Welcome to issue 165 of Python Weekly. We have a packed issue this week. Enjoy it!
News
Python-FOSDEM 2015 Call for Proposals
Python-FOSDEM 2015 is looking for speakers. The duration for talks will be 30 minutes, including presentations and questions & answers. When submitting your talk in Pentabarf, make sure to select the 'Python devroom' as the 'Track'.
Articles, Tutorials and Talks
Manipulating PDFs with Python
There are some nasty PDFs out there, but there are several tools you can use to get what you need from them, and Python enables you to get inside and scrape, split, merge, delete, and crop just about whatever you find.
Building a realtime API in Django
Django is an awesome framework for building web services using the Python language. However, it is not well-suited for handling long-lived connections, which are needed for realtime data push. This article explains how to pair Django with Fanout to reach realtime nirvana.
Importing `*` in Python
This post discusses Python's from <module> import * and from <package> import *, how they behave and why it may be (is!) a bad idea to use them.
Building Web Applications with Django and AngularJS
In this tutorial you will build a simplified Google+ clone called "Not Google Plus" with Django and AngularJS.
Choose Your Own Adventure Presentations with Reveal.js, Python and WebSockets
You're preparing a technical talk on your new favorite open source project to present to your local software meetup group. How do you proceed? If you choose to create another passe linear slide deck, load up Microsoft PowerPoint. If you decide to build a childhood nostalgia-packed Choose Your Own Adventure presentation, continue reading this blog post.
Using Amazon S3 to Store your Django Site's Static and Media Files
Storing your Django site's static and media files on Amazon S3, instead of serving them yourself, can make your site perform better. This post is about how to do that. We'll describe how to set up an S3 bucket with the proper permissions and configuration, how to upload static and media files from Django to S3, and how to serve the files from S3 when people visit your site.
Adding Social Authentication to Django
Python Social Auth is a library that provides "an easy-to-setup social authentication/registration mechanism with support for several frameworks and auth providers". In this tutorial, we'll detail how to integrate this library into a Django project to provide user authentication.
Data Science with Python
The videos covering various aspects of the Python Data Science ecosystem (NumPy, SciPy, pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn, NetworkX, NLTK, IPython notebook, etc.)
How Yhat Does Cloud Balancing: A Case Study
Yhat offer a public sandbox where anyone can try out our ScienceOps product without charge. Giving potential customers the chance to try out and evaluate our products is an important tool for generating new business. What may not be obvious are the logistical challenges behind such an offering. This post will address some of those challenges, along with operational modeling techniques we use to solve them. Specifically, we'll show how we keep such a free service running in the cloud at reasonable cost.
Using Pandas To Create an Excel Diff
This post walks you through a real world example of how to use pandas to automate a process that could be very difficult to do in Excel. The business problem is that we have two Excel files that are structured similarly but have different data and we would like to easily understand what has changed between the two files.
How To Create a Server to Send Push Notifications with GCM to Android Devices Using Python
Push notifications let your Android application notify a user of an event, even when the user is not using your app. The goal of this tutorial is to send a simple push notification to your app. We'll use Ubuntu 14.04 and Python 2.7 on the server, and Google Cloud Messaging as the push notification service.
The Hipster Effect: An IPython Interactive Exploration
Offloading Computation to PyPy Using CPython's Multiprocessing Module
The tale of DRY with django-crispy-forms
Scaling Elasticsearch to Hundreds of Developers
Fun with Lists
Books
Lightweight Django
How can you take advantage of the Django framework to integrate complex client-side interactions and real-time features into your web applications? Through a series of rapid application development projects, this hands-on book shows experienced Django developers how to include REST APIs, WebSockets, and client-side MVC frameworks such as Backbone.js into new or existing projects.
