Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with python

From Zero to Python Hero

KilgoreTrout — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:26:31 -0800

I'm interested in teaching myself Python as my first programming language. What kind of useful/interesting projects are recommended as a long term goal to work towards, given that I'm a total beginner? I've been messing with the idea of teaching myself a programming language as a hobby, and after a bit of research Python seems to be the one best suited for me. That being said, I know absolutely nothing about programming, and I'm interested in what exactly I'd be able to accomplish after I've taught myself the basics. I've pulled together a number of tutorials and books, and messed around a bit with the extreme basics, and I've enjoyed it, but I feel that it would really help to motivate me if I had some kind of an end goal or project that I could work towards.

I would rate myself as a relatively advanced computer user, I like tinkering around with different programs and set ups to get the most out of machines. As a bit of background, I'm currently running a laptop on Windows Vista as my main PC, and a mac mini as an HTPC hooked up to my plasma, which I use mainly to run Plex for my movies and TV shows. Does anyone have examples of what they've been able to accomplish as a beginner after a few months of learning, or any suggestions on goals/projects that I can work towards? I realize that this is an extremely broad question, but I want to keep things pretty open so I can get a feel for what's possible. I've found the posts on Askmefi really helpful for tracking down resources and tutorials, but not much in terms of suggested projects. Any recommendations for books or training resources are also appreciated to help me get there.

Where to get started with Python GUI programming?

cowbellemoo — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:46:59 -0800

Which Python GUI framework is right for someone new to GUI programming? But who may also aspire to open source community (linux) development/involvement? Cross platform, wonderful documentation/tutorials, and cruft-free new technology are also welcome. My current need is just for a simple GUI front end for scripts I write in work for Windows, but one day I'd like to have GUI skills robust enough to help out with open source development. I've given this list a look, but I really don't know where to start. I know GTK/Qt are the most commonly utilized, but are there any exciting new next-generation graphical toolkits? What's fun to learn? What are your favorite tutorials, books, or resources for it?

Any and all suggestions welcome! Thanks!

How to programmatically record user sessions?

lwf — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:28:57 -0800

I'm looking for a non-interactive screencasting tool for use in my application. I'm doing some usability testing where I cannot be physically present on-site, and I want to record the sessions while my program is in use. Any ideas? My application is in Python and GTK targeting the Windows platform.

British or American sitcom suggestions?

PowerCat — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:02:00 -0800

I'm seeking to expand my repertoire of sitcom shows. Please suggest some series that have a similar type of humour as the shows I've outlined below. Like:

Spaced
Monty Python
Peep Show
Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Seinfeld
The IT Crowd
Curb your Enthusiasm

I Wish I Could Just Throw It At the 'Net

47triple2 — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:33:21 -0800

Auomating Mac Filter: I want to upload a movie to a free video sharing site from the command line. How? I currently have a system where I email an image to my Mac Mini which upload the image to TinyPic then Twitters the caption and image URL: ("This is a cool picture! - http://bt.ly/example")

I want to do the same thing with videos. The only problem is that I do not know how to automate uploading a short video to a video sharing site. I found this python script to upload a video to Revver, but using the following command, I cannot get the video to upload:

python /Users/example/RevverExamplePython/revver-upload-video.py /Users/example/revverupload/movie.3gp --login Username --passphrase-file /Users/example/revverpassphrase.txt --age-rating 1 --title test --tag test --author test --url http://www.example.com/ --credits test --description test

Which returns an unnamed error. So, in the end, I want a system to upload a video to any video sharing site and return the URL (or video id) for that video. Help?

Severe mac/python question

emptyinside — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:34:02 -0800

So I was fiddling with commands in the python interpreter via the Terminal. I ran this basically, and was messing with the help system. fileHandle = open ( 'test.txt', 'w' ) ; fileHandle.write (' asdasd^3 '); fileHandle.close(); And all of a sudden this application opened. Python shell is it's name, it has no icon. WTF is going on?

ball python care in winter

crapples — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:46:49 -0800

Ball-Python-Care-Filter: How do we best care for our ball python during the cold cold winter? We just got him in May and we absolutely love him. We have been lucky because he eats really well, and is great with the kids.

However, I live in the midwest and when winter comes it will be cold. Our house will regularly get down to 58 degrees at night and rise to no more than 67-68 during the day.

He lives in a 20 gallon-long tank. We have an under-tank sticky heating pad on one side of the tank, and that has been his only source of heat during the summer. So, I know that I will have to get a heat lamp for the winter.

My questions are these:

1 - Do I leave the heat lamp on 24 hours a day? Or can he handle a cold night as long as he warms up during the day?

