Specifically, Elastic Beanstalk will now support Python apps and frameworks that run on Apache HTTP Server and the WSGI interface.

Amazon also introduced new features, which it says will make it easier to build Python web apps on Elastic Beanstalk.

“First, you can now easily leverage Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database instances with your Elastic Beanstalk applications,” the company says on the AWS site. “Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud, making it a great fit for scalable web applications running on Elastic Beanstalk. To learn more about how to setup and use an Amazon RDS database instance with your application, visit “Using Amazon RDS with Python” in the Developer Guide.”

“Second, you can customize the Python runtime for Elastic Beanstalk using a set of declarative text files within your application,” Amazon adds. “If your application contains a requirements.txt in its top level directory, Elastic Beanstalk automatically installs the dependencies using pip. Elastic Beanstalk is also introducing a new configuration mechanism that allows you to install packages from yum, run setup scripts, and set environment variables. To learn more about customizing your Python environment, visit “Customizing and Configuring a Python Container” in the Developer Guide.”

To start running Python apps on Elastic Beanstalk, check out Amazon’s developer guide, which includes walkthroughs for Django and Flask apps.

[Hat tip to CIO.]

It just so happens that he is also involved with Google’s driverless cars, and actually teaches a class about how to program them.

“This class, taught by one of the foremost experts in AI, will teach you basic methods in Artificial Intelligence, including: probabilistic inference, computer vision, machine learning, and planning, all with a focus on robotics,” the description says. “Extensive programming examples and assignments will apply these methods in the context of building self-driving cars. You will get a chance to visit, via video, the leading research labs in the field, and meet the scientists and engineers who are building self-driving cars at Stanford and Google.”

“The instructor will assume solid knowledge of programming, all programming will be in Python. Knowledge of probability and linear algebra will be helpful,” the syllabus says.

It’s a seven-week course, which includes: basics of probability, gaussians and continuous probability, image processing and machine learning, planning and search, controls, putting it all together and a final exam. This is enough time, according to Thrun’s Udacity site, to learn the basics of all the primary systems involved in programming a robotic car.

“First of all, this is a fascinating subject,” it says in a FAQ section. “The technologies involved are cutting edge, but the theories behind them are simpler than you might think. In addition to learning the math and science behind these technologies, you will also improve your coding probabilities as you solve the same problems that scientists at places like Google, Stanford, and MIT have been working on for years.”

With Thrun on the Project Glass team, perhaps there will be a programming for glass class at some point. Hopefully, some tips will be shared at Google I/O at least.

Oh, and by the way, the class is free.

Other free classes ad udacity.com include: building a search engine, design of computer programs, web application engineering, programming languages, and applied cryptography.

Reddit, as defined by them in a blog post, is “a bit unique.” I would use other adjectives to describe the Web site, but I can’t argue that unique is a good term for them as well. My definition, however, relates to the content of the site, whereas they mean their site is built on open source software.

When you look at it as a whole, Reddit claims that about 6.6 percent of their code comes from open source developers. That’s a significant percentage for a site as large and far reaching as Reddit.

Anyway, this is all to lead up to Reddit hosting a sprint at PyCon 2012, which is being held in Santa Clara, California this year. PyCon is an annual convention for the community of developers that use the open source Python development language. It’s also unique in that its organized by the community with corporate sponsors so the events are always accessible to the largest amount of developers possible.

As said, Reddit will be hosting a sprint during the convention. A sprint is like a hack-a-thon with a singular purpose. Since Reddit is hosting this sprint, you can bet it’s going to be about the Reddit API. The description on the sprint page says:

What’s the next big thing for reddit? Why don’t we have an official Android app? How can I script and simplify my common moderation tasks?

The answer to all these questions involves the reddit API! The best reddit-related projects are the ones that take advantage of our terrible API, and we want more of them – this sprint is about making that API better, and building new things on the existing API.

