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PyCon UK’s Raspberry Jam played host to 35 children from around the country. It was a first taste of coding for many of the kids and a valuable lesson for how we can revolutionise school education…

The open-source Python programming language has continued to steadily improve its code quality in recent years and now surpasses that of its open-source and proprietary peers, according to a study published by development testing vendor Coverity.

The Tornado Web framework makes it easy to write RESTful APIs in Python. How easy? Have a look

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have highlighted our favourite Python IDEs. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to quicken their pace of Python development.

The 15th year of OSCON (Open Source Convention) kicked off last night with an opening reception at the Expo Hall. This year's theme is Everything Open. And, the tracks reflect that: business, cloud, geek lifestyle, community, open hardware, tools & techniques, mobile, programming languages like PHP, Python, Perl, Java, and Javascript, and much more.

In many cases, scientific research takes you into totally new areas of knowledge, never before explored by others. This means the computational work you need to do may be totally new as well. Although typically such code development still happens in C or FORTRAN, Python is growing in popularity. This is especially true in physics.

Pythonistas are eager to extol the lovely virtues of our language. Most beginning Python programmers are invited to run import this from the interpreter right after the canonical hello world. One of the favorite quips from running that command is: There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Installed as a layer above Hadoop, the open-source Pydoop package enables Python scripts to do big data work easily. In this article, I explore Pydoop, which provides a simple Python API for Hadoop.

I’m happy to announce the Version 3 release of Froide, the open source, Python-based platform for running Freedom of Information portals: allowing you to make requests to public entities by email and track responses, as well as, customize your instance to fit your campaign for government transparency. Froide has been in development for nearly two years. It has powered the FOI portal in Germany for over a year and a half and has recently been used to launch an Austrian FoI site. Full instructions for getting started with Froide can be found here, and the source code is on Github here. This latest release comes with the latest version of the Python web framework Django 1.5 and Bootstrap 2.3. All other dependencies have also been upgraded. Some of the major features include:

During my second year at Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey (SNDT) Women's University, the first of its kind in India as well as in South-East Asia, I attended a workshop on Python and Orca by Krishnakant Mane. My classmates and I were novices to free and open source software (FOSS) and astonished when we saw a visually impaired person using a computer with the same ease as we did. I was aware of Linux and had learned the basics of Unix as a freshman, but I had never used Ubuntu, which I thought might be command driven. It had a great interface and there was a lot of new technology for us to learn. That day not only was our class introduced to a new world of open source, but so was the university as a whole. 

Polkit/Policykit is what determines what permissions users have to perform certain operations on a Linux system.

Francesca Ciceri announces on her blog that the Debian Project now has its own blog at bits.debian.org.

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has announced that it has reached a settlement with PO Box Hosting, who also trade as Veber, over the latter's use of the name Python and application to trademark Python. The Python Software Foundation called for help in fighting the application in February.

Version 5 is out and adds many new cool features to the project :)

By now, active observers of the open source world will have heard of the trademark dispute between the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and Veber, a small hosting company in the UK. As reported by the PSF, Veber recently decided it wished to use "Python" in certain branding of its products and services. Veber filed an EU community trademark application, claiming the exclusive right to use the "Python" mark for software, servers, and web services throughout the EU. The PSF (which obtained a registered trademark for "Python" in the US in 2004) is opposing Veber's trademark application.

In 2005, Arlington Career Center teacher David Welsh had an unmanagable list of 77 Video and Media Technology competencies to evaluate for each student in his classes. A Yorktown High School computer science teacher Jeff Elkner was teaching his students to program in Python and bursting with enthusiam for engaging students and teachers in open source processes. I had a new job leading the SchoolTool project with a charge from entrepreneur and philanthropist Mark Shuttleworth to create open source administrative software for schools around the world.

LXer Feature: 17-Feb-2013

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

For anyone who works in a company that has an office in a EU Community member state, we need your help. There is a company in the UK that is trying to trademark the use of the term "Python" for all software, services, servers... pretty much anything having to do with a computer. Specifically, it is the company that got a hold on the python.co.uk domain 13 years ago. At that time we weren't looking a lot at trademark issues, and so we didn't get that domain.

A trademark battle has erupted following a company’s bid to stake a Europe-wide claim to the name "Python" - that of many devs’ favourite scripting language. The Python Software Foundation has said it’s wrestling UK-based host Veber for its own name after the company informed the software people it was applying for Community Trademark on the name “Python”.

RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives.

It is great that they are using a garbage-collected language for as much code as possible. For a component-based shell UI, Javascript is a reasonable choice, and surely better than C, C++, or Java. However, I don’t think it is a better choice than Python.

If you’re a Linux desktop user like myself you may have experienced problems finding for a decent Twitter client. In many distributions the default is Gwibber, it’s even integrated into the Unity desktop for Ubuntu. I’ve used it on and off for years but it’s monumentally slow, buggy and unstable. Whenever I try Gwibber it hangs and I get the classic Compiz grey window while I wait for the machine to stop having a panic attack. All I’m trying to do is refresh my messages. Out of frustration and purely by chance I stumbled across the answer, Turpial. A lightweight Python app for the Linux desktop. Finally I can take Gwibber out the back and shoot it.

Computer programming can be a fun hobby, as I learned when I programmed Apple II computers last century. Back then, I'd lie on my bed and dream up some educational game, then run over to my Apple //c to bring the game to life. Sometimes in less than two hours I could go from raw idea to working prototype. The most fun part was sharing the programs I created with friends and having them suggest improvements.

The Microsoft translator provides an API that you can use for automated translation. It currently supports about 39 languages. True to the nature of open source I found that someone had already written a python wrapper to the API. I extended the wrapper to use the requests and pofile packages.

Are you a Python programmer who wishes your storage could do more for you? Here's an easy way to add functionality to a real distributed filesystem, in your favorite language.

For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced veterans, in the Linux community, command-line use is encouraged. Often the command line can provide a more elegant and efficient solution when compared to doing a similar task with a graphical user interface.

I was proudly wearing one of my Salt Stack shirts the other day when my daughter asked me, "What is Salt Stack?" I began by explaining the problem it solved. If you have multiple servers and want to do things to those servers, you would need to log in to each one and do those things one at a time on each one. They could be fairly simple tasks like restarting them or checking how long they have been running. Or, you might want to do more complicated things like installing software and then configuring that software based upon your own specific criteria. You also might want to add users and configure permissions for them.

A new CC-licensed manual for educators offers to equip them with the resources to teach programming using the Raspberry Pi, Scratch, Python, and the web