer
find the Python script.

Are there any simple and workable solutions for this sort of thing?

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Re: Can recursive descent parser handle Python grammar?

2006-10-02 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
  [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
   I'm a compiler newbie and was curious if Python's language/grammar
   can be handled by a recursive descent parser.
 
  I believe a recursive descent parser can handle any grammar; it just
  depends on how pure you want it to be.
 
  --
  Ben Sizer

 Thanks!  What do you mean by 'pure'?

By 'pure' I mean entirely recursive and not iterative. Implementation
becomes easier if you're not writing a purely recursive parsing
program, and it makes it more practical to implement an arbitrary
amount of 'read-ahead'.

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Re: Can recursive descent parser handle Python grammar?

2006-09-29 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I'm a compiler newbie and was curious if Python's language/grammar
 can be handled by a recursive descent parser.

I believe a recursive descent parser can handle any grammar; it just
depends on how pure you want it to be.

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Re: for: else: - any practical uses for the else clause?

2006-09-27 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 metaperl I'm wondering if anyone has ever found a practical use for the
 metaperl else branch?

 Yeah, I use it from time to time:

 for foo in bar:
 if foo matches some condition:
 print sail to tahiti!
 break
 else:
 print abandon ship!

As a C++ programmer (which I'm sure undermines my argument before
you've even read it...), this feels 'backwards' to me. Although I am no
purist, the 'else' typically implies failure of a previous explicit
condition, yet in this case, it's executed by default, when the
previous clause was successfully executed. It would seem more natural
if the else clause was triggered by 'bar' being empty, or even if the
loop was explicitly broken out of, though I'm sure that would make the
construct much less useful.

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Re: RELEASED Python 2.5 (FINAL)

2006-09-20 Thread Ben Sizer
Anthony Baxter wrote:
 It's been nearly 20 months since the last major release
 of Python (2.4), and 5 months since the first alpha
 release of this cycle, so I'm absolutely thrilled to be
 able to say:

 On behalf of the Python development team
 and the Python community, I'm happy to
 announce the FINAL release of Python 2.5.

Any chance the docs links could be fixed?

The link on the front page still goes to 2.4.3 on docs.python.org, and
the link from /download/releases/2.5/ goes to 2.6a0.

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Request for elucidation: enhanced generators

2006-09-20 Thread Ben Sizer
A simple question - can anybody give a short example of how these work
and what they are good for? I've read PEP 342 and the associated bit in
the What's New section and it's still all Greek to me. The latter seems
to focus on how to do it, rather than why you'd do it, so it doesn't
aid the understanding too much.

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Re: Request for elucidation: enhanced generators

2006-09-20 Thread Ben Sizer
Steve Holden wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
  A simple question - can anybody give a short example of how these work
  and what they are good for? I've read PEP 342 and the associated bit in
  the What's New section and it's still all Greek to me. The latter seems
  to focus on how to do it, rather than why you'd do it, so it doesn't
  aid the understanding too much.
 
 Unti 2.5 the yield keyword could only be used to produce a value from a
 generator - it introduced a statement.

 Now the yield keyword can be used as an expression inside a generator,
 allowing you to send values into the generator by calling its .send()
 method.

 If you have no use case for this you are, as always, perfectly free to
 ignore it, as the majority of Python users may well choose to do. Your
 existing generators should continue to work.

But do you have an example of such a use case? That's what I'm missing
here. Without ever having used proper coroutines elsewhere, I have no
real way to appreciate their benefits without a good example.

I don't think it's feasible to just ignore any new feature, as sooner
or later you're going to encounter someone else's code that relies upon
it. Hence why I'd rather not see all sorts of 'optional' extras added
later (like type declarations and so on).

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Re: SQLwaterheadretard3 (Was: Is it just me, or is Sqlite3 goofy?)

2006-09-14 Thread Ben Sizer
Bryan Olson wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
  It's not a crackpot theory. It's a completely reasonable theory. SQL is
  based on relational algebra, which provides a mathematical set of
  operators for grouping data that is stored in separate sets. That data
  is selected and projected according to its value, and nothing else. The
  concept of it having a 'type' has been overlaid on top of this,
  presumably to facilitate efficient implementation, which tends to
  require fixed-width rows (and hence columns). It's not necessary in any
  sense, and it's reasonable to argue that if it was trivial to implement
  variable width columns as efficiently as fixed width columns, that
  explicit data types might never have needed to exist.

