Python Weekly No 209

News

Swiss Python Conference Call for Proposals
The call for proposals for the first Swiss Python conference is open! The deadline for sending proposals is October 31st. The organizing committee will review all proposals and will post a definitive schedule latest November 30th. 2015.


Articles, Tutorials and Talks

Hacking the Random Walk Hypothesis
Random number generators are used everyday to encrypt data and communications but if the random number generators are flawed then they stop being cryptographically secure and hackers can exploit those vulnerabilities to decrypt the encrypted data and communications. For this reason random number generators need to pass robust sets of statistical tests for randomness, such as the NIST suite of cryptographic tests for randomness, to determine whether they are sufficient for cryptographic uses. In this post we are going to subject various financial market returns to the NIST suite of tests and see whether or not we should be able to, in theory, hack the market.

Analyzing 1.7 Billion Reddit Comments with Blaze and Impala
In this post, we'll use Blaze and Impala to interactively query and explore a data set of approximately 1.7 billion comments (975 GB uncompressed) from the reddit website from October 2007 to May 2015. This data set was made available on July 2015 in a reddit post. The data set is in JSON format (one comment per line) and consists of the comment body, author, subreddit, timestamp of creation and other fields.

Let's Build A Simple Interpreter. Part 4.
In this part, you're going to learn how to parse and interpret arithmetic expressions with any number of multiplication and division operators in them. I will also talk quite a bit about another widely used notation for specifying the syntax of a programming language. It's called context-free grammars (grammars, for short) or BNF (Backus-Naur Form). For the purpose of this article I will not use pure BNF notation but more like a modified EBNF notation.

Straightening Loops: How to Vectorize Data Aggregation with pandas and NumPy
This notebook demonstrates alternatives to loops in your code that offer performance and readability improvements of multiple orders of magnitude. It compares native Python loop performance to NumPy and pandas vectorized operations and provides recipes for performing efficient aggregation and transformation with pandas.

Episode #25: Effective Python
What if you could bottle up all the wisdom and hard-fought experience of many expert Python developers and power up your own skills? That's what Brett Slatkin did and he put it in his book Effective Python. Brett has had a unique opportunity to learn the correct and efficient ways to write Python. He has worked at Google on Google App Engine (GAE) alongside greats such as Guido van Rossum and Alex Martelli. Join the conversation where we discuss some of that wisdom when we talk about Brett's book "Effective Python". 

Adding a Simple GUI to Your Pandas Script
This article shows you an example of how to easily create an end-user-friendly GUI using the Gooey library. This interface is based on wxWindows so it looks like a "native" application on Windows, Mac and Linux. 

Introduction to Python UDFs in Amazon Redshift
This post serves as a tutorial to get you started with Python UDFs, showcasing how they can accelerate and enhance your data analytics. You'll explore the CMS Open Payments Dataset as an example.

Ball Tracking with OpenCV
After reading this post, you'll have a good idea on how to track balls (and other objects) in video streams using Python and OpenCV.

How to Create Webkit Browser with Python
In this tutorial we’ll create simple web browser using Python PyQt framework.

A Web Crawler With asyncio Coroutines

Sharks, Landsharks, Geoplotting, and KDTrees!

Modern Methods for Sentiment Analysis
    
Test Fixtures: Setup, Teardown, and so much more (PT004)


Books

Doing Math with Python

Doing Math with Python shows you how to use Python to delve into high school--level math topics like statistics, geometry, probability, and calculus. You'll start with simple projects, like a factoring program and a quadratic-equation solver, and then create more complex projects once you've gotten the hang of things. Creative coding challenges and applied examples help you see how you can put your new math and coding skills into practice. You'll write an inequality solver, plot gravity's effect on how far a bullet will travel, shuffle a deck of cards, estimate the area of a circle by throwing 100,000 "darts" at a board, explore the relationship between the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio, and more.


Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

GDB dashboard
Modular visual interface for GDB in Python. This comes as a standalone single-file .gdbinit which, among the other things, enables a configurable dashboard showing the most relevant information during the program execution. Its main goal is to reduce the number of GDB commands issued to inspect the current program status allowing the programmer to focus on the control flow instead.

Twittor
A fully featured backdoor that uses Twitter as a C&C server.

sshuttle
Transparent proxy server that works as a poor man's VPN. Forwards over ssh. Doesn't require admin. Works with Linux and MacOS. Supports DNS tunneling.

Videodigest
Videodigest is a command-line utility for generating summaries of videos by (1) applying an automatic summarization algorithm to their subtitles to find the N most important sentences, then (2) compiling the video regions where those sentences appear.

c8d
A Chip-8 disassembler in Python. The disassembly is based on Cowgod's Chip-8 technical reference document.

Armada  
Armada is a complete solution for development, deployment, configuration and discovery of microservices. Armada is more than just a tool, it defines conventions and good practices designed towards making your platform more service oriented.

Nylas Sync Engine 
The Nylas Sync Engine provides a RESTful API on top of a powerful email sync platform, making it easy to build apps on top of email.

pyramid_blogr
Pyramid_blogr is an example implementation of Flaskr app with Pyramid Web Framework.

PyScaffold
Python project generator with batteries included.

Snaql
Raw SQL queries from Python without pain. 


New Releases

Python 3.5.0 
Python 3.5.0 is the newest version of the Python language, and it contains many exciting new features and optimizations.

Jython 2.7.1 beta1