amount = re.sub(r'\.(\d)0$', '.\1', amount)


wont work but...


amount = re.sub(r'\.(\d)0$', '.\\1', amount)


will!

Python libxml2 not quite threadsafe, use lxml instead for xpathing! although lxml is just a wrapper for the same libxml2 library that python's libxml2 module (python-libxml2) uses, it will act very strange when you're calling parseDoc in a loop in your threads.

text() is a special xpath function in lxml


import lxml.etree as etree
f = StringIO.StringIO('<hours>anytime</hours>')
tree = etree.parse(f)
res = tree.xpath('//hours/text()')
print res[0]


I've been using LXML (http://codespeak.net/lxml/) for a new project, Kinda tricky, not quite obvious if you want to drop an element and its children that you find, but the rest of the lxml library is pretty obvious after a little while

so you may have something like

<food>
<taste>sour</taste>
</food>

so you would..


type="sour"
elem = xml.xpath('//food[taste="%s"]' %(child))
elem[0].getparent().remove(elem[0])


Was having trouble figuring out pyodbc http://code.google.com/p/pyodbc/ with my ODBC configuration to talk to a MS SQL or "Sequel" as some people would have it

You'll need a couple of packages installed


tdsodbc - ODBC driver for connecting to MS SQL and Sybase SQL servers
odbcinst1debian1 - Support library for accessing odbc ini files
odbcinst - Helper program for accessing odbc ini files


so just


apt-get install tdsodbc odbcinst1debian1 odbcinst


A handy recipe I like to use, utilising python queue's and threads (via threading module), create a bunch of threads and process them with what is in the queue.

Uses a global var to know how long it's been since the last thread executed anything of use to know when to start shutting down the worker threads.

Depending on resources you can build a pool of threads to eat its way thru the jobs in your queue, this example loads 5000 'jobs' into the queue with 50 threads polling in non-blocking mode for a job to perform off the queue stack.

    

      
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GnuCash is an excellent linux based accounting package, it is modelled very closely to traditional two-column accounting methods but has lots of functionality like generating invoices, tracking clients and all the other things you'de expect from a package to run your finances.

Something I wrote for a small project, initially designed to listen my radio scanner via /dev/dsp and record when it hears something, this uses python and some threads to launch instances of 'lame' encoder and then insert them into MySQL.

The app has a threshold for incomming sound levels and starts recording when the threshold is reached, there is also a setting for time-distance between hearing things so you dont end up a billion little mp3s because the audio is dropping out, just a nice long mp3.