 The mathematical definition of the relational model includes
 that data values are drawn from specific sets.

Well, I did say relational algebra, which from what I understand
predates the official 'relational model'.

 Implementing variable width columns has nothing to do with it.

On a practical level, it has lots to do with it!

 Here's
 the reference:

 1.3. A Relational View of Data

 The term relation is used here in its accepted mathematical
 sense. Given sets S1, S2, ···, Sn, (not necessarily
 distinct), R is a relation on these n sets if it is a set
 of n-tuples each of which has its first element from S1,
 its second element from S2, and so on [1]. We shall refer to
 Sj as the jth domain of R.

Does it specify anywhere that sets S1...Sn cannot each be the universal
set? To put it another way - although the spec implies the existence of
limited set domains, and data types enforce limited domains, I don't
think a requirement to allow limited domains is a requirement for
static data types.

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Re: SQLwaterheadretard3 (Was: Is it just me, or is Sqlite3 goofy?)

2006-09-08 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
  SQLite never pretended to be a full-blown RDBMS - just a lightweight
  simple embedded database as SQL-compliant as possible.

 Ah, *you* haven't read the documentation either!

 as SQL-compliant as possible?

 ROTFLMAO!

No need to be rude really. In this context as SQL-compliant as
possible means, as SQL-compliant as it is possible to be within the
project's restrictions, which presumably refer to code size and speed.
It's a reasonable trade-off.

 **
 * The authors argue that static typing is a bug in the   *
 * SQL specification that SQLite has fixed in a backwards *
 * compatible way.*
 **
 /quote

 Fixed? Up until now, I didn't think it was possible for
 crackpot theories to be implemented in computer science.
 This is absolutely the craziest thing I've ever heard.

It's not a crackpot theory. It's a completely reasonable theory. SQL is
based on relational algebra, which provides a mathematical set of
operators for grouping data that is stored in separate sets. That data
is selected and projected according to its value, and nothing else. The
concept of it having a 'type' has been overlaid on top of this,
presumably to facilitate efficient implementation, which tends to
require fixed-width rows (and hence columns). It's not necessary in any
sense, and it's reasonable to argue that if it was trivial to implement
variable width columns as efficiently as fixed width columns, that
explicit data types might never have needed to exist.

 So much for
 If switching to a larger database such as PostgreSQL or Oracle
 is later necessary, the switch should be relatively easy.

If you rely too much on a language-enforced data type rather than the
values of the underlying data, perhaps Python is not for you!
Personally I've migrated from SQLite to MySQL a couple of times (on
small projects, granted) and not found it to be a problem at all.

 Fixing the documentation is now becoming an enormous task.

I don't think so... it doesn't take much to say that the module
implements a subset of SQL but stores ignores data types.

 What are the chances that anything I send in as a bug report
 will simply be ignored? Kind of like the Emporer's New Clothes, eh?
 It would be an admission of ignorance and stupidity on the part
 of the Python Development Team, wouldn't it?

Why get so bitter over this? I agree the docs need fixing but you make
it sound like this was a deliberate attempt to make you waste your
time.

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Re: Javadoc style python manual?

2006-09-08 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I'm new to python and I'm from the java world.
 Though I love to learn python, I'm not very comfortable with the python
 documentation.
 Because when i read jdk doc, i can see the class hierachy, class
 member, class methods etc in html docs. It's very easy for me to
 understand the Java language.
 But in python, i find it kind of inconvient.

My advice is to get used to it... the Python docs are not arranged in
the hierarchical fashion because there isn't any real hierarchy to
speak of. Python does not rely heavily on inheritance like Java does.
Instead, it is used in just a few places, more like the C++ standard
library than the Java library.

I agree that the Python docs aren't quite as effective as reference
material due to the lack of simple function and method lists though. I
don't know if there's a solution to that anywhere.

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Re: Javadoc style python manual?

2006-09-08 Thread Ben Sizer
Michele Simionato wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
  I agree that the Python docs aren't quite as effective as reference
  material due to the lack of simple function and method lists though.

 http://docs.python.org/lib/modindex.html, pydoc and ipython are more
 than enough for me.

modindex is comprehensive but too 'flat'. Sometimes you want to see all
of one object's methods and properties listed together.

