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Neil Dickenson’s fantastic Assembly Programming Series continues apace, focussing on the stack.
A nice little video from Dai on using the Nautilus file-browser to do Linux admin tasks.
In just over a minute Ian shows how to install the increasingly necessary firefox adblock plugin. Very slickly done as always. As ever, adblocking is subject to a little debate. The garish, obnoxious ads that destroy ones browsing experience are self-defeating anyway so blocking them isn’t an issue, but more benign, relatively peaceable text-based ads should probably be allowed through if there’s any chance it will help maintain the flow of quality content.
Some really nice 3D modelling and texturing videos from Horst and Leo, using the rather cool Wings3D open-source modeller, a simpler alternative to the rather more heavyweight Blender. As ever Horst and Leo helpfully provide an English-subtitled version.
We have a huge C++ series coming in, courtesy of antiRTFM – C++ Tutorials – Absolute noob Spoonfeed. As a C++ programmer from way back, it’s great to see these videos at Showmedo. Yisroel has really created something rather special, 30 videos which aim to gently lead you through the initial steps of what is a relatively difficult language. The videos were designed for the smaller YouTube format but work well within that constraint. Although the terser and friendlier scripting languages such as Python are starting to make big inroads in software development, there are still times when the raw speed of C++ and its ability to connect to the machine at a lower level make it the right tool for the job. So check out this rather cool set and leave some nice feedback.
We’ve published 15 new Learning Paths to help you build your knowledge of Python, C and Screencasting. The Paths mix free and Club content in a guided journey, pulling out exactly the right episodes and series to help you complete your knowledge for a particular subject.
Popular Paths include:
If you like the idea of these guided tutorials, please give us feedback and help us to spread the word by blogging and tweeting (@showmedo).
In the Learning Paths section we’ve added a new Screencast Tutorial. The tutorial covers techniques, applications (for Windows, Mac and Linux) and how you can upload your screencasts into ShowMeDo.
Over at ShowMeDo HQ Kyran has spent several months building a new learning system dubbed Learning Paths. The aim of the paths is to give you a co-ordinated journey through many videos, with dependencies clearly marked, so you can track back and forth picking up all the skills you want.
The Learning Paths have just launched, there are some bugs to iron out but the first set of Paths should be useful to a number of Beginner and Intermediate Pythonistas. Our current paths are:
These are the first Paths, I have another set ready to write-up. The Paths mix our free and Club content and all our authors have edit access so we can build upon these initial tutorials and expand them as new material is made available, to make for a reacher learning experience for everyone.
We’re keen to start spreading the word as we want people to use these Paths (which results in feedback for our authors…which motivates them to make more videos and Paths) so if you like what we’re doing, perhaps you could blog or tweet and help spread the word?
Fresh from bemoaning increasing Google intrusiveness , here’s a little tale to warm the cockles. Showmedo’s email wented AWOL today, cue five hours of so of adrenaline-fueled panic. A few hundred forum-trawls later, it turns out that our server-host has a bit of previous on the old email-front, as a stereotypical UK policeman might observe (lawks but writing for an international audiance doesn’t half give one pause missus). Well using my google-search-fu and some Python-based smtp-lib hacery I was finally able to bypass our ailing local webserver and use the rather convenient and pretty robust Gmail-based SMTP server facility. It all feels wrong and hacky but, gosh darn it, it works and might prove to be one of those long-term short-term fixes.
The downsides may well make themselves known in the morn’ but right now I’m too knackered to care. Feel free to test our email by posting some very warm comments to your favorite author.
There are precious few open-source (OS) GUI builders of any repute but the lack is sorely felt in the WxPython world. WxGlade is a fine tool if you like, as I do, it’s minimalist approach, but it is best for fairly small projects. When programming in the C++ WxWidgets I was impressed by the DialogBlocks GUI-builder, written by Julian Smart, the man behind WxWidgets. But it’s not open-source (though well worth the money IMO) and though you can use it to ouput XRC and, with a bit of hackery, use its widgets with WxPython, it is not Python-centric.
So it’s great to announce the addition of a series of videos dedicated to Boa Constructor, the Python IDE/WxWidgets GUI-builder. I have been impressed by the effort the author Chaelon has put into getting these videos right and they are a great way to gently introduce yourself to what is probably the only real contender as far as ambitious OS (or otherwise) WxPython IDEs is concerned. It is a surprising gap in WxPython’s armour and it would be great were Boa Constructor to achieve critical mass. I did try it a number of years ago and found it somewhat fragile, but from watching the vids it looks to have matured. Anyway I’m inclined to give it another chance. So get on over and watch the vids and remember to leave Chaelon some well-earned praise.
