techniQal support

Antonio over at antoniocangiano.com has a great article about the effect the rise of Rails and Ruby has had on Python.

I totally agree with him regarding the meteoric rise in popularity of Rails buoying scripting languages such as python. I believe more and more businesses are choosing, or are open enough, to implement Rails and Django solutions for their webapps. On top of other MVC frameworks, both Django and Rails allow for fast and sometimes cheap development (the non-cheap comes in if you have to hire an over-priced rails consultant). The visibility is definitely changing the way businesses view scripting languages and allow them to be seen as a viable alternative to Java and other enterprise adopted technologies.

I have had a man-crush on python for quit some time, and try to spout off about it’s benefits whenever I can.
I have been so close to starting a series of blog posts surrounding Python and the ease of adoption for the non-programmer. As soon as I have more time…

So, the word is out, and Seth Godins‘ latest project, Squidoo, is slightly open to the public. Those of us who were closed beta testers were given the go ahead to share our Squidoo Lenses with friends and family.

For those who don’t know, Squidoo, is a site that enhances the search engine ideology. It does this by allowing people to publish information/links and articles(Lenses) on subjects that a person(LensMaster) may have experience/expertise in.
The concept allows these self proclaimed experts to provide tightly filtered and relevant information on a topic, without all of the cruft that comes along with a normal search engine. The whole project abounds with the hottest buzzwords of the day,ie. longtail,web 2.0, ajax,etc.

So I decided to do a lense about the Python programming language, and it’s use on Windows. So without any further ado, the link to my Squidoo lense.
http://www.squidoo.com/python_on_windows/

I am currently ranked 1,777 , –so if you believe my lense has some valuable content, go ahead and rate it.

Got a little idea to write this up after seeing a question over on Photo Matt. He asked about having a script that could take commands sent by email and execute them remotely, then return the results via email.
So I decided to hack something up in Python, and give it a try. Read the rest of the post to see how I did it.
Or you can cheat and just look at the script itself. Click Here for the script.

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Here is another nifty tidbit of python code that is often hard to find. If you work with Python and wxPython to build gui apps, there are a number of widgets etc., that can be hard to figure out. Adding a task bar icon for your app is one of them. This simple example shows you how to add a taskbar icon, and capture events from it.

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I thought I would throw some information out there that has helped me immensely in the past. Here is a link to some articles on Devshed.com that simplify and de-mystify some common problems people have when learning Python, from beginner on up. For beginners I suggest checking out the articles here and here for info on file handling and sockets.
Also, check out the forums if you are ever in need of some guidance or help in the world of Python , or just about any other language/technology.

–List of articles–

Though there are a lot of resources out there for Python,and great books, rarely do you find a simple reference guide that helps you navigate the basics. I found that there was not a lot of reference material to help you do the simple things, if you didn’t know what to look for.

This little guide will focus on the basics of reading and writing files in python..
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