I was unaware of pydoc until this thread; its existence seems to be
buried, somewhat. Looking at pydoc.org (assuming that is a good example
of it in use), it looks more like what the original poster and I might
want, but sadly it's still very inconsistent, with many things
undescribed.

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Re: getting quick arp request

2006-09-07 Thread Ben Sizer
kondal wrote:
  Something is limiting the TCP/IP connections from my python program at
  10 maximum at the same time.
  I do not see this limit in my code.
  I did not bumped over the 4226 error.
 
  = Where does this limit come from.
  = How can I overcome it.

 You can just edit it by creating a new key in the registry.

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE - SYSTEM - CurrentControlSet - Services -Tcpip -
 Parameters

 Create a DWORD key named TcpNumConnections and set the value to
 00fe or 16777214.

That's the maximum number of connections, which is unlikely to be what
he's running up against. It's more likely the original poster is
hitting the max number of half-open connections, which is limited to 10
(exactly the figure he's seeing). Perhaps the 4226 event just isn't
appearing for some reason. I've had that myself sometimes.

There is an unofficial OS-level patch for this behaviour at this
address: http://www.lvllord.de/?lang=enurl=downloads

No idea if it works or if it's safe, but many people use it.

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Re: getting quick arp request

2006-09-07 Thread Ben Sizer
seb wrote:
 I am not fully confident to apply the patch from
 http://www.lvllord.de/?lang=enurl=downloads .on computers other than
 mine.

Fully understandable.

 Is there another solution ?

I believe it is possible to overwrite the .dll that SP2 gives you with
the older one. Obviously you lose any other bug fixes or enhancements
Microsoft put in there. I don't remember the actual file in question,
sorry. And I don't suppose this is much more acceptable than the
previous 'solution'.

 Still without the above patch on windows, the software angry ip scan
 for example managed to output a lot of more socket connection. How is
 it possible ?

It sends an ICMP ping to each address first, meaning it doesn't have to
waste time on trying a TCP connection to a host that doesn't respond.
This leads to fewer half-open connections.

It may also be that it implements part of its own TCP/IP stack, and
accessing the ethernet card directly, but I don't know how practical
that is for you. Ethereal and nmap appear to do this; you might want to
browse their open source code, and/or ask on their mailing lists or
forums.

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Re: Higher-level OpenGL modules

2006-09-06 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 http://pyopengl.sourceforge.net/ I wouldn't begin to tell you how to
 install this..  Looks like russian roulette with virus since the .dll's
 are not available and are not linked from the site but are available
 from lots of places in the google search.

I think you're very mistaken... it's a little over-complex, but
everything you need is up there, on the installation and download
pages, and the only other .dlls you need are the OpenGL ones which the
original poster will already have.

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Re: getting quick arp request

2006-09-06 Thread Ben Sizer
seb wrote:
 I need to write a scanner that test all the IP adresses that repond on
 a given port.
...
 I am using winXP pro on a 2GHZ P4 and 512 Mo.

If you have XP Service Pack 2, it cripples port-scanning as part of a
'security' fix. Broadly speaking, it limits the rate at which you can
make connections at the OS level; this will show up as event 4226 in
the Event Viewer if it affects you.

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Re: Is it just me, or is Sqlite3 goofy?

2006-09-06 Thread Ben Sizer
Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  I don't mind living with it as long as it's documented.

 It is. In SQLite manual. Or do you hope the Python manual to also fully
 document PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Apache, Posix, Win32 etc ?

With those other applications, you have a separate download. With
sqlite, you don't, on Windows at least. Surely all the 'included
batteries' should have local documentation, especially with the type
conversions.

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Re: raw audio in windows

2006-09-04 Thread Ben Sizer
Jay wrote:
 So, are you saying this would be possible to do with the PlaySound
 function?

Fredrik is often terse. ;)  I think what he's saying is that when I
said you could pass a .wav file to an external application, he showed
that you could pass it to a Python module instead. I think you still
need to get it into .wav format first, though this can apparently be in
memory rather than on disk.

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Re: raw audio in windows

2006-09-01 Thread Ben Sizer
Putty wrote:
 Hi.  I've written a small python script that was primarily meant for
 use in a unix-compatible environment.  It writes a bunch of raw audio
 to a file and then sends the file to /dev/audio and the system plays
 the audio.  Very simple.