In a trickle sure to become a flood, we are starting to receive some videos demonstrating Python 3 and its differences from the 2.3–2.6 family. Exciting time for all Pythonistas, but it will take a while before Py3k is the first Python of choice. But watch these and the others to come if you want to keep abreast of developments, and you really should.
- Rob Marchetti has a short comparison of Python 2.5 and 3.0 using Ulipad.
- Chyld has a couple of Py3k videos, including a very cool demonstration of a del.icio.us mashup which uses the social bookmarking site’s RSS feeds to create something rather wonderful. I loved this demonstration of Python’s power and it’s a great example of scratching an itch with some well integrated libraries.
- Gasto gives a side-by-side comparison of differences between the old and new Pythons, focusing on the new and very different ‘print’ command. This is a long but detailed video which gives a real feel for developments in the language.
Erik Thompson continues his huge series ‘Developing Emol’ which follows his creation of a 3D molecule viewer using Python and WxPython, the Python GUI-building library. Erik has really created something special here, and it’s my own personal favourite Showmedo series. He covers quite comprehansively the creation of a useful and very cool piece of software. For anyone interested in the birthing pangs and joys of a new program, this is a must-view. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
Things are starting to settle with the new site and new-server teething problems, so some new video announcements are long overdue. I’ll deal here with the non-python contributions:
Congratulations to the authors for such a varied and interesting set.
Frantic scenes aboard the SS Showmedo as we move to a new server and introduce a much-changed site. According to google analytics about one third of our regular audience are currently lost in cyberspace as various DNS caches around the globe send them off to the old site or some weird fusion of old and new.
Moving server has been as stressful as I imagined, probably the reason for all those ‘moving servers is stressful’ blog entries around the web. We’re currently a little rickety and scared to crank up the engines for fear of shaking the ship apart. But, thanks to some caching magic, we seem to be serving pages and videos.
The new site design is the result of finally having a big chunk of hours to dedicate to Showmedo, rather than cadging them after hours from the day-job. I think things are a deal cleaner and more professional, allowing for my being rather an accidental web-developer. The feedback has been pretty positive, which is always nice.
Our new initiative viz web-education is Learning-paths. I’ll be blogging a little about this as soon as I manage to get the server software installed. For all you linux users out there used to the simple pleasures of ‘apt-get install’ or ‘yum’ or ‘rpm’ or any one of the new-fangled ways of getting software onto your *buntu, opensuse, fedora, etc. box, be very thankful; I have been plunged back a couple of decades or so to library-dependency hell and it is a head-trip indeed.
Given the UK government’s historic love of all software solutions proprietary, the news that Open Source solutions are now to be actively sought for and encouraged is significant indeed. Possible reasons for this volt-face are the collapse of more than a few high profile proprietary IT projects and a general need for belt-tightening as the current economic woes hit goverment revenue hard. Or maybe they just discovered Showmedo and realized the game was up  More details from our very own BBC here.
Blogging about our freshly themed, recently resuscitated blog seems more than a tad redundant but it has been poorly and someone has to announce its recovery. It should look more at home with the new Showmedo site, courtesy of some wordpress-theme-fuery, which turned out to be slightly less painful than all that but which will be the topic of a screencast one of these days.
Re-theming the blog gave me (Kyran) a chance to peer under the Wordpress hood, install it (and Apache) locally and generally play around a little. Gotta say I’m impressed, even the little amount of PHP hackery being very bearable. Wordpress is a real shining star in the open-source firmament and I haven’t yet managed to break it, so it’s a few notches ahead of Showmedo. So thanks to all the relevant parties for creating this little joy and we fully intend to use it quite a bit more in the future.
And if anyone has any Wordpress screencasts lying around or a vague idea of making one sometime, I think they would go down huge, so to speak. For a slightly aging, but very nice introduction to Wordpress 2.0, checkout Rachel Cunliffe’s screencast.
This is a test message that confirms that the blog is working. ShowMeDo.com came up on a new server a week back, we’re still configuring a few parts and expect full service over the next week.
