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…

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.

First off, you will need access to the *nix server. Probably root access.
This method uses a standard python script, and the sendmail smrsh facility.
You will want to start by making sure sendmail has smrsh support included.
You can tell if it does by looking at /etc/mail/sendmail.mc and looking for a line –FEATURE(`smrsh’,`/usr/sbin/smrsh’)
If you get that far, you are in good shape.

Onto configuring smrsh:

1. Create a new user account that will recieve the email. Ex: adduser my_secret_user
2. Then edit /etc/aliases and add a line like:
   my_secret_user: “|/etc/smrsh/my_script_name”
3. Then run the newaliases command
4. Now, all you need to do is create the script. You will need it to be named whatever you called it when adding the line to the /etc/aliases file, and it needs to be in the /etc/smrsh directory. The example script below is the one I wrote in python. You can copy the script, and alter it for your needs. And if any python zealots see this, I know it is not well formed, and could be written much better.

#!/usr/local/bin/python
# Change the fromaddr and toaddr values below,
# and change path to python above

import sys,os,re,string,smtplib

#who the response comes from
fromaddr = 'secret@localhost'
#who to send the email to
toaddr = 'myemail@myhost.com'

input = sys.stdin
mail = input.readlines()

for x in mail:
     #  is string to denote start of command.
     #  change it below to suit your needs.
     if re.search('*cmd*',x):
            cmd = string.replace(x,'*cmd*','')
            cmd = string.strip(cmd)
            cmd_in,cmd_out = os.popen4(cmd)
            msg = 'Subject: Output from " + cmd + '\r\n'
            msg = msg + cmd_out.read()

#Optional-- this will send email to whoever sent the original,
# un-comment out next 7 lines --otherwise, this will
#only send emails to address configured  above

# if re.search('From:',x):
#    if re.search('@',x):
#       who = string.split(x,' ')
#       toaddr = who[2]
#       toaddr = string.replace(x,'< ','')
#       toaddr = string.replace(x,'>','')

#send email
if msg:
        server = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
        server.sendmail(fromaddr,toaddr,msg)
        server.quit()


  

Caveats: This is probably not safe to do. Make sure the email address is obscure enough, so it could not be guessed.
Also, this will run any command the exec’ing user has rights to. So if the script is owned by root, you can do some damage.
Use caution, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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.

import wx

def OnTaskBarRight(event):
             app.ExitMainLoop()
#setup app
app= wx.PySimpleApp()

#setup icon object
icon = wx.Icon("favicon.ico", wx.BITMAP_TYPE_ICO)

#setup taskbar icon
tbicon = wx.TaskBarIcon()
tbicon.SetIcon(icon, "I am an Icon")

#add taskbar icon event
wx.EVT_TASKBAR_RIGHT_UP(tbicon, OnTaskBarRight)

app.MainLoop()

Check out the documentation for wxPython, for more information.

–List of articles–

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

First we are going to focus on reading from files. Open up your Python shell,
or IDE.

To open a file/file object :

open(filename,mode)

1. filename can be a file or path to a file
2. mode can be any of the following

1. ‘r’ for reading
2. ‘r+’ for reading and writing
3. ‘w’ for writing
4. ‘a’ for appending
   
5. both read and write modes also have a ‘b’ option for binary reading and writing (‘rb’, or ‘wb’)
   

Ex:
myInput = open('myfile.txt','r')

This command will open the file “myfile.txt” in the current
directory, in “read” mode. You can access the methods of this file
using the ‘myInput’ variable. In the example, the open command will
open the file indicated in the first argument(‘myfile.txt’).
This argument can be a file, or the path to a file. The second
argument, is the file mode.

Once you have a file handle(myInput), you can work with that
file, depending on the mode you opened it with. We can now start
reading data from our file.

Ex:
s = myFile.read() Will read entire file into a string
s = myFile.read(N) Will read N bytes (1 or more) from file
s = myFile.readline() Will read next line into string until end of line
L = myFile.readlines() Will read entire file into a list of strings