Long ago, I learned the regular expressions in order to write a simple syntax highlighting engine. Regular expressions are not hard to master, but take time to practice. Kodos was the regex debugger of my choice, as it was written in Python. All these years Kodos was a "must have" tool on my development machines. Suddenly with the new version of Debian operating system, Kodos was not in the repositories anymore! Why? Kodos is based on QT3 widgets toolkit, which is a bit outdated nowadays (QT5 has been released recently) and was removed from Debian 7.0 ("Wheezy"). That is how I decided to write a small Python regex debugger in Python 3 and its de-facto standard Tkinter bindings to the Tk GUI toolkit.

I just returned from my summer vacation and can finally state: another summer is over. But wonderful summer it was! I finally graduated and got a Master's degree in computer science. I cycled a lot and upgraded my MTB skills. I read lot of fiction. And somewhere between work, sports reading and sleeping was Kaylee, a distributed and volunteer in-browser computing framework.

Python's documentation states that one has to use the is operator to compare a variable to None. What happens when you avoid that advice?

If you've been using python for a long time, then you surely know that os.listdir() function returns an unsorted list of file names. I didn't care much until facing a situation, in which the sorted-sequential processing of files was crucial, and I could not remember whether the previous file processing were done in sorted order. Well, luckily they were. But hey, this is a little bit annoying, isn't it? Why os.listdir() returns an unsorted list of files? Would you like to find out?

Sometimes, it's really hard to understand what happens inside a function or even a whole module of Python's Standard library. For example, the subprocess module contains a very tricky Popep class. I tried to use the the module to communicate with a MATLAB subprocess shell (e.g. send MATLAB commands to subprocess and read the output). Unfortunately I failed and was just able to pass a MATLAB script via command-line arguments. Yet, I learnt much about the Popen.communicate() method and I'd like to share this knowledge with you.

Python never stops surprising me. While doing my master IT project, I was looking for a way to add dynamic properties to classes (we're speaking of new-style classes of course!). I did a little research and here are the results...

It's been a while since I wrote the first part of this guide. I'm happy to introduce you the second part of the tutorial. This part continues the story about applet-only techniques. Even if you're skilled in PyGTK, you are adviced to read this part.

A bootstrap guide on creating Gnome2 panel applets with Python.