A few weeks back, I was whining that although Doctor Who was available on Amazon Prime streaming, I didn't have any way to watch it on my television. Thankfully, my friend Richard Servello pointed me to the bluecop repo for XBMC. Not only does bluecop support Amazon Prime streaming, but it also has add-ons for Hulu and countless other network-video-streaming collections. more>>

Bitcoin mining is so last year. Put your expensive GPU to use cracking passwords.

When the Bitcoin mining craze hit its peak, I felt the tug to join this new community and make some easy money. I wasn't drawn only by the money; the concepts behind Bitcoin mining intrigued me, in particular the new use of graphics processors (GPUs). With a moderately expensive video card, you could bring in enough money to pay off your initial investment and your electricity bill in a relatively short time. more>>

The second event in our series of Distutils2 sprints was again a success. We’ve managed to fix some interesting issues and we’ve gained some experience points at dealing with the black magic of the packaging arcane.

We would like to thank TP1 for hosting the sprint at their nice Downtown Montreal offices and also for the pizza. Pierre Paul, our host, wrote a longer post relating the event.

Stay tuned for upcoming announcements on Distutils2 sprints.

Special thanks to the sprinters:

• Julien Courteau
• Jonathan Fernandes
• Patrice Gauthier
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel
• Pierre Paul Lefebvre
• Alex Parij
• Kim Pettersen

Stay tuned this week for the announcement of the next sprint.

Here’s a glimpse of patches being born:

Divine inspiration:

Pythonistas

The last workshop in French for the winter 2012 season is this Wednesday. We wish to remind you that there is still plenty of places left, and, especially, that the room we have for the workshop is not SH-R810 as announced, but SH-2420, also in the Sherbrooke Pavillion of UQÀM.

Here are all the details:

Django : monter une application web en Python

• Date: Wednesday 16th of May, from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (please come at 5:30PM if you need help setting up your computer)
• Place: UQAM, Sherbrooke Building, 200 Sherbrooke West, room SH2420
• Sign up: on Eventbrite
• Workshop’s wiki page
• Workshop’s original post

Catalyst is the latest in the evolution of open-source Web development frameworks. Written in modern Perl and inspired by many of the projects that came before it, including Ruby on Rails, Catalyst is elegant, powerful and refined. It's a great choice for creating any Web-based application from the simple to the very complex. more>>

Last minute news :
Qt community have a Qt Meetup today at Notman House, it is all about Python for Qt. It’s a hands on workshop so bring your PySide questions and your handsets!

See : Meetup’s page

Hey honey, take a walk on the PySide!

Most people have heard of gold. Most people are familiar with dollars. For a handful of geeky folks, however, the currency they hope will become a global standard is digital. Whether it's a problem or not, the currency you use on a day-to-day basis is tied to the government. more>>

HTML5 lets you play music through compliant browsers—no "cloud" required. more>>

Ta-ta-ra-ta-taaaaaaaaaaa!
Pythonistas, Montréal-Python Rugby League needs your help!

Here comes your confrontation with Django… a bit postponed since we absolutely wanted to hold this event in a UQAMian stadium. If bad weather occurs, we’ve took our dispositions : we’ve found a covered stadium near UQAM.

So, let’s stop kidding, here’s what you need to know about our last workshop in French of the Winter 2012 Session :

Django : monter une application web en Python

• Date: Wednesday 16th of May, from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
• Place: UQAM (hourra!), Sherbrooke Building, 200 Sherbrooke West, room SH-2420
• Subscription: on Eventbrite

• Workshop’s wiki page
• Workshop’s original post

Please, install what’s needed before the workshop or show up at 5:30 PM to get help.

Don’t forget to subscribe even tough it’s free!

Be there!

The first Distutils2 sprint, held on the 21st of April at RadialPoint’s office, was a real success.

That afternoon marked the renewal of Montréal-Python’s contributions to this vital project of the Python ecosystem. Indeed, two years ago, sprints were organized here at the very beginning of Distutils2, which aims to replace Distutils with a more powerful tool that implements the new specs (PEPs) that all packaging tools will comply with in the long term.

We’re pleased that a dozen of volunteers were part of this first sprint!

I spent some time with every participant and I think everyone learnt something from the sprint, be it knowledge on packaging, a first experience in free software development or the writing test suites. I’d like to thank everyone who came and opened Pandora’s Box in order to fix bugs for the benefit of the whole community.

The complexity of the code explains the fact that only two patches were done at the end of the sprint, but the other patches started by the other participants could certainly be completed during the next one.

In order to keep the pace, a second sprint will be held Saturday the 12th of May. TP1 will host this sprint and provide us with some pizza. Keep in mind that our deadline is the release of the first beta version on the 24th of June. We have until that point to close bugs and implement some useful features still missing.

Contributing to Distutils2 will help the whole Python community. Be part of it!

