Now with Python, you can do an import antigravity.
And soon you’ll be flying.
(From XKCD)
webbrowser.open("http://xkcd.com/353/")
(Source: Python)
XKCD comics have been receiving quite a bit of attention recently hasn’t it?
It’s the first Python User Group meeting in Singapore. It’s interesting to see that the number of people using Python in Singapore (we’re a population of 4.5 million when I last counted with my fingers).
Let me first say I’m not really a Python programmer developer. I work with PHP more but Python has always been interesting for me mainly because of the beauty in the syntax. I probably would blog more about it in future (not near).
Anyhow, the Singapore Python User Group is organized by several Republic Polytechnic lecturers, mainly teaching Diploma in Interactive & Digital Media. Two of the courses that in the diploma actually uses Python - Multimedia Programming I and II. I think Temasek Polytechnic has a little bit of Python in this shell scripting course too.
The first meetup is mainly a sharing session, the later part of the meetup broke in lightning talks ala Barcamp. There is also mention of PyCon Singapore 2010. I hope things would work out right. Things should be interesting.
I figured I should too mentioned that there are women present in this meetup and they are not PR people.
The meetup finished at 7 where I rush home for dinner. Met Jonathan on my way out of SMU and we chatted a little. And yeah, he didn’t know what’s Python.
Interestingly, there actually are people interested in Python in Singapore. Most Singaporeans are Java or .NET language programmers due to the things they teach in school. Java and .NET languages are great but alternate languages won’t hurt.
The Python User Group is on coming Thursday, i.e. October 9, 2008.
Venue: SMU, SIS (School of Information System) NSR 2.1
Time: 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Of course you know I probably be there for the tea since Singapore Institute of Management have no more free tea breaks and we now have to pay a dollar seventy cents to get our own bun and coffee. To think Irene and I spend one whole semester complaining that the coffee sucked, the tea sucked, the plain water sucked and the flatten bun did not look at all appetizing. Now there’s no more. We only appreciate things when we miss it.
Rants aside, anybody going to the Python User Group meeting?
Aptana acquires Pydev. Pydev is an Eclipse plugin.
Aptana Acquires Pydev to add Python Support to Studio
We are very excited to announce that Pydev, the popular Python and Jython IDE, is now part of the Aptana product family and that Pydev creator, Fabio Zadronzy, will head up continued efforts to advance Pydev as part of the Aptana team. Like our products for Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and PHP, Pydev offers code completion, refactoring, code analysis, debugging support, and lots lots more. Pydev’s popularity in the Python community and Eclipse ecosystem made it the clear choice for Aptana. The acquisition sets the stage for a full Python suite of products and services ranging from local development to cloud deployment. (Source: Aptana)
Aptana is pretty neat. I use it for PHP and Ruby on Rails last time. But I didn’t find the syntax highlighting as good as Eclipse PDT and syntax highlighting is one of the main reasons I switched away. Pydev is pretty good already, lately they don’t have much significant updates.
Reddit decides to go open source. Reddit is already using open source software - Debian, lighttpd, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Slony-I, various python libraries, Psychopg, pylons, Solr, Tomcat, Ganglia, Mercurial, Git, gettext (translation), daemontools, and memcached. The only thing that isn’t open source is Reddit itself so they decide to open source it.
(Souce: Reddit)
Oh so that’s what the penguin is about.
TheUnixGeek compiled a list of salaries of programmers. It’s of course not reflective in Singapore but it’s interesting to do some comparison as always. All salaries are in United States currency.
Objective C? Erm… Okay, don’t think we use that a lot in Singapore. And well, I search some additional languages just for fun. COBOL programmers are said to be paid $72,000. ActionScript, an average of $73,000. Lisp people get $77,000. And of course, I can’t help it but to search for FORTRAN, apparently those people are still in demand - $75,000. I used to do FORTRAN for 4 months. I cried every day.
No for loops. (more…)
Google App Engine pricing announced.
Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month:
(Source: TechCrunch)
You know… It would be totally kickass if Google can offer web hosting services. I’m sure there’ll be lots of people interested.