If you are looking to generate/create/write (but not read) excel spreadsheets from native python (read on linux or macos or even Windows!), then xlwt (a fork of pyExcelerator) is your friend. This library, (and the ancestor) is somewhat unknown, but quite good. The only real problem with using …

For those in the Utah vicinity, and who want to see a cool presentation about python, wiimotes and lasers (or who really like MS products, since most sessions seem dedicated to that), my brother is presenting at Utah Code Camp. It should be a little cooler than the Pycon version …

My brother gave a talk about using python to detect lasers with webcams and also demo'd a prototype of a 3d game with wiimote headtracking. For those who missed the preso, there's now a video up.

As there appears to be some interest in branch coverage and the cool testing/metrics/quality tools that can be built upon it, I've proposed a GSOC project to start the ball rolling. (I assume it will start rolling either way, but allowing someone to devote more time to it …

Here's my notes on Pycon this year. I'm going to throw out a collection of links that may or may not be useful to you. If you weren't able to make the conference, hopefully this list contains a link or two that are new or interesting to you.

• elasticwulf slides …

Here's my thoughts regarding Pycon 2008.

Benefits of conference attending

• Face time with virtual friends - Some people/IT shops invest in established technology provided by big vendors. I've been somewhat disenchanted by the products (and underlying lockin/intentions) of many vendors. Yet open source (for the most part) has provided …

A much as some gnomers don't like python ;), there's some good stuff coming from those that do. Andy Wingo writes of his work to reduce the memory footprint of the Flumotion Media Server. It is linux specific (and somewhat gnome/gtk specific), but if you're looking to profile memory usage …

I've spent the past days starting a MonetDB backend for SQLAlchemy. My code is currently attached to ticket 874.

Here are my thoughts after spending a bit hacking out the backend (which is really slightly usable if you have nightly of Monetdb):

• I was thinking writing the backend would require …

I'm giving an introductory talk on testing tomorrow for Utah Python. I'm planning to cover unittest, doctest, coverage and interpreting coverage results. At the end will be a hands on session for applying what we've learned. We'll write a simple program and then try and achieve good test coverage using …

Just watched the screencast here about Owen Taylor's improved shell. Nothing revolutionary per se, but it just looks more beginner friendly (ie you can go and edit existing expressions, rather than using shell history). Kinda reminds me of the only time I used mathlab.... some 13 years ago. Now if …