The sprints will be running from Monday, March 12 through Thursday March 15. There’s no real schedule to the event, but the Reddit team says that they will be available from around 10 a.m. to whenever dinner-time is for them.

If you want to participate in the Reddit sprint, you can sign up over at the PyCon sprints page.

The Reddit team will also be holding a pre-sprint intro session on Sunday evening. So be sure to attend that if you plan on joining the sprint to fix their API.

fbFund Gives Financial Awards To Facebook Apps

After all, competitors in the hunt for fbFund’s money are being asked to improve their creations.  In a final event that’s much funnier than it sounds, competitors in the Monty Python bit are simply asked to end their own lives.  So, however much the two groups may resemble each other in the beginning, they should be headed in different directions.

According to the Mercury News, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg stated, “We are just looking for innovative and disruptive things.  We don’t think we can build all these applications ourselves.”

That’s a reasonable attitude to take.  Zuckerberg also took a reasonable approach to forming the fbFund; grants provided by it will range in value from $25,000 to $250,000, and will come out of a $10 million pot created by Facebook, Accel Partners, and The Founders Fund.  Accel and The Founders Fund both contributed to Facebook’s success, so the fund is essentially an internal affair.

And from an outside perspective, the whole arrangement tends to create a no-lose situation.  Either we get a bunch of impressive Facebook applications, or we get a lot of apps to laugh at.

However the rest of us would very much like to see the end of that other spam that accumulates on the web.

One major influence in creating all this rubbish was Google with its search view that the number of inlinks to a web page could be a measure of the importance of that web page. Once every one knew that, the name of the game was to create as many other inlinks as you could. Even though this was against the Google Terms of Service, for a time it seemed to work. The view that inlinks are what counts persists and is as strong as ever even though Google has been improving its ability to root out the spam-producers.

Now Matt Cutts, a Googler with some authority on this topic, has written a very clear explanation of what they’re doing about spam. This was triggered by a new service to create “Undetectable” spam. The follow-up to that is well described by Loren Baker in a post, Matt Cutts vs. V7N Links : Matt Wins. Another sign of the times is that Wikipedia seems to have gone the “No Follow” route in adding this tag to all its outlinks. So these will no longer count as inlinks conferring authority in the Google search process.

One would hope that the message will get around and the mindless creation of inlinks or the search for irrelevant reciprocal linking will cease. Unfortunately too many people currently waste too much time and money on these pursuits and spoil the scene for the rest of us.

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Barry Welford, President of SMM Strategic Marketing Montreal works with business owners and senior management on Internet Marketing strategy and action plans to grow their companies. He is a moderator at the Cre8asite Forums and writes on current issues on the Internet and on the Mobile Web in three blogs, BPWrap, StayGoLinks and The Other Bloke’s Blog.

Yahoo! to Serve UP BBC Videos

As part of an agreement with ABC News, Yahoo is beginning to offer BBC News video on its site. Yahoo! users will now have access to approximately 30 video clips of BBC News video each day, including a large assortment of videos pertaining to most major news and entertainment genres.

Nearly a year ago, ABC News signed a deal with the BBC to become the exclusive distributor of the channel’s broadband content throughout North America. Today’s announcement leverages Yahoo! News as the primary platform for BBC News video distribution pursuant to the January agreement.

“The BBC has established itself as an unparalleled global news-gathering organization, and its content will be a tremendous complement to the world class news already available on our site,” said Scott Moore, head of news and information for Yahoo! Media Group.

“The BBC has a cool factor with younger audiences, a natural fit for Yahoo! News users who are generally younger than audiences at other news organizations.”

The videos will be made available for free to Yahoo! News users as part of an ad-supported model.

This announcement, of course, begs an even larger question pertaining to the future of BBC programming and Yahoo!’s online video offerings:

When will Yahoo! offer exclusive episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus?

Come on, you know you were thinking it, too. Yahoo! definitely needs to look at the bigger picture when it comes to the virtual goldmine they’re sitting on when it comes to BBC television distribution.