 Is there a simple way I could edit the script (which just uses the
 system call to do this) to run under windows?

 This is the code that would have to change:
 os.system(cat audioBuf  /dev/audio)

Not really. You'll have to convert it to .wav and then pass it to a
helper app.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/nov04/hey1103.mspx

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Re: Timeline for Python?

2006-08-31 Thread Ben Sizer
Sebastian Bassi wrote:
 So, if the book is published in October 2007, should feature Python 3
 or Python 2.5?
 I did read http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/ but I still not
 sure about timeline.

I get the impression that Python 3 will not be around Any Time Soon and
certainly not in just 12 or 13 months. The PEP does suggest that it
isn't likely to be around any time before  2008 at the earliest.

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Re: Pygame, mouse events and threads

2006-08-25 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
  [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
   When I put the content of the run and input functions in the main
   thread, it's working, why not in the thread?
 
  Because event handling needs to be done in the main thread. So does
  rendering. This is a limitation of the underlying system.
 
  As a general rule, try to keep all your PyGame functions in the main
  thread and push your other processing into background threads, if you
  really need them.

 Well, that is a limitation... And is it something that will be fixed or
 something that is inherent to pygame and not fixable?

It's inherent to SDL (the library underpinning PyGame), because it's
apparently inherent to some of the platforms it runs on. Rendering and
event handling is typically tied closely to the notion of a window and
that in turn may well be coupled tightly to a single process or thread.
As Diez said however, this is not generally a big problem. Most games
are typically single-threaded anyway.

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Re: Python and STL efficiency

2006-08-25 Thread Ben Sizer
Neil Cerutti wrote:
 On 2006-08-24, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  It will run a lot faster if it doesn't have to keep resizing
  the array.

 I don't see why it should run a lot faster that way.

 Appending elements to a vector with push_back takes amortized
 constant time. In the example above, preallocating 4 strings
 saves (probably) math.log(4, 2) reallocations of the vector's
 storage along with the consequent copy-construction and
 destruction of some fixed number of strings. Most of those
 reallocations take place while the vector is still proportionally
 quite small.

Math.log(4, 2) is not a small number when talking about a
relatively expensive operation such as memory allocation and
deallocation. And the superfluous copying amounts to probably an extra
2^16 copies in this case - not exactly trivial.

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Re: Open Office and Python

2006-08-25 Thread Ben Sizer
F wrote:
 I'd like to load a .csv file to the Open Office spreadsheet from the command
 line using an arbitrary delimiter through Python. I don't need any fancy
 formatting and stuff like that, just putting the values in the spreadsheet
 will do.

 Is there a relatively simple way to do that?

I assume when you say load you mean create. To 'load' usually means to
read data rather than write it. If you want to read the data in, then a
Google search for python csv should answer all your questions.

Otherwise...

How are the values stored? It might be as simple as this:

# sample data
table = [
(item1, 10, 100),
(item 2, 15, 300)
]

out = file(my.csv, w+)
for row in table:
out.write(,.join(str(item) for item in row) + \n)

And my.csv will look like:
item1,10,100
item 2,15,300

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Re: Pygame, mouse events and threads

2006-08-24 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 When I put the content of the run and input functions in the main
 thread, it's working, why not in the thread?

Because event handling needs to be done in the main thread. So does
rendering. This is a limitation of the underlying system.

As a general rule, try to keep all your PyGame functions in the main
thread and push your other processing into background threads, if you
really need them.

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Re: Python + Java Integration

2006-08-23 Thread Ben Sizer
Chas Emerick wrote:
 There is no doubt that Ruby's success is a concern for anyone who
 sees it as diminishing Python's status.  One of the reasons for
 Ruby's success is certainly the notion (originally advocated by Bruce
 Tate, if I'm not mistaken) that it is the next Java -- the language
 and environment that mainstream Java developers are, or will, look to
 as a natural next step.