Mastering Machine Learning with scikit-learn
This book examines machine learning models including logistic regression, decision trees, and support vector machines, and applies them to common problems such as categorizing documents and classifying images. It begins with the fundamentals of machine learning, introducing you to the supervised-unsupervised spectrum, the uses of training and test data, and evaluating models. You will learn how to use generalized linear models in regression problems, as well as solve problems with text and categorical features. You will be acquainted with the use of logistic regression, regularization, and the various loss functions that are used by generalized linear models.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
CoroBot Spark
The CoroBot Spark combines everything you need to build an incredible robot. It has a built in battery with battery recharging circuitry, 4x discrete motor drivers, and 3x high power PSoC chips to handle all the sensors and low end hardware control you can throw at it. Not only will the CoroBot Spark be powered by Python but each Debian image will come preloaded with powerful tools like Anaconda, SciPy, iPython Notebook, and many other great tools.
PyRecord
A record (aka "struct" in C) is a pre-defined collection of values where each is accessed by a unique name. Depending on the nature of the data, records may be a superior alternative to dictionaries and instances of custom classes. PyRecord allows you to use records in Python v2.7 to v3.x and PyPy v2, and can be thought of as an improved namedtuple.
RxPY
RxPY is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable collections and LINQ-style query operators in Python.
Lea
Lea is a Python package aiming at working with discrete probability distributions in an intuitive way. It allows you to model a broad range of random phenomenons, like dice throwing, coin tossing, cards hands, gambling, lottery, ... with fair or unfair characteristics! More generally, Lea may be used for any finite set of discrete values having known probability: numbers, boolean variables (true/false), date/times, symbols, ... Each distribution is modeled as a plain object, which can be named, displayed, queried or processed to produce new distribution objects.
cyordereddict
A drop-in replacement for the standard library's OrderedDict that is 2-5x faster.
preTeX
preTeX is a Python (2 and 3) LaTeX preprocessor designed to make LaTeX syntax more concise and thereby the writing process faster and the code more readable. It consists of a number of "transformations", which are largely RegEx-powered replacements.
genty
Genty, pronounced "gen-tee", stands for "generate tests". It promotes generative testing, where a single test can execute over a variety of input.
Timesketch
Timesketch is an experimental, proof of concept open source tool for collaborative forensic timeline analysis. Using sketches you and your collaborators can easily organize your timelines and analyze them all at the same time. Add meaning to your raw data with rich annotations, comments, tags and stars.
django-nopassword
Authentication backend for django that uses a one time code instead of passwords
Python Jobs of the Week
Python Developer at Umbel
We are seeking a Python Developer that loves to build incredible things. This position will work closely with all members of the product, development and engineering teams in a collaborative environment, which is diverse and open-minded. A successful candidate will obsess over high performance web development and database optimization, as well as feel comfortable in the cloud and know the latest techniques for developing and scaling web-apps.
Senior Front-End Developer at Desktop Genetics
You will design and implement new user-facing applications, specialising in building responsive and elegant web-based genetic engineering tools. You will write client-side code to create fast, easy-to-use, high volume production applications. You will help shape our vision for a streamlined, beautiful way to engineer living organisms and hack biology to do amazing things. Our experts will train you in biology.
Python and SQL Developer at IPS
You will be maintaining and adding to an existing piece of software which provides data and admin functionality. It handles settings for reporting and custom information.Your will also be responsible for supporting and building up on the admin console for the properties maintained in the web services. The web services cover the reporting engine, login functionality, customer information and trend data for display in graphs.
Upcoming Events and Webinars
PyHou Meetup November 2014 - Houston, TX
Peter Ryan will present "Statistics for Sensory and Consumer Science". Peter will demonstrate the Panel Check Python package that is used to interpret survey results of attributes of a product. The survey results are visualized using uni- and multivariate plots.
Py-U-Mah - Meeting Night #1 - Minneapolis, MN
Our first Py-U-Mah beginners meeting at the University of Minnesota. Open to the public, you don't have to be a student to attend. We will talk about:
- Programming basics
- Using Anaconda
- An iPython Notebook containing exercises derived from Google's beginner Python course and xkcd comics.
Extending Python in C - Cluj-Napoca, Romania
This talk gives a very high-level overview of the CPython C API, and shows how to build a C extension in a few steps. It then discusses a popular use case for C extensions - optimizing performance of your Python programs! Finally we're gonna look at some modern alternatives to getting more performance out of your Python code, e.g. Cython.
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