Two facts remain unchallenged here:

This is the kind of score that will give Yahoo! an advantage over Google in the online video marketplace. Who knows, maybe it could spurn a whole trend of bringing cult BBC television to North America for mass distribution.

First Monty Python, then Absolutely Fabulous, the possibilities are virtually endless!

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Joe is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

The final release of Python 2.5 became a reality with its debut, and the notation that it should be suitable for production use.

Several updates and tweaks in Python should improve its speed. Among those highlights were performance enhancing updates that delivered “major speedups in exception handling and string operations.”

Noteworthy Python developer Andrew Kuchling posted to the Python.org site that there have been more than 350 patches and over 450 bugs fixed since the previous Python version, 2.4.

Python’s profile has been gaining among the major Internet players. The language’s creator, Guido van Rossum, joined Google in 2005, and spends part of his time working on Python.

More recently, Microsoft added support for Python to its .NET engine. Earlier in September, the company’s Jim Hugunin reported the 1.0 release of IronPython 1.0, and recounted some of his history with that project:

Python also served as the topic for a recent Google TechTalk. Delivered by O’Reilly Media senior software engineer Ben Bangert, the talk covered “ReUsable Web Components with Python and Future Python Web Development.”

The 51-minute talk may be viewed for free at the Google Video website.

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I’ve been an IBM fan for quite some time, but even more now that I cover them on occasion on different topics. Their people are smart and enjoyable to chat with on topics like search, and they do very well when it comes to finding third party folks to discuss topics as they do on their developerWorks tutorial series.

The two-part discussion presented by Ian Maurer, Senior Consultant, Brulant, Inc, covers Python in a couple of contexts. First, developers working with the Python-powered Django framework to build web applications can build it in Linux and get to work right away.

Maurer goes through the process of the install in his tutorial, and configuring the admin tool for Django. Then the developer can create a model (Django follows the Model-View-Controller architecture) for the project. From Maurer:

Maurer’s Django example proceeds through the development of a job search application. He makes an important observation about templates in Django: “The Django template language has been designed with limited functional capabilities. This limitation keeps templates simple for non-programmers and keeps programmers from putting business logic where it doesn’t belong, the presentation layer.”

Maurer followed up the Django walkthrough with a tutorial on TurboGears, a Python-built mega-framework. This project focused on building a shopping application.

He called TurboGears a mega-framework because of the components TurboGears brings together:

MochiKit: JavaScript library
Kid: Templating language
CherryPy: Base Web framework
SQLObject: Object-relational mapper (ORM)

After installation, Maurer shows how to get started with a model package called tgcommerce. With this, the developer has a simple shopping cart for the application.

Once the model has been created, developers can use CatWalk from the TurboGears toolbox to quickly create, update, and delete data for their model through a GUI.

Maurer found that the error handling in the controller methods could be better. Refactoring in the controller class can catch a SQLObjectNotFound error and make it a NotFound exception. Instead of the 404 error, that could be written to redirect instead.

He also included an Ajax example that adds an item to the cart; “To make this shopping cart example buzzword compliant,” he wrote.

After going through the tutorial, he compared the Django and TurboGears frameworks. Maurer said both were extracted from existing applications and released as open source. Then he summarized the differences:

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This not only pulls together a lot of useful stuff for python hackers that want to tinker with our APIs, it means I have more good code examples from which to continue my quest to learn Python.

I guess that means we need a Ruby Developer Center next, huh?

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

I figure that Ruby would be easy to learn because of its similarity to Perl (I’m told). But I also figure that Python would be easy to learn because of its simplicity. And when it comes to webby stuff, I can use Rails with Ruby and Django with Python.

I’m currently leaning toward Python and began doing so last week. I started with Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive Into Python and made it thru the first 3 chapters pretty quickly. So far it feels pretty good.

Before I really dive in, though, I’m curious to hear what others think about the choice between these two languages.

(On a related note, you might also read Tim Bray’s On Ruby post, since he just started learning Ruby.)

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Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.