Python Liberation Front

New Front Page for AwareTek, Software You Can Use for Fun, Decision Analysis, and Spiritual Questing

In the never-ending quest for the best use for the front page to the whole AwareTek web site, and in the burning search to find some sort of a common thread to tie this whole eclectic site together, I have completely updated and revamped the front page, linked to above, as primarily a collection of fun little "decision analysis" scripts I have written and other fun programs written by others, as welll as various online resources.

If you have trouble discerning the common thread and theme, well, wait a while and keep returning to the main AwareTek front page, becuase it is highly likly to change drastically and often and to evolve disruptively ;-)))

As far as the self-written scripts, they may be pretty simple but keep in mind I am working on much more complex and interesting ones, but in my limited spare time it is taking a long time to bring them to final fruition ;-)))

Real Soon Now...

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IronPython and Great Hackers

Just in case you are the last person on the planet to hear, Jim Hugunin, the creator of Jython, announced last week the first release of IronPython, a fast implementation of Python for the .Net and Mono virtual machines. This is good news for Python because it will mean even more wide spread popularity for the language.

Also last week, Paul Graham posted a fascinating essay to his blog called Great Hackers which is well worth reading.

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Web Spider, Python related articles, and the Art of Software Maintenance

Finally, at long last, once again, *ALL* of the news-gathering web spiders on my web site are working again, daily searching the web and bringing back updated lists of current web articles about Python and related subjects. The links to these web spider outputs can be found on my Python Learning Foundation web page. When they work, they are kind of neat. The links are duplicated right here for your immediate viewing pleasure, but their permanent home is on my Python page.

Here is a link to Real-Time Python Web Articles, a list of links updated daily by our Pythonic web spider. For more specific news on Pythonic topics, try the Zope web spider, Tkinter web spider, Jython web spider, or wxPython web spider; or try the Perl web spider, Ruby web spider,and Javascript web spider versions. For something different, try out the Tech News Web Robot, updated news every 15 minutes...

Keeping them in working order has been a real eye opening lesson in the Art of Software Maintenance over the last few years. I have solved many, many bugs that showed up over time. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for new bugs to show up this time.

The web spider program was written by Hans Nowak, and is called mygale.py, and is used to scour the web for new Python articles. I modified it a little, in particular to search for related outputs, as in the other categories above. Then, all the various versions of mygale.py run on my old Suse Linux box, that I use for nothing else at this time, by means of being called daily by a cron script. Then, an uploader script is called for each by the cron script, to uploade the results to my web server automatically.

Which is all neat when it works, but I have learned about a lot of random failure types. In this day and age, all of this should, I suppose, be done by RSS programs, but I have yet to figure all that out. Meantime, see if you can get hooked on daily news flashes from around the web on Python, Jython, wxPython, Tkinter, Zope, JavaScript, Perl or Ruby; or scan the back lists to see how many articles on specific topics you can find. On my Python Learning Foundation web page, I even include a link to an output I ran long long ago that listed links to every web article the spider could find about Python, no matter how old; hundreds and hundreds of articles.

The source code and documentation for the mygale.py web spider on which all of the above is based can be found at Mygale.

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