The topic of VMware came up at my local 757 Python Users Group.

A common administrative need is to control VM farms. While there are a number of pointy-clicky GUI tools, VMware offers the VIX library to permit writing scripts to control VM's.

Here's some information we looked at recently …

In Command-Line Applications, we looked at a Python main-import switch which boiled down to this.

for file in args.file:
    with open( file, "r" ) as source:
        process_file( source, args )

The point was that each distinct file on the command-line was processed in a more-or-less uniform way by a single function …

I'm old -- I admit it -- and I feel that command-line applications are still very, very important. Linux, for example, is packed full of almost innumerable command-line applications. In some cases, the Linux GUI tools are specifically just wrappers around the underlying command-line applications.

For many types of high-volume data processing …

See this: "Stop hard-coding business rules" in SD Times. Here's what's exasperating: "Memo to developers: Stop hard-coding business rules into applications. Use business rules engines instead." Business Rules Engines? You mean Python? It appears that they don't mean Python. "Developers can use [a BPM suite or rules engine] and be …

Folks like to claim that unit testing absolutely requires each class be tested in isolation using mocks for all dependencies. This is a noble aspiration, but doesn't work out perfectly well in Python.

First, "unit" is intentionally vague. It could be a class, a function, a module or a package …

web2py wins an award -- cool. I really like Django. But...

"Are you implying that a scalable Data Warehouse solution could be implemented using Python and serialised files?"

Not "implying". I'm trying to state it as clearly as I can. A scalable data warehouse solution involves a lot of flat file processing.

ETL, for example, is mostly a flat-file pipeline. It …

We process a fair amount of externally-prepared datasets. 40,000 rows of econometric data that we purchased from a third-party. Mostly, the data is in a usable format: .CSV or .XSLX.

Once in a while, we get CSV with |. A few times, we got fixed-format COBOL-style records.

Recently, we got …

Check out this question on Stack Overflow: "Python: replace a string by a float in txt file".

The question is confusing, but it appears to be a longish and confused description of simple formatting or template substitution. It's hard to be sure, but it sounds like one of Those Things …

Someone sent me this: "“Building Skills in Python” – Steven F. Lott".

I had a vague idea that this book would get some traction. This response was surprising. I guess I should get to work on the upgrades.

And focus on the "no-nonsense" comment.