Is it? I thought it was more along the lines of you've been struggling
with Java to build web-apps all this time - here, have Ruby on Rails
which is much easier. Python provides just as much simplicity in the
web frameworks, but no consensus on what is 'best' (recent BDFL
pronouncement aside), and thus only a small community for each
framework. I bet that if Django or TurboGears had been fully ready for
prime-time before Ruby on Rails, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

As a language, Python is much closer to Java than Ruby is anyway.
People already migrate over to Python from Java in their multitudes,
bringing some odd assumptions with them. (eg. The whole thing about
'why isn't a Python static method equivalent to a Java class method?'
because they've been wrongly told that 'static' in Java signifies a
'class method', and because they never read the Python docs where it
clearly shows that classmethod != staticmethod. A bit of C++ knowledge
might have sorted them out here too, as it would have for many problems
encountered by people who were raised on Java, but I digress...)

 One thing that would help Python in this debate (or, perhaps simply
 put it in the running, at least as a next Java candidate)

Java itself never deserved to be the 'next' anything anyway. It was
sold on hype and has never lived up to it. I can see your point from a
business perspective but I like to think Python is sold on its merits
and not on being the new panacea for middle managers to deploy.

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Re: hide python code !

2006-08-15 Thread Ben Sizer
 is typically strongly linked to the quality of your work,
it's arguable that this is in fact a fairer business model than being
paid a normal salary.

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Re: hide python code !

2006-08-14 Thread Ben Sizer
Paul Boddie wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
 
  Imagine if you were the single-person developer of a small application
  that did something quite innovative, and charged a small fee for your
  product. Now imagine you were practically forced to make your algorithm
  obvious - a couple of months later, Microsoft bring out a freeware
  version and destroy your business in an instant. Sure, they and others
  can (and have) done that with closed-source products, but you increase
  your chances of survival 10-fold if the key algorithms are not obvious.

 This point is fairly comprehensively answered in the following article:

 http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/apple_eats_whiners.html

I don't believe so. That talks about copying of ideas, which is quite
distinct from copying of implementations. The distinction may be
meaningless in your typical desktop app where implementation is usually
obvious from the interface. However in more high-tech systems such as
multimedia or AI, the same is far from true.

 I read an article where various aging popular musicians were
 lobbying the British government to extend the period of copyright
 beyond 50 years because their first works would soon fall into the
 public domain and that they'd no longer earn royalties on those works.
 But in what percentage of the many other jobs that exist do you still
 get paid for a day at work that happened over 50 years ago?

However, in most of those jobs you get paid properly at the time. Aside
from the 1% of musicians who are pop stars, musicians generally do not.
I'm not saying I agree with extending the copyright period, however I
do think you can't just compare it to 'a day at work'. It's a totally
different set of circumstances which requires a different set of rules
to both encourage artists to continue creating while benefitting
society in the long run too.

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Re: hide python code !

2006-08-14 Thread Ben Sizer
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
 On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 09:18:12 -0700, Ben Sizer wrote:

  Imagine if you were the single-person developer of a small application
  that did something quite innovative,

 And imagine that you found a money-tree in your back yard...

 How about a more likely scenario? Imagine you're using a boring,
 run-of-the-mill algorithm, the same as 99.9% of all software out there,
 and that it's neither non-obvious nor innovative in any way at all.
 Statistically, I'd say it is ten thousand times more likely that this is
 the case than that the algorithm is at all valuable. Everybody thinks
 their algorithm is special. They almost never are.

I work in game development, where new algorithms and processes are
being discovered all the time. Sure, they're not going to cure cancer
or end poverty but there are most definitely some algorithms devised by
many developers which other companies have no idea how to emulate until
years down the line; long enough for the first company to enjoy a
little commercial benefit based on their individual implementation.

 Valuable algorithms are rare. Most software is not valuable for the
 algorithm, which is hidden in the source code, but for the functionality,
 which is obvious. Algorithms are a dime a dozen.

True, however, most is not all, and I think it's unfair to categorise
all software as being so trivial.

 Yes, and for every algorithm worth stealing, there are ten thousand that
 aren't. Play the odds, and you too will poo-poo the idea that some random
 developer on Usenet has discovered a valuable innovative algorithm. More
 likely he's just ashamed of his code, or wants to hide backdoors in it.

Play the odds, and pretty much everything is unlikely. Of all the names
in the world, what was the chance of this language being called Python?
Yet these things occasionally happen. I have no opinion on why the
original poster wants to hide code, only an opinion on there definitely
being a few applications where it is very useful.

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Re: hide python code !

