After several years of tame fish like tetras, we’ve restarted the tank with cichlids. I had both Africans and South Americans many years ago, but we decided to go with Africans this time because we liked the colors and I had the most fun with my Africans before. It took us a while to settle on a theme for their names, but we’ve finally chosen to go with middle names of past United States Presidents.

What’s new? I’ve just uploaded release 1.7 of virtualenvwrapper, my set of extensions to Ian Bicking’s virtualenv tool. There are no major code changes in this release, just some packaging updates to fix installation via easy_install (forcing unzipped install) and to deal with the move to bitbucket.org.

The asyncore module includes tools for working with I/O objects such as sockets so they can be managed asynchronously (instead of, for example, using threads). The main class provided is dispatcher, a wrapper around a socket that provides hooks for handling events like connecting, reading, and writing when invoked from the main loop function, loop(). Read more at pymotw.com: asyncore

It’s time for a change at Python Magazine. Editing a magazine like this every month is, not surprisingly, a huge amount of work. With the evolution and expansion of my duties at my day job (almost everyone at MTA is part-time, even me), I’ve found less and less time available to dedicate to my editorial duties. It was a tough decision, but rather than let the quality of the magazine suffer from lack of attention I found someone to take over who will be able to devote the time necessary to keep up our high standards.

The February 2009 issue of Python Magazine is available for download now. On the cover this month we have a story about the development of Urban Mediator, a tool for collaborative city planning created at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. This story is another example of how the variety of problems solved with Python is endless. Michael Noll brings us a how-to for Writing a Personal Link Recommendation Engine.

The tarfile module provides read and write access to UNIX tar archives, including compressed files. In addition to the POSIX standards, several GNU tar extensions are supported. Various UNIX special file types (hard and soft links, device nodes, etc.) are also handled. Read more at pymotw.com: tarfile

The Python writing community has never been stronger. From blogs to magazines to a slew of recent releases from O’Reilly, Packt, Manning, Apress, and other publishers there a more opportunities than ever before for anyone wanting to write about Python in some form. Of course, authoring is only one aspect of producing high quality professional writing. As an editor, it’s no surprise that I think all authors can benefit from having someone else read their work.

The grp module can be used to read information about Unix groups from the group database (usually /etc/group). The read-only interface returns tuple-like objects with named attributes for the standard fields of a group record. Read more at pymotw.com: grp

The pwd module can be used to read user information from the Unix password database (usually /etc/passwd). The read-only interface returns tuple-like objects with named attributes for the standard fields of a password record. Read more at pymotw.com: pwd

I’ve been working on the Python Module of the Week series since March of 2007. During the course of the project, my article style and tool chain have both evolved. I now have a fairly smooth production process in place, so the mechanics of producing a new post don’t get in the way of the actual research and writing. Most of the tools are open source, so I thought I would describe the process I go through and how the tools work together.