A recent post on my blog exposed a problem with the unicode handling in BlogBackup. Release 1.4 fixes the problem with saving posts that contain unicode characters.

Neha Shaikh at Packt publishing sent me a copy of Tarek Ziadé’s new book Expert Python Programming for review and I finally finished it this weekend. Overall, I liked the book. My first impression was, “Really, a chapter on installing Python in an expert level book?” As it turns out, I’m glad that chapter was there because I learned about setting a default module to be imported when the interactive interpreter starts.

The November 2008 issue of Python Magazine is available for download now. The cover story this month is Building E-commerce on Plone with GetPaid by Horacio Durán. He walks through several scenarios for configuring different types of sites that need to accept payments, from charity donations to shipping physical goods. Gloria Jacobs’ article, An Introduction to SQLAlchemy, uses a straightforward intranet application to illustrate the power and portability of SQLAlchemy.

At the PyWorks convention this week there were enough people talking about interesting things I missed from not having a Twitter account that I decided to abandon my resistance and sign up. I’m still setting up the list of feeds I want to follow, and since people search is down I expect that to take a while.

What’s new in 1.4? Version 1.4 of virtualenvwrapper includes a .pth file management function contributed by James Bennett and Jannis Leidel. The new add2virtualenv function makes it easy to share code between virtual environments without installing it in the system site-packages directory, by adding directories to a .pth file in the virtualenv. Thanks, James and Jannis!

The array module defines a sequence data structure that looks very much like a list except that all of the members have to be of the same type. The types supported are listed in the standard library documentation. They are all numeric or other fixed-size primitive types such as bytes. Read more at pymotw.com: array

What’s new in 1.3? John Shimek identified a nasty bug in rmvirtualenv and provided a patch to fix it. Release 1.3 includes the fix. I strongly recommend upgrading.

Nov 12-14: PyWorks 2008 Nov 15: Google AppEngine Hack-a-thon, co-hosted by PyATL and Google Nov 15-16: TurboGears Sprint

I’ve had a couple of requests to make it easier to print the PyMOTW articles by using a print-specific style sheet on my site or blog. I decided that since it is so easy, I should just set up sphinx to produce a PDF of the entire thing. As a result, starting with today’s article on struct each release will be available as a PDF from the project home page.

The struct module includes functions for converting between strings of bytes and native Python data types such as numbers and strings. Read more at pymotw.com: struct