2006-08-11 Thread Ben Sizer
Paul Boddie wrote:
 Fuzzyman wrote:
  I never understand the knee-jerk reaction on this mailing list to
  answer people who ask this question by telling them they don't really
  want to do it...

 Well, given the pace of technological development and the disregard in
 some environments for perpetual backward compatibility, how much of
 your infrastructure would you implement in vendor-supplied binaries,
 especially when the vendor is a one man plus dog operation? When the
 binaries don't work on your newly-upgraded system and the vendor is on
 holiday (possibly for good), it doesn't look like a knee-jerk reaction
 any more.

It's worth remembering that there is a massive amount of software that
has nothing to do with 'infrastructure', that won't need to be
maintained, or upgraded. Examples include most retail software for the
home or small office, and most entertainment software. Developers of
such software often have understandable reasons for making it
inconvenient to examine the algorithms at a high level.

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Re: hide python code !

2006-08-11 Thread Ben Sizer
Paul Boddie wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
 
  It's worth remembering that there is a massive amount of software that
  has nothing to do with 'infrastructure', that won't need to be
  maintained, or upgraded. Examples include most retail software for the
  home or small office, and most entertainment software. Developers of
  such software often have understandable reasons for making it
  inconvenient to examine the algorithms at a high level.

 Sure, developers of such software may not want their competitors to
 find out how their products work - certain companies also like to file
 patents for that added anticompetitive edge, should their competitors
 even consider figuring out the not-so-magic formula - but as end-users
 of software ourselves, we don't have to share such an understanding of
 their motivations, especially when such motivations directly conflict
 with our own: with respect to the above evidence, our own motivations
 are to have a reasonable level of control over the tools to manage our
 own data.

I think you're possibly being a bit idealistic here. I use and endorse
open source and open formats wherever possible but I don't believe we
would have the same degree of diversity of software available if
everything was open.

Imagine if you were the single-person developer of a small application
that did something quite innovative, and charged a small fee for your
product. Now imagine you were practically forced to make your algorithm
obvious - a couple of months later, Microsoft bring out a freeware
version and destroy your business in an instant. Sure, they and others
can (and have) done that with closed-source products, but you increase
your chances of survival 10-fold if the key algorithms are not obvious.

The only other way to protect against that would be a software patent,
and I disagree with their existence on the grounds that it punishes
those who discover the techniques independently.

 It may not matter if some console game or other doesn't work after 20
 years...

Certainly; yet this is a valid example of software that requires a
degree of protection since some of the algorithms employed truly are
'worth stealing'. They can usually be replicated in time, but that may
be months and allows the original company to have a deserved commercial
advantage.

 ...although I think it's actually something of a shame given that
 such artifacts, no matter how apparently trivial they are, are actually
 part of our culture and shouldn't be so readily discarded and
 forgotten...

Thankfully we have emulators for most platforms, and hopefully
litigation won't kill those off.

 ...but when your own data is not easily accessible within a
 much shorter timeframe, the scandal is (at least to me) so much more
 obvious.

I think it's quite possible to have a closed binary but an open
document format, thus allowing the user to migrate away at any point
while still preserving any 'secrets' in the implementation.

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Re: beginner questions on embedding/extending python with C++

2006-08-08 Thread Ben Sizer
Qun Cao wrote:
 Hi Everyone,

 I am a beginner on cross language development. My problem at hand is to
 build a python interface for a C++ application built on top of a 3D
 game engine.  The purpose of this python interface is providing a
 convenient scripting toolkit for the application.

As well as this group/list, you may find some useful help at the
Gamedev.net Scripting Languages and Game Modifications forum:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/forum.asp?forum_id=41

Many people there have mixed Python and C++ code in the context of game
applications and may have some good answers to your questions. After
deciding how to expose C++ classes and functions to Python, the main
problem you'll face, assuming you need the functionality, is how to
yield control between Python and C++ when a Python action is
long-running yet requires the C++ engine to be polled (eg. to handle
input, AI, graphics, etc). Previous threads there will give you some
hints on all these matters.

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Re: Need a compelling argument to use Django instead of Rails

2006-08-04 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Paul Rubin wrote:
  A typical shared hosting place might
  support 1000's of users with ONE apache/php instance (running in a
  whole bunch of threads or processes, to be sure).

 You just need to run multiple apache
 instances, which is advisable anyway.
 The hosting service formerly known as
 python-hosting has been doing this
 for years.

