I have not yet played with python 3, which sounds like it makes working with Unicode easier.

In python 2.x, working with Unicode can be annoying, but when you remember this rule of thumb, it's much easier and allows you to keep your sanity:

Always use unicode strings ...

A python-based project I'm working on has a win32 user that I need to support. Until yesterday I've been moving to a win32 laptop in order to run python setup.py bdist_wininst so I can produce a self-installing executable. Then I discovered how trivial it is to use ...

When you're writing python, you don't need a lot of debate over the minutiæ of most coding standards. PEP 8 does that for you. Even better, there are some tools that make it really easy to stick to the standard.

Why do this? Well, for one thing it ...

The ctypes module makes loading and calling into a dynamic library incredibly easy:

>>> from ctypes import CDLL
>>> libc = CDLL('libc.so.6')
>>> print libc.strlen('abcde')
5

As with everything else in python, it gets even better when you scratch the surface. In the example above, CDLL returns an object ...

I didn't like the existing enum recipes, so I cooked up what I feel is a better way of working with enumerations in python. The result is yapyenum, hosted on github. Rather than come up with something new to say about it, I'll just repost the README here ...

I've had this code around for a while and had an opportunity to drag it out the other day and dust it off. The problem: Every now and again there's a situation where you don't really want to catch an exception, but you do want to perform ...

Jesse Noller has been republishing articles he wrote for Python Magazine. These are very informative: I learned new things about the "with" statement in python 2.5 and tonight I was introduced to Paramiko, a library for using SSH.