As usual, I’m a little late to the party and Jesse beat me to the punch. If you haven’t already, head on over to LinkedIn and join the new Python community group set up by Danny Adair.

This is a point in favor.

The difflib module contains several classes for comparing sequences, especially of lines of text from files, and manipulating the results. The SequenceMatcher class compares any 2 sequences of values, as long as the values are hash-able. It uses a recursive algorithm to identify the longest contiguous matching blocks from the sequences, eliminating “junk” values. The Differ class works on sequences of text lines and produces human-readable deltas, including differences within individual lines.

The premier issue of Python Magazine is available for download right now, completely free. I haven’t mentioned it previously on this blog, but I’m the Technical Editor for the magazine. That means I review and test the submitted code, and write a monthly column. The column runs under the title “And Now for Something Completely Different” and will focus on technical topics (this month I talk about the GIL and 2 packages for managing processes).

Has your multi-threaded application grown GILs? Take a look at these packages for easy-to-use process management and inter-process communication tools. There is no predefined theme for this column, so I plan to cover a different, likely unrelated, subject every month. The topics will range anywhere from open source packages in the Python Package Index (formerly The Cheese Shop, now PyPI) to new developments from around the Python community, and anything that looks interesting in between.

How can you access group calendar information if your Exchange-like mail and calendaring server does not provide iCalendar feeds, and you do not, or cannot, use Outlook? Use Python to extract the calendar data and generate your own feed, of course! This article discusses a surprisingly simple program to perform what seems like a complex series of operations: scanning IMAP folders, extracting iCalendar attachments, and merging the contained events together into a single calendar.

The copy module provides functions for duplicating objects using shallow or deep copy semantics. Read more at pymotw.com: copy

The sched module implements a generic event scheduler for running tasks at specific times. Read more at pymotw.com: sched

The timeit module provides a simple interface for determining the execution time of small bits of Python code. It uses a platform-specific time function to provide the most accurate time calculation possible. Read more at pymotw.com: timeit

Marsee Henon from O’Reilly recently interviewed a couple of us about the Atlanta-area Python Users’ Group Book Club. She asked some good questions, and although I’m not entirely comfortable with the group being characterized as an “O’Reilly” book club, O’Reilly does offer us a lot of support (esp. free books) so I guess I shouldn’t complain. If you’re interested in participating in a technical book club, you don’t have to live in or even near, Atlanta to join ours.