Would you need one instance per user? Is it practical to run 1000s of
Apache instances on one server?

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Re: Using Python for my web site

2006-08-04 Thread Ben Sizer
Cliff Wells wrote:
 On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 22:25 -0700, Luis M. González wrote:
  IMHO the best way of using mod_python is with its publisher handler.
  It let's you code your applications in a MVC (model view controller)
  style.

 While I agree (or at least consider the point moot) that this is
 possibly the best way to use plain mod_python, I'd disagree that it's a
 good way to develop modern web applications in Python.  By the time
 you've decided on every bit of framework to use, and made all the little
 decisions that go into turning a fresh, clean spot on your hard drive
 into an application, what you've done is reinvent TurboGears rather than
 develop your application.

However, at least whatever you come up with would be better documented
than TurboGears. ;)

(I reserve the right to amend this jocular opinion after TurboGears
hits version 1.0.)

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Re: Need a compelling argument to use Django instead of Rails

2006-08-02 Thread Ben Sizer
Vincent Delporte wrote:
 On 31 Jul 2006 07:05:27 -0700, Ben Sizer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Typically you run PHP as a module in your webserver, so there should be
 no process startup overhead. mod_python provides the same sort of
 functionality for Python, but is not as popular or widely installed as
 the PHP Apache module.

 So, if mod_python provides the same functionality, it's not the main
 reason why Python developers use application servers while PHP users
 still program with page codes in /htdocs.

 Why do PHP users stick to that old way of things? Because they mostly
 use shared hosts, with no way to install their application server?

Yes, one reason is because they can't install anything other than web
pages. Not only can they not install a Python application server, they
can't install mod_python either, and few places will have it
pre-installed. Shared hosting accounts for a massive number of sites so
this is a significant issue.

Another perfectly good reason is that PHP pages are much simpler to
deploy than any given Python application server. Just add the code into
your HTML pages as required and you're done. Python could come close to
this if something like the Python Server Pages implementation in
mod_python was to become widely available and well known, but that
still requires overcoming the first problem.

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Re: Network Game in Python

2006-08-02 Thread Ben Sizer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Some questions I have are:
 1. How can I manage network messages among the players. Should
 multicast be used or Actor should send the message to Supervisor and he
 sends to all. ?

Send a message from one client to the supervisor, handle it, then get
the supervisor to send messages back out to notify all clients of the
change. That way, the supervisor always has the correct state, and
knows which clients are aware of it.

 What python modules can be handy in these things.

The socket and select modules are all that you need. Perhaps there's a
higher-level solution somewhere but I don't expect you'd need it.

 2. How can I manage moves among players. What move a player makes is
 visible to all others in real time, so essentially all players have the
 same consistent view of the game. Only the person with access can
 actually make a move or carry out action. Any suggestion how to carry
 out this thing.

As above: inform the supervisor/server of the move, and the server
informs all others of what is going on. Usually this is just a message
telling the client to update certain values. The client will update
those values and refresh the display. You may find it easiest to send
whole objects using pickle or something like that.

 3. Shold I use a flat file or some database in mySQL to measure points
 etc ? I want to have a repository which keep tracks of all the mvoes in
 the system and who played what move etc..? Any suggestions on this.

Use whichever is easiest for you. Why do you need to save the data to
disk anyway? If you definitely need to do that, the shelve module is
often a good choice for basic needs. But it depends on what you need to
do with the information after you write it. 

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Re: Need a compelling argument to use Django instead of Rails

2006-08-02 Thread Ben Sizer
Paul Rubin wrote:
 Ben Sizer [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
  Another perfectly good reason is that PHP pages are much simpler to
  deploy than any given Python application server. Just add the code into
  your HTML pages as required and you're done. Python could come close to
  this if something like the Python Server Pages implementation in
  mod_python was to become widely available and well known, but that
  still requires overcoming the first problem.

 I didn't realize you could do shared hosting with mod_python, because
 of the lack of security barriers between Python objects (i.e. someone
 else's application could reach into yours).  You really need a
 separate interpreter per user.  A typical shared hosting place might
 support 1000's of users with ONE apache/php instance (running in a
 whole bunch of threads or processes, to be sure).