2 - Should we change his feeding schedule during the winter (right now he eats a mouse every week, exactly. He doesn't mess around either! He grabs that thing within seconds of it being in the tank with him).

3 - Anything else I should know?

Thanks a lot.

Python vs java in threading

xmutex — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:54:07 -0800

How do you respond to a dude who says that python ain't _really_ a multithreading language, and you should write it in Java- and you really think that's wrong?

Best programming language for a web design class?

satori_movement — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:07:22 -0800

What programming language should I teach my kids? (web dev) I've got about 20 interesting and enthusiastic highschool kids in a web design class. I'm having a blast teaching them, and so far we've covered some of the basics(html, css, and trappings of JS).

We're going to be on Javascript for a while, but at some point we're going to move on to a little database stuff and I want to be ready.

My own personal background is in PHP, but I've played with ruby and done a decent amount of work in python. I've also read that lua is a good choice, and there are some interesting MVCs in that area(plus Lua's syntax is similar to JS which I like).

Really though, I want to avoid running around in circles. So what programming language should I teach my kids? Lua, python, ruby, php, something else entirely?

Need help extracting links off of a webpage (RuneHQ to be exact). Need to put them in a database.

Javed_Ahamed — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:31:13 -0800

Need help extracting links off of a webpage (RuneHQ to be exact). Need to put them in a database. Hey guys,

I am working on a little coding project related to an online game called runescape (yes its a legit program), but I am wondering how to go about extracting all the links I want from a webpage, so I can visit them all with my script.

The webpage in question is RUNEHQ and I would like to extract every link on the right "Items menu" which scrolls vertically forever.

An example item link looks like http://www.runehq.com/database.php?type=item&id=008016 but the number on the end does not increase in a logical fashion.

Does anyone have any ideas to only extract all the links on the right hand "Items" menu? It can be a direct scraping approach or somehow querying their database?

I will eventually be using these links to do some trend analysis on runescape item prices, using python and urllib2, beautifulsoup etc.

Help me with a tricky (for me) Python problem

Mjolnir — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 01:00:06 -0800

I am trying to make a python script that takes a CSV file and turns it into an HTML table. I need it to combine a column containing a website name and another column containing a URL into an HTML link. I'm working on a python script that takes a CSV file and turns it into an HTML table.

The CSV has, among numerous other columns, a column containing a website name and another column containing a URL. I would like to combine the two into an HTML link.

Here is what I have so far that converts the rows & columns into tables:

for row in reader:
html.write('<tr>');
for column in row:
html.write('<td>' + column + '</td>');
html.write('</tr>')

I know the part that makes the HTML link would need to say:
html.write('<a href="'+ URLcolumn + '">' + sitecolumn + '</a></td>')

But I am stumped on how to finish implementing this. In particular, I can't figure out how to "refer" to the URLcolumn and sitecolumn.

Attending a Seminar 101

Mach5 — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:38:22 -0800

I need to pick a seminar/conference/class/training/whatever for work to attend within the next 6 months or so, I have until 10PM to choose, and I have no idea where or what the cool stuff is. It should be at least tangentially related to my job as a Unix Systems Engineer/Python Guy, and preferably within the Northeast (NYC is where I'm located), although feel free to recommend anywhere in the US. I'm a django/python coder, but mainly a linux engineer. I'd like anything that is cool and interesting, a la DEFCON/HOPE/etc. It can be anything related to python, linux, AIX (ugh), solaris, high performance computing, clusters, networking, security, etc.

So, metafilter, what do ya got for me? Be forewarned that I fall asleep easily when I am bored, so I need something at least halfway interesting, that will also improve my skills.

I'm a Python, and I'm a Mac.

reductiondesign — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:41:20 -0800

Help me learn Python! On a Mac! I'd like to start getting to really know a programming language, and I've determined Python to be the best choice (it seems to be useful and able to make things and fairly intuitive—if I'm wrong, tell me!). I've got vague backgrounds in Java, a tiny bit of C, and web design.

I'd prefer to avoid the "Learn something else before Python!" speech unless you have a really good reason.

Also, I'm on a Mac. How do I write/compile/etc. in Python? Terminal? Xcode? Something else that's really cool and I'm unaware of?

Thanks so much!

Help me learn Perl, Python, Lisp, Haskell, Ruby

jgunsch — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:39:29 -0800

Help me learn a few new programming languages. Python, Perl, Lisp, Haskell, Ruby. In college now, been programming for six or seven years already, all self-taught. I started with Java for a couple years, moved on and now consider myself fairly fluent in PHP and its friends (JavaScript, CSS, etc.). I've been having a lot of fun with jQuery lately! And now I'm stuck in a summer internship working on an ASP.NET project written in VB.

