PASW is the old name for SPSS. The statistics program outputs a .sav file, what is essentially a file-based database. This guide contains instructions on how to use a driver to access data within the SPSS output file. The driver exposes an ODBC source for data access. It may be possible to use SqlAlchemy to … Read more

“Few photographers have ever considered the photography of wild animals (as distinctly opposed to the genre of Wildlife Photography) as an art form. The emphasis has generally been on capturing the drama of wild animals IN ACTION, on capturing that dramatic single moment as opposed to simply animals in the state of being.

I’ve always … Read more

LOLapps makes use of Paster, Tornado, SQLAlchemy and others to serve 50 million Facebook users a month. Here are their slides from their PyCon2010 talk on the methods they used to boost performance of their gaming servers.

Didn’t make it to PyCon? Watch some of the presentations here.

MongoDB lacks Unix domain socket support. Using a file socket rather than a TCP socket results in better performance. “Running the same benchmarks gives [a] time of 35.8s, vs 43.9s over TCP, and 28.9s with the RAM cache vs 31.1s on TCP.” Here’s a patch implementing domain sockets for MongoDB.