By : lakshman

Great Indian Developer Summit, is the India's largest developer conference, held at Bangalore, India; in its third edition this year. The conference concluded last Friday. The summit had about a 1000 visitors on the first day and a comparable number on the other days. The conference basically caters to the enterprises, and hence their focus on the .Net, Java and Flash. There were many star speakers. I gave a talk on django, introducing it and then explaining the standard community conventions to make good reusable applications. Django, being a social software, developed by a community, it is important to ...

By : lakshman

What is bpython?

bpython is a fancy interface to the Python interpreter for Unix-like operating system.

says the bpython home page. It provides syntax highlighting, auto completion, auto-indentation and such stuff.

Unlike iPython, which implements then entire shell functions and emulates the standard python shell, and adds enhancements, bpython just adds features on top of the existing python shell functionality, using the curses module.

The "killer feature" of bpython is, as you can see from the image above, the IDE like prompting of the function parameters and the doc string of the function dynamically. I have always thought, what IntellijIDEA ...

By : lakshman

There are technology conferences, and then there are gatherings of passionate technology enthusiasts. You will most likely not know what I am talking about, unless you saw that someone wrote a software for controlling a toy-car, using it's blue tooth module, from an Nokia phone, at the event. You will most likely not know what I am talking about, unless you were at Nimhans Convention center at Bangalore between 1st to 5th December 2009.

Foss.in had its beginnings 10 years ago, as linux bangalore, whose objective was the popularize free and open source software to local Indians. From ...

By : lakshman

Pycon India concluded last weekend at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

There have been so many python/django conferences recently, I have been tracking them literally all through the year. Another one, SciPy India just got announced. Week long, with sprints!

Pycon India was attended by around 350 people and had 30 talks. I have attended many conferences, but this one was different. This one was where real people, the real developers gave talks and socialized. No enterprise BS, just the real thing*.

There were a vast majority of good talks. However, I could only attend a few. Strand use ...

By : lakshman

Thanks to awesome django community, there is plenty of open source django code around.

These packages get updated quite often and if you use it often like we do, you'd have possibly realized the need to manage these packages better.

Thankfully, all python ever needs is the source, and all you need to do is to place the source in the python path.

Most projects use Distributed Version Control Systems like Mercurial and Git, and they come locally with the entire history of the source which provides a lot of control to use any version of the code. For ...

By : lakshman

Yahoo has a search api with generous limits, BOSS. There are a few python apis around it. But we wanted a lighter api, and one which has the same interface as out Bing Python api. So here is the updated bingapi.(Now with bossapi.py as well). Or svn it from here

Usage

Usage is mostly compatible with bingapi

In [2]: from bingapi import bossapi

In [3]: api = bossapi.Boss('<appid>')

In [4]: api.do_web_search('Uswaretech')
Out[4]: ....

In [5]: api.do_news_search('salsa')
Out[5]: ...

In [6]: api.do_siteexplorer_search('http://uswaretech.com')
Out[6]: .....

By : lakshman

The newly launched search engine Bing has a simple restful API. We have created a thin Python wrapper over this API, which allows to query the Bing servers in a very pythonic way.

Installing this is as easy as easy_install bingapi.

[Or get it here or here ]

Using

from bingapi import bingapi
bing = bingapi.Bing(<appid>)
bing.do_web_search('Usware Technologies')

The README from the project is posted below, which provides more details on using this.

bingapi.py is a very thin python wrapper over the Bing API. Bing provides a very simple Restful interface to their search engine and provides ...

By : lakshman

Twitter's robust REST API enables building of good applications that leverage its increasingly large and real-time data.

Google's cloud system App Engine not only provides a scalable platform for deploying applications, but also proves to be economically viable because of its pay per resource usage model and a large free quota.

Little wonder then, there are increasingly large number of twitter apps being deployed on App Engine.

In this post, I am going to examine how to create a simple application based on twitter's REST API and deploy it on Google App Engine. A deployed version can ...

By : lakshman

Authorize.net has a user base of over 200k merchants making it the largest payment gateway service provider. Most e-commerce solutions already integrate with Authorize.net, including our favorite e-commerce store Satchmo, developed in django, that we have covered earlier.

However, many shopping portals still require custom development. The robust REST API Authorize.net offers (AIM and SIM) allows for integration with e-commerce merchants' websites.

The AIM API allows for the check out of the customer within the merchant's site, it requires SSL certificate for the merchants site and data is to be transferred in an 128-bit encrypted format ...

By : lakshman

Update: keywords2.txt is Pride and Prejudice from Project Gutenberg. Attached for convenience.

Finding keywords in a given snippet of text has many uses. From classifying web pages to fighting spam mails, keyword recognition is the first step in many algorithms.

We here show the naive Bayesian filter to find keywords, which was popularised by Paul Graham to discover spam mails.

Steps to find keywords.

1. Have a large corpus of text against which we will compare.
2. Find the relative frequency of words in corpus. Eg if your corpus is "the green way is very green way green". Relative frequency is ...

By : lakshman

Twitter, just like many other Web2.0 sites, has an excellent API. So much so, writing a twitter app is considered to be "Hello World" of Web2.0 Programming.

I wrote an application recently. It is DM++. By default, this application allows you to receive direct messages from twitter users you have @replied even if you currently don't follow them. You can even configure application to be able to receive direct messages from people you have @replied in only last 2 days, or receive Dm from all other twitter users.

Look how many people are currently complaining Cant DM ...