I'd love people's recommendations for books/resources to get started in a few high-level languages: Perl, Python, Lisp, and possibly Haskell or Ruby. I went through an O'Reilly book on Perl (I believe it was this one a couple months ago, so I have a handle on the syntax, but am not terribly capable with it.

Opinions/information on which languages people would recommend (or others) and for what purposes would be incredibly helpful. Other language suggestions are welcome, as well. I don't really have reasons to learn these specific languages beyond "well, I probably should know enough Python to know what it's good for, understand what's going on in Python code if I saw it, and hack something together for a basic task." I'm perfectly capable of searching for tutorials/books on my own, but people's personal recommendations have that knack of knowing which ones worked and didn't for them. ;)

Books/Internet resources/etc. that anyone could point me to would be awesome. Bonus points for a good crash course in Linux shell scripting.

How do I use data from data.gov?

Blandanomics — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:50:31 -0800

I'm a journalist with not much database programming experience. However I have been fascinated by the government and other agencies making their data available for developers to play with, and I think a newspaper could do wonders with this data. How do I get in on the fun? Transit agencies are making their times available the gov't just released records at data.gov.

What languages should I learn to manipulate these datasets to make some good applications and visualizations? Example I have in mind are the Guardians treatment of PM expenses and EveryBlock.

Should I learn Django, Ruby, Pyton? All? None?

Your experience with ball pythons.

Yasuo — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 09:24:32 -0800

How is it like to own a ball python? I'm asking for personal experiences only please, as I can always Google for husbandry, etc.

Simple USB control - how to blink an LED via code?

BishopsLoveScifi — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:28:48 -0800

This is something that's been bugging me for a while.... Given a USB port and an LED (perhaps more components required?), and a program running on the PC, how do you get from here, to the simplest case I can think of - making a line of code flip the state of an LED? Either a practical example, or some recommendations for topics that would drag me in the right direction. My interest in this is because although I get computers, I don't entirely get how they control the hardware that is attached. I have a vague sense of it, but it's too fuzzy to call knowledge.

So I guess I'm curious about very simple driver development, just as a conceptual link to understanding what goes on when something gets plugged in.

If it helps, my language of choice is Python because of the speed and flexibility of development, plus the interpreter which is a great way to get a feel for the language. Is Python up to the task? I'd prefer not to code in C/C++, and I'd really like to avoid Java. Windows preferred, but I've got Fedora and Ubuntu on other PC's if it drastically simplifies it.

Best language for highschool bioinformatics course?

bergeycm — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:22:31 -0800

I'm teaching a course on bioinformatic programming for high schoolers. Which language should I teach it in? And do you have any nifty ideas for easy projects that fall under the bioinformatics header? It's a six-week, twice-weekly internship for highschoolers with absolutely no programming experience. The catch is, it has to be a bioinformatics course. What language would be best? I think the two contenders are Perl and Python, though I'm open to other options.

Possible Perl Advantages:

- I know Perl, so I won't need to pick up another language and I'd be better at debugging it.
- If the kids go on to AP Comp Sci or a 101 course in college, the language is often Java. Both Perl and Java use C-style syntax.
- The bioinformatics online support for Perl seems better than for Python.
- Long-string manipulation and speed seem much better in Perl.
- Though complex Perl is scary-looking, well-writen basic perl doesn't seem that intimidating.

Possible Python Advantages:

- Less steep learning curve.
- Possibly more resources for beginner programmers.
- The whitespace-is-important thing and there-is-only-one-best-way-of-doing-something thing may be better for teaching good programming techniques.

Also, any basic bioinformatics projects you can think of are much appreciated. The goal is really to teach programming, but the internship requires that it be done through bioinformatic applications.

Which host offers the most interpreters?

grumblebee — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:20:19 -0800

Is there a reliable, not-too-expensive hosting company out there that lets you post server scripts in most open-source languages? This is for personal use. I know PHP and I'm learning Python. Eventually, I want to learn Java and one of the popular functional languages. And maybe some C++.

I know I could just download the various interpreters and compilers and play around locally, but it's so much more fun writing web apps for public consumption.

Currently, I'm with Dreamhost, and they let me code in PHP and Python. Is there another host out there with more options?

I know I could get my own dedicated server or use Amazon's cloud service, but those would be expensive solutions -- wouldn't they? If that's the only way to go, help me find the most reasonable option. I'm talking personal website stuff here. I currently pay $30 a month to Dreamhost. I'd pay a bit more than that if necessary, but I'd rather not pay hundreds a month.

generating tables using mako templates

zippy — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:01:42 -0800

Using a Mako template and CSS, I need to generate a m x n grid display from a variable length list of elements. For simplicity's sake, let's say what I want is a 2 x n table, but I'm fine with unordered lists as long as they appear on screen aligned as if they were in rows and columns.

