I’ve used easy_install for open source tools, but I have to admit I never thought of setting up a web server as a private repository for closed source apps. Jeremy makes it look simple.

I need a book to teach someone about basic database design. They don’t need relational algebra or calculus, and they don’t have to be an expert about highly optimized storage, indexing, or anything like that. They just need some basic normalization, column type selection, and query help for what should be a pretty simple database. They took a college class on RDBMSes, but the class and accompanying book were both terrible.

Version 0.3 of LinkingToMe remembers the link history and highlights new links since the previous run in bold.

The latest book I’ve been reading as part of the Atlanta Python Users’s Group Book Club is Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran. Disclosure: My copy of the book was provided free, as part of O’Reilly Media’s support for the book club. My Impressions I have to admit, I was a little concerned when I picked up Programming Collective Intelligence that my rusty math skills would be a hindrance to really understanding the material.

The pprint module includes a “pretty printer” for producing aesthetically pleasing representations of your data structures. Read more at pymotw.com: pprint

The shutil module includes high-level file operations such as copying, setting permissions, etc. Read more at pymotw.com: shutil

Google’s Webmaster Tools site provides a reporting feature to let you see who is linking to you. Unfortunately, the report is backwards from the orientation I want to read it. It lists the remote links for each of your local pages. I want to see all of the local pages linked on a remote site grouped together. That helps me recognize trends and identify people who might be blogging about what I write here.

For those of you subscribe directly to the PyMOTW feed, I apologize for the temporary interruption in service. Apparently I reached a maximum feed size and FeedBurner cut me off. I didn’t realize there was an issue, because I had given up on the FeedBulletin notifications, since they just cried wolf every day first by saying that there was a delay in updating and then in the same email reporting that everything was working again.

The next PyAtl meeting is on Nov. 8th. The topic this month is GUI toolkits, and the agenda calls for a bunch of lightning talks. I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to make it, since there are several toolkits on the list that I’ve never used before. Agenda: PyGTK 2.0: Jeremy Jones WXPython: Mark Adams PyGlet: Drew Smathers Curses: Jeremy Jones Divmod Nevow Athena: Cary Hull Tkinter: Bernard Matthews Python/Cocoa/Leopard: Noah Gift We’re still looking for someone to talk about PyQT, Jython, and IronPython.

The past several years have seen a steady increase in the use of RSS and Atom feeds for data sharing. Blogs, podcasts, social networking sites, search engines, and news services are just a few examples of data sources delivered via such feeds. Working with internet services requires care, because inefficiencies in one client implementation may cause performance problems with the service that can be felt by all of the consumers accessing the same server.