Second Distutils2 Sprint:

• Date: Saturday, 12th of May 2012, from 12:00 to 19:00
• Place: TP1, 1410 Stanley street, office 500 (map)
• Registration is optional but recommended
• Setup instructions (can also be done on site)

It may sound like a new Indiana Jones movie or possibly a cheesy platform-style video game from the 1990s, but the title of this column actually refers to our focus this month—programming! Not that there's anything wrong with daring adventures in remote locations, it's just that all the red tape can be overwhelming. more>>

Just a quick reminder : tomorrow is the Django Workshop in English at McGill.
There’s about 35 places left, so don’t be shy and let’s have a nice hands on Django together.

Our subscription service (Eventbrite) was automatically close yesterday because the auto-limit of 40 places were all reserved, but in fact there’s nearly 85 places (so near 35 left now)!

So, sorry for the inconvenience and subscribe now if it’s not already done and/or show up tomorrow!

• Date : 2012-05-02 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
• Place : McGill, Rutherford Building, room 118, 3600 University Street
• Subscription : http://montrealpython-workshop-20120502.eventbrite.ca/

See you!

N.B.: exact place for the same workshop in French next week will be soon announce here.

Multiprocessing, multithreading and evented I/O: the trade-offs in Web servers.

A Web server needs to support concurrency. The server should service clients in a timely, fair manner to ensure that no client starves because some other client causes the server to hang. Multiprocessing and multithreading, and hybrids of these, are traditional ways to achieve concurrency. Node.js represents another way, one based on system libraries for asynchronous I/O, such as epoll (Linux) and kqueue (FreeBSD). To highlight the trade-offs among the approaches, I have three echo servers written in close-to-the-metal C: a forking_server, a threading_server and a polling_server. more>>

Cet article a été écrit en réaction à cet article de la presse: "Hausse des droits de scolarité: profitable pour les moins nantis".

Mise à jour: l'IRIS a publié des commentaires fort intéressants sur cette analyse.

Dans cet article, on fait un calcul où on montre que la nouvelle proposition du gouvernement Charest va être en fait favorable aux moins nantis de la société. Si la section de la "Praisse" ne vous a pas déjà indiqué un problème argumentaire, je vous invite à suivre mes réflexions, qui montreront sans équivoque les sophismes de ces arguments.

en lire plus

Extra, extra!
Read all about it!

Montréal-Python 29, Mythomaniac Meme, is next Monday!

• Date : 30th of April, 6:00 PM
• Place : RadialPoint, 2050 de Bleury street, 2nd floor

It’s gonna be a hell of a night!
Another free edition, open to all! It’s all about the Web!

Be there!

Sometimes events and equipment conspire against you and your team to cause a problem. Occasionally, however, it's lack of understanding or foresight that can turn around and bite you. Unfortunately, this is a tale of where we failed to spot all the possible things that might go wrong. more>>

Pythonistas, let’s continue our magnificent journey on the Pythonic Way. It’s now time to dive head first in web development using Django, a Python web framework. Our last workshop [1] of the Winter 2012 series will show you that “Beautiful is better than ugly” and that “Simple is better than complex”. — Zen of Python

The Montréal-Python Rugby League (MPRL) [DoesNotExist] cruelly needs a web app to manage its teams and its season. In only 3 hours, we’ll make this happen.

Let’s code this together Wednesday on May 2nd at McGill University.

• Date : 2012-05-02 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
• Place : McGill, Rutherford Building, room 118
  3600 University Street [2]

The workshop will be in English but all nations are welcome. No need to know rugby nor having attended previous workshop. Our workshops are free and open to all.

The prerequisites, the technical setup and the content of this workshop can be found on the workshop’s wiki page :

Django : building a Python web app

Please take time to install the softwares (Python, Django [, South, IPython]) before the workshop. If you bump into any issue during the installation, don’t panic, Montréal-Python team will there at 5:30 PM to help you setup your laptop for the workshop, whatever OS you are running. The installation procedures are on the wiki page.

To be part of the scrum, please confirm your presence:
Subscription : http://montrealpython-workshop-20120502.eventbrite.ca/

N.B. : This workshop will be held in French the following week. Date and place to be confirmed here in a separate post.

Ready? So…
Crouch! Touch! Pause! Engage!

[1] We originally planned 4 workshops for this Winter 2012 series, but supporting the student strike movement made us reorganize things. Lucky you, you might see yourself following the 4th workshop in the very first Montréal-Python Summer Workshop series!

[2] The room of this workshop is sponsored by : the Network Dynamics lab.

A short while ago, an article appeared in Linux Journal implying Git was the be-all and end-all of source code revision control systems ("Git—Revision Control Perfected" by Henry Van Styn, August 2011). more>>

 New products for April.

In my past several articles, I've looked at various packages to do all kinds of science. Sometimes, however, there just isn't a tool to solve a particular problem. That's the great thing about science. There is always something new to discover and study. But, this means it's up to you to develop the software tools you need to do your analysis. more>>