What does the logic look like in mako to create such a structure? I'm having trouble figuring out when to start a new row or close and old one, while still keeping the template simple and readable.

Please spell things out and use small words as I'm new to both Mako and CSS (but somewhat conversant in Python), and keep me from the temptation to hard-code a solution for a fixed length list of elements.

making a simple GUI to database using available python libraries

figTree — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:12:56 -0800

existing python ADT structures within available libraries that are efficient at tagging schemas? Using python, I am looking for make some sort of GUI interface that allows me to make, update and visualize a database on my harddrive, interact with it, add keywords etc. I am looking for the best platform to that has these concepts so i can do less programming and more scripting!

For example, i would like to make sure that under the hood, my keyword/tagging schema is comprised of more than one table so it is not slow.

Any ideas on the best libraries/tools to do this? perhaps there is already an example somewhere of this type of implementation? I do not know a specific GUI API for python, so im not sure which pick would have the better classes support and documentation for this type of problem.

thanks for the help!

I think I broke my python installation on Mac OSX 10.5

neilkod — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:15:25 -0800

I think I broke my python installation on Mac OSX 10.5 Before learning about easy_install, I've been trying to compile modules(numpy,scipy) from source. I then went to python.org to install the current python binaries. Now, I can't seem to install things anymore and I now question my overall python installation's integrity.

Now i'm trying to install BeautifulSoup and I get errors like



www:Current neil$ easy_install BeautifulSoup

Searching for BeautifulSoup

Best match: BeautifulSoup 3.1.0.1

Processing BeautifulSoup-3.1.0.1-py2.5.egg

BeautifulSoup 3.1.0.1 is already the active version in easy-install.pth

Installing testall.sh script to /usr/local/bin

error: /usr/local/bin/testall.sh: Permission denied

If I try and sudo easy_install BeautifulSoup, it looks like everything ran ok but when its time to import the library, it's not found.

I think with all the installing, and compiling, and everything else, I might have hosed my python installation. How can I fix this?

Python and Math

alligatorman — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:22:10 -0800

Is it worth learning Python for combinatorial mathematics research? I need to (re-)learn a programming language for some future research I plan on doing in combinatorics and discrete mathematics, and the elegance of Python is drawing me towards it.

How much efficiency/speed would I lose by not using a lower level language, like C++?

I know this question is very vague, but I do not know exactly what type of problems I plan on tackling. I just want to know if Python can efficiently handle heavy data.

I've read about the excellent math packages for Python, and Sage looks very neat.

Any (discrete) mathematicians out there use Python on a regular basis? Am I better off re-learning C++? (I'd rather not!)

Python or Java ...

eebs — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:13:52 -0800

Help me choose between Python and Java for a specific type of programming. Background: I am a researcher in engineering with a wide scope. Mostly, I perform simulations of (mechanical) systems, behavior of which are governed by differential equations. I also develop models for biology/genetics (but not bioinformatics type stuff). I use Fortran (I know) for programming, write results to output file(s) and read them using Excel or Tecplot to visualize. I also use Matlab and Mathematica for quick models. It gets pretty cumbersome after a while, especially when you want to quickly figure out behavior change (of a phenomenon) depending on the input variables. So I thought maybe it is time for me to learn some OOP and write codes that will allow me to change input variables interactively and see the results simultaneously on the screen. Following link best describes the type of interface I am looking for:

http://cmol.nbi.dk/models/igroup/igroup.html

You see what I mean? There are buttons, sliders, text boxes to change variables and the results change immediately in the "graphics" area. As far as I can tell, it is an applet written using Java. Let's drop the ability to write applets aside because I am not looking for that.

First question: can one write a code that would provide similar interface (GUI if you will) using Python?

If so, would it be pretty straight forward after some Python learning (I understand it is hard to answer this question but give it whirl please)?

Java appears a little intimidating to me while my initial experience with Python has been pleasant. However, I could not find any applications/codes on Python sites that fits what I am looking for (suggestions are welcome).

Thanks so much.

Granular volume data from MP3 files?

joe vrrr — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:13:54 -0800

I'm looking for a command-line tool that can return a volume value for specific points of time in an MP3 file. Basically, I need an array of volume values for an MP3 file. Preferably, one value for every 1/30th of a second of audio. The data will be used for visualization, so the values don't have to be extremely accurate or in any particular unit of measurement.

In a perfect world, this would be an open source python-based tool.

Any ideas?