Ah yes, I hadn't considered that. Is this a Python limitation?
Py_Initialize() seems to initialise a global Python object which
obviously makes it awkward to share. Other languages allow you to
create multiple instances (eg. Lua has lua_newstate() which returns a
new Lua state) which would facilitate running multiple interpreters
without the new process overhead. A brief search implies that mod_perl
doesn't have the same problem as mod_python (but has other problems).
It would be a shame if Python is almost alone in having this issue.

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Re: Need a compelling argument to use Django instead of Rails

2006-07-31 Thread Ben Sizer
Paul Boddie wrote:
 Ben Sizer wrote:
 
  Even C++ comes with OpenGL in the standard library.

 Which standard library?

Sorry, it was a long day, and I used entirely the wrong term here. By
that, I meant typically shipped with each compiler. I've never had to
even install a development library to use OpenGL, whether under Win32
or Linux. It's just a typical part of the distribution.

 [Web-SIG standardisation]
  And I always thought that WSGI was solving the wrong problem. It
  certainly didn't go very far towards meeting the expressed goals of the
  Web-SIG. Oh well.
  http://mail.python.org/pipermail/web-sig/2004-August/000650.html

 There are some remarks just after that message about the SIG charter
 needing to change or having become irrelevant, but in fact the need for
 standard functionality is as relevant today as ever. At a slightly
 higher level, everyone would now prefer that you buy into their total
 full stack solution, perhaps with the exception of the Paste
 developers whose selection of packages either suggest a problem of
 internal framework proliferation or one of a lack of coherency in
 presenting a suitable solution to the casual inquirer.

Yeah. On the server side I think there's been a sad lack of attention
to the large middle ground that lies between simple CGI scripting and
full stack solutions. In fact, I'd guess that the majority of web sites
fall into that middle ground, just perhaps not the most interesting or
financially lucrative ones. Examples might be things like the various
PHP forums, or web-based non-real-time games. These applications are
complex enough to deserve a decent implementation language such as
Python, yet simple and small enough that most users won't want to set
up dedicated hardware for the purpose. I think there's definitely scope
in the standard library to go well beyond the current cgi module and
the piecemeal offerings in other modules, without needing to provide
another integrated web stack.

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Re: Need a compelling argument to use Django instead of Rails

2006-07-31 Thread Ben Sizer
Sybren Stuvel wrote:
 Ben Sizer enlightened us with:
  PyGame was barely maintained for a year, and is based on SDL which
  was also barely maintained for a year, and which hasn't kept up with
  hardware advances at all.

 Still, ID Software and Epic both use SDL + OpenGL for their games. Why
 is it good for them but insufficient for you?

Because id and Epic have many millions of dollars and better developers
to throw at the problem than I do. :)  To put it another way, they have
lots of in-house middleware that is built on top of those technologies
to make them more effective. SDL and OpenGL is the bottom of the stack
for them. We mere mortals often prefer to start with something a little
higher level. :)

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Re: Need a compelling argument to use Django instead of Rails

2006-07-31 Thread Ben Sizer
Terry Reedy wrote:
 Ben Sizer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message
 news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
  PyGame was barely maintained for a year, and is based on SDL which was
  also barely maintained for a year, and which hasn't kept up with
  hardware advances at all.

 I believe there is a recent release of SDL, but which what advances I do
 not know.  Pygame is being actively worked on by more than one person.

The recent release of SDL was another minimal one, though there is an
intention to make the important changes 'soon'. As for PyGame, it's
good that development there has picked up again but I'd love to see it
broaden its horizons beyond SDL. Maybe that is impractical, however.

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Re: Need a compelling argument to use Django instead of Rails

2006-07-31 Thread Ben Sizer
Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
 On 2006-07-29 01:07:12, Tim Roberts wrote:

  Vincent Delporte [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
 BTW, what is the advantage of running a CherryPy/Django server instead
 of the regular way of code in pages? Improved performance because the
 Python interpreter is already up and running?
 
  Exactly.  The Python interpreter can take a significant fraction of a
  second to start.  For the typical short web request, the overhead can add
  up.

 Is this start-up overhead the same thing for PHP? Or is this handled
 differently there?

Typically you run PHP as a module in your webserver, so there should be
no process startup overhead. mod_python provides the same sort of
functionality for Python, but is not as popular or widely installed as
the PHP Apache module.

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