Baiju Muthukadan's Blog

I started writing blog in October 2004 . Most of my blog entries were technical, very few times I wrote personal things. This blog post is written just to tell those who read my blog that I believe in Jesus Christ. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in 1995. However, due to resistance from my family, I couldn't continue fellowship with other believers and so I started backsliding. In August 2011, God helped me to find a good fellowship in Bangalore where I live now.

Yesterday we had BangPypers meeting at ZeOmega office. There was 10 members came for the meeting. There was no specific agenda for the meeting, we discussed some general topics related to Python. I demonstrated the installation of Salt in Windows XP ( http://saltstack.org/ ). Salt is a remote execution and configuration management tool. For those who missed, here is the screencast I created today for the installation of Salt in Windows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeJByb-alz8 BTW, community is working on a unified installer for Windows. If you are interested to learn more about Salt, look at the excellent documentation here: http://salt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html You can replace remote execution systems like Fabric & Capistrano with Salt. Also you can replace configuration management systems like Puppet, Chef & CFEngine. I have tried Salt with RHEL,CentOS,Debian,Ubuntu,Fedora,FreeBSD,Windows 2008 Server R2 and Windows XP. For example, if you want to install Salt...

Few weeks back (on 3rd September) I conducted one Python workshop at KSR College of Arts & Science .  I couldn't write about it till now. The college is located in Tiruchengode, a town in Namakkal district of Tamil Nadu.  The workshop was on a Saturday, but I reached the college in the previous night.     There was around 80 students from MCA and MSc courses. One student took some photos using his mobile camera, you can see some of those pictures below. I started my journey from Bangalore on Friday afternoon in one KPN bus.  It was a Multi-axle bus and the road was also very good, so the journey was very comfortable. I reached Erode around 9.30 pm and one college staff was waiting for me. We had our dinner from Erode and went to college by one taxi car.  They had arranged my stay in the college guest house. It is a very good campus, and there are many colleges in that campus by the same management.  Next day during lunch time, the founding chai...

Python Testing Tools Taxonomy page hosted at http://pycheesecake.org was a great collection of links to Python testing tools, libraries and frameworks. It is maintained by Testing in Python (TIP) community members. The page has been moved to Python wiki for convenience of maintaining it. The new wiki page is here: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy Feel free to add/update your favorite testing tools there!

It looks like, the number of Python books which exclusively cover Python 3 is increasing. A Byte of Python by Swaroop C H Dive Into Python 3 by Mark Pilgrim Programming in Python 3 by Mark Summerfield Python 3 Object Oriented Programming Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science by John M. Zelle, Ph.D. Programming Python by Mark Lutz Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 3 from Wikibooks Please comment here, if you find any other book.

I started using LiveJournal in 2004. It was a great blogging platform back in 2004. But now a days I am finding it very difficult to use. So I am changing my main blog from LiveJournal to Blogger. My new blog URL is http://baijum.blogspot.com/ I have migrated all my old posts to the new blog. I have send mail to Planet-Python & Planet-India editors to update my blog feed URL. If anybody else subscribed to my feed, please use my new feed URL: http://baijum.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/python (This will bring any Python related blog posts to your reader)

Recently Selenium 2 has released with it's new WebDriver technology. Selenium WebDriver supports multiple web browsers like Firefox, Chrome and IE. Selenium WebDriver communicate with browser through its native API. Selenium Python bindings provide a convenient API to access functionalities of Selenium. Recently I started writing some documentation for Selenium Python bindings . It still need lots of work, but now it would be good enough to start with Selenium. I am looking forward to your feedback! EDIT (September 30 2011): The documentation has been moved to readthedocs site . And the source is hosted in Github .