We’ve just published another series aimed at Python Beginners – “the ‘if’ statement” introduces the ‘if’ statement to new programmers, along with ‘else’ and ‘elif’.
The series is short – just two episodes lasting for 14 minutes. If you’re new to Python and you want to learn how it works, our Club series are just for you.
Club membership is gifted for free to all authors, anyone else can buy access with a simple one-off payment. You might want to follow new video announces in our blog or on twitter.
If you’re a twitter user, we’re now announcing our open-source tutorial screencasts at http://twitter.com/showmedo. This will include all the Python videos, along with Inkscape, GIMP and everything else.
Twitter makes it easier to push out lite announces rather than writing longer blog posts on ShowMeDo’s regular blog (though of course we’re still blogging, but just as occasionally as before!).
On my personal blog I have written a long entry on Making Python math 196* faster with shedskin.
I compared stock Python 2.5, Psyco and ShedSkin output on an artificial neural network problem. The goal was to quickly estimate how fast a C version might solve the problem without having to actually write C (thus saving hours, sweat and tears). ShedSkin converts Python code to C++ for compilation with g++.
Psyco speeds things up by a factor of 2.6, ShedSkin by a super-impressive 196 times.
Leonardo Maffi has continued the benchmarks and shows that hand-coded C is between 1.5 and 7 times faster than ShedSkin’s output. Auto-generated code that is within a order of magnitude of hand-written code is darned impressive in my book!
He also notes the difficulty of writing a bug-free C version vs the simplicity of dealing with Python (and D) code.
As a side note – Mark Dufour and team at ShedSkin are interested in having extra hands help with the push to a 0.1 release which supports enough Python to be useful to many.
Python Beginners – Functions teaches you how to write and call your own functions in Python. We cover how to write functions, argument passing, scoping, gotchas and nested functions.
“I like the beginner videos, because you are confident on what the student must prepare to accept initially as dogma, and suggest to trust you for later explanation and pragmatize the knowledge-gaps. You also show the PEPs, as a great way of showing how software is maintained when tens of thousands of people are behind it.” – Gasto
These videos are aimed at new Python programmers who want to understand how to write their own functions and how to avoid making time-eating mistakes. The 6 episodes last 5-10 minutes each. The series is available to Club ShowMeDo members.
“So much help for beginners like me, many thanks to Ian.” – hoya
- Overview (free)
- Defining a Function (Club-only)
- Arguments and Return Values 1 (Club-only)
- Arguments and Return Values 2 (Club-only)
- Variable Scope (Club-only)
- Nested and Private Function (Club-only)
Club videos are for paying members (a year’s membership costs less than a couple of books). Anyone who contributes a video to ShowMeDo gets free Club membership for life. Over 140 screencasts exist in the Club now, on top of the 760 free videos in the site.
One of my jobs as co-founder is to work to get kudos for our authors. Authors put many hours into creating the free ShowMeDo screencasts that educate thousands and I love to see them get recognised.
Ron Stephens of awaretek and the Python 411 podcasts interviewed me last week (30 minute mp3). Sadly our Skype connection wasn’t great so I’m somewhat garbled (but still understandable!).
Ron mentions the videos of some of our authors, I’m happy to say that Florian’s advanced Python and decorators series is mentioned, along with ericflo and Eric Holscher’s two Django series.
I also wrote a new article for the Python Papers for Volume 3, Issue 2 (pdf).
In this piece I talk about: Gasto, Horst, Kirby, Florian, ericflo, percious, Jiang Xin, Lucas, Marius and Erik Thompson. The article covers our recent videos, the Club and it talks about how anyone can contribute.
I have another Python Papers article planned for after Christmas, all recent Python authors will get a mention again. If you are thinking of authoring a screencast – we do try to spread your name and send kudos your way!
Florian, one of our authors, has written a blog on how ‘How I do my screencasts‘.
“…I log into my tutorial account and start making the screencast, with recording on. It has to be noted that I have no second monitor showing me the code I am supposed to write, so I pretty much write it from memory. With longer screencasts I might have a paper with notes lying next to me. …”
His method is probably shared by most screencasters, though editing tends to follow (at least for me) to clean-up the recording, remove empty space and smooth out any audio glitches.
Lucas’ Club series for Python beginners which introduces the Python standard library is now complete.
Batteries Included – The Python Standard Library has 9 episodes for Club-subscribers which introduce the core elements of file-system access, using the shell, regular expressions, math, dates and talking to websites.
“I will thank you for getting this in-depth basic explanation of the basic modules. It really fills in some missing holes on my knowledge of using this.” – JZA
Each video is around 5 minutes long and includes examples of normal use.
Episodes:
- Series overview
- The “sys” module
- The “os” module
- The “shutil” module (shell access)
- The “glob” module (file pattern matching)
- The “re” module (regular expressions)
- The “math” module
- The “urllib2” module
- The “datetime” module
Other recent Python videos include Making a Django Dev Environment, TurboGears 2, Agile Python Development, Python for Math Education, Database Programming, Google App Engine and pyWin32
Justin Lilly has created a 3-part series on using Vim macros, Vim is a powerful editor that has a bit of a learning curve.
“Thanks! Learning by looking over the shoulder is really a great addition to the help files.”
Screencasts make it easier to see what’s going on for the new user:
- An Introduction to Vim Macros
- Vim Selections
- Vim % operator
These videos form a part of our 330 Python tutorial screencasts. Most are free, some are a part of our Club which focuses on carefully planned tutorials for Python beginner/intermediate programmers.
Other recent videos include Making a Django Dev Environment, TurboGears 2, Agile Python Development and Python for Math Education. Recent beginner-Python videos include Common Variables and Containers, Loops and Iteration and What Does Python Look Like?.
We’ve got new Django screencasts (30 to date), first Eric Holscher has added 4 videos on Debugging Django covering the Django error page, logging, pdb in Django and unit tests.
“Wow! I had no idea Django could do that. Suffering from some serious envy right here. Very, very good screencast. Pacing, structure, content all top notch. When you called up that Python console my jaw dropped a few inches” – Kyran Dale
Second Ian shows Django in Under a Minute to celebrate the release of Django v1 with an easily blogged, music-backed demo.
Andrew Kuchling has created a screencast on Searching the Python Bug Tracker which describes how you can search for bugs in the Python bug tracker.
Searching for bugs helps you figure out if you’ve found a problem with Python rather than in your own code. Filing bugs is an important way you can help to make Python better. If you’ve never seen the Python Bug Tracker, take a look at this lovely demo.
“Wow, this is probably the most eloquent/fine-voiced screencast I’ve ever heard of.” – gasto.
These videos form a part of our 330 Python tutorial screencasts. Most are free, some are a part of our Club which focuses on carefully planned tutorials for Python beginner/intermediate programmers.
Other recent videos include Making a Django Dev Environment, TurboGears 2, Agile Python Development and Python for Math Education. Recent beginner-Python videos include Common Variables and Containers, Loops and Iteration and What Does Python Look Like?.
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A Sting in the Tale
I just caught a very cool example of what some people are doing with javascript these days. A little molecule-builder, it’s impressive and fun at the same time:
check out Molecools
Now that was fun, and note the example molecule, Ethanol. As an aside, the simulator is pretty crude so there’s no valency-counting or any of the refined stuff that lends molecules their particular shape and characteristics but, like all javascript, the code is out there in the public domain to peruse – just give the author an acknowledgement if you use anything substantive.
Anyway, as I noted, the molecule demonstrated was Ethanol, which is a nice, definite unambiguous noun and has not formed any part of my browsing history for a while or so. So when I returned to my Gmail account and saw the little top-advert for some Ethanol related products, there was no doubting the provenance.
Now Google’s permeation of my browser and their improved ad-targeting has been an expanding wedge for a while and I always assumed they were making note of my google-searchs and using them in my gmail-ad, although I’d never been able to unequivocally pin them down here – I have a lot of emails for them to farm data from. But here was something a bit different, unequivocal evidence of them using a link-click (from reddit as it happens), unrelated to any google-search, as the basis for a targeted ad. I managed to find this little explanation of what appears to be a new phenomenon:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22052924-Google-Uses-Your-Browser-History-To-Target-Ads
I’m assuming reddit is part of some affiliation scheme. Now I don’t know about you but this has crossed my Rubicon as far as Google intrusiveness is concerned, and their opt-out scheme, as explained in the article is a bad one. I think I’m going to hunt out one of those Firefox gmail ad-blockers; to be honest the sheer banality of most of the Forbes promos or jokey comments for the day was tending me that way. Anyway, another reason to keep an eye on the big G, our self-appointed (and generally benign?) dictator.