Travis CI is used by more and more open source Python projects to do their continous testing. scikit-learn is the latest project to adopt it.

With Travis, usually you'll use pip or setuptools to get your project's Python dependencies installed before running the test script. Here's the minimal .travis.yml example from the Travis docs for Python, one that will install dependencies using pip before it runs nosetests:

language: python
python:
  - "2.6"
  - "2.7"
  - "3.2"
# command to install dependencies
install: "pip install -r requirements.txt --use-mirrors"
# command to run tests
script: nosetests

There is however some dependencies where this is problematic. Two of those are numpy and scipy, which contain a lot of C code that, with the method just discussed, needs to be compiled every time you run the Travis tests.

Travis allows you to install system packages through apt-get, which is quite cool. And there's already the binary python-numpy and python-scipy packages in Ubuntu, so why not use them?

The problem is that simply installing them via apt-get does not work for the same reason it doesn't work when you do this locally: The default virtualenv that Travis sets up for you to run the tests in is isolated from the system packages, so it won't see those globally installed numpy and scipy packages.

The solution for this is use virtualenv with the --system-site-packages option, which allows you to also import packages from the global site packages directory.

virtualenv:
  system_site_packages: true

before_install:
 - sudo apt-get install -qq python-numpy python-scipy

This is a collection of what I consider essential articles and interviews on the topic of the recent attacks on Gaza (#GazaUnderAttack), and on the wider Israeli-Palestine conflict.

The mainstream media are sadly very biased with regard to this topic. This is true even for outlets that are commonly considered liberal. It's essential for anyone who wants to get a good understanding, and for anyone who wants to eventually be part of the solution of this decade-long conflict, to inform themselves through their own research. And here's some hopefully useful pointers for doing that.

Who's aggressor, who's victim? Here's a clue. Palestinians killed by Israelis in last 10 yrs: 3,434. Israelis by Palestinians 78.(UN figs)

— MartinLinton (@martinlinton) November 16, 2012

While reading Erich Fromm's Escape From Freedom, I came across this passage from English economic historian R. H. Tawney's book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, which elaborates the medieval view on economic activities:

Material riches are necessary; they have secondary importance, since without them men cannot support themselves and help one another [...] But economic motives are suspect. Because they are powerful appetites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to applaud them [...] There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a constant and measurable force, to be accepted like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less irrational and less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as pugnacity and the sexual instinct [...] Riches, as St. Antonio says, exist for man, not man for riches [...] At every turn therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade is legitimate; the different resources of different countries show that it was intended by Providence. But it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits which he takes are no more than the wages of his labour. Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. But it is to be tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself; the ideal—if only man's nature could rise to it—is communism. "Communis enim," wrote Gratian in his decretum, "usus omnium quae sunt in hoc mundo, omnibus hominibus esse debuit." [1] At best, indeed, the estate is somewhat encumbered. It must be legitimately acquired. It must be in the largest possible number of hands. It must provide for the support of the poor. Its use must as far as practicable be common. Its owners must be ready to share it with those who need, even if they are not in actual destitution.

(My emphasis)

According to Tawney, the basic medieval assumptions concerning economic life were two: "That economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct, upon which as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding."

Today, it seems that people often assume that the free market is a natural force and that other apects of human life, out of necessity, have to be subordinate to it. It turns out that in the Middle Ages, the opposite was expressed in the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and in secular law.

To constantly portray the capitalist market as a natural force, as the corporate media does, is to help sustain these avaricious economic interests that threaten to destroy our planet, and that are a direct cause of immense human suffering around the world.

Here's the videos and material for the Writing a Pyramid application tutorial that I gave at last month's EuroPython 2012.

The tutorial is around 3,5 hours long. The accompanying material includes code and documentation for the seven individual steps of the tutorial (ex1_hello through ex7_final).

(Head here if the videos aren't displayed.)

This is the tutorial's complete description of the tutorial from the EuroPython website:

Pyramid is a very general open source Python web framework. As a framework, its primary job is to make it easier for a developer to create an arbitrary web application. The type of application being created isn’t really important; it could be a spreadsheet, a corporate intranet, or a social networking platform. Pyramid is general enough that it can be used in a wide variety of circumstances.

In this tutorial you will build from scratch a simple app in which users each have their individual workspaces, and can invite other users to collaboratively edit content.

While writing the application, you will learn about many aspects of Pyramid. Concretely, you will learn how to:

• Install Pyramid within a virtualenv
• Use Pyramid's scaffolds to quickstart your project
• Work efficiently with templates (using Chameleon)
• Create models and views
• Write your own user authentication
• Make use of Pyramid's Access Control Lists support
• Use Pyramid's Traversal to map URL paths to your objects
• Create forms using the deform form library
• Work with the ZODB, a convenient database to store your Python objects in.

The tutorial will be split into steps with each step accomplishing a certain set of goals. Documented code for all the individual steps, including the final application, will be made available to participants.

Prerequisites: If you're on Mac OSX or Windows and you don't have Python 2.6 or Python 2.7 installed, you might want to run through the Pyramid installation instructions prior to the tutorial.

Last week's Kotti sprint in Berlin was full of win. Here's a summary of what we worked on. (Sprinters: If I forgot to mention anything, please let me know and I'll update.)

Paster templates

Marco and Tom worked on kotti_paster which Marco initially started. They've been working on a set of accumulative templates for Kotti that are based around Buildout and try to define best practices for different aspects of Kotti and Pyramid development for beginners.

The following is an excerpt from the book Newspeak in the 21st Century by David Edwards and David Cromwell of Media Lens published in 2009 by Pluto Press. You can find out more about the book and buy it here.

In 2006, an explosive front-page article in the Independent was titled: "Earth's ecological debt crisis: mankind's 'borrowing' from nature hits new record." Martin Hickman, the newspaper's consumer affairs correspondent, explained the results of a study featured in the story:

Evidence is mounting that rapid population growth and rising living standards among the Earth's six billion inhabitants are putting an intolerable strain on nature. For the first time an organisation — a British think-tank — has sought to pinpoint how quickly man is using the global resources of farming land, forests, fish, air and energy.

By analysing data from the US academic group Global Footprint Network, the think-tank has worked out the day each year when "humanity starts eating the planet". Just like a company bound for bankruptcy, the world started falling into ecological debt on October 9 that year. Hickman explained: "Problems, affecting everything from the seabed to the stratosphere, range from carbon dioxide emissions to the destruction of rainforests to the intensification of agriculture". The crisis Hickman was describing could hardly be more serious: humanity really is devouring the planet's life-support systems. And yet, typically for mainstream reporting, Hickman's analysis of the causes behind the crisis was lost in unsupported, clichéd assertions about "rapid population growth" and global "rising living standards". It is not just that "mankind" is "'borrowing' from nature", as Hickman claimed — the problem is rooted in a particular form of politics controlled by wealthy elites.

Consider some of the key issues that should be at the heart of any analysis of the looming catastrophe under discussion. And consider how inclusion of these issues is all but inconceivable in any corporate newspaper. These issues include:

1. The inherently biocidal, indeed psychopathic, logic of corporate capitalism, structurally locked into generating maximised revenues in minimum time at minimum cost. As corporations are legally obliged to maximise profits for shareholders, it is in fact illegal for corporations to prioritise the welfare of people and planet above private profits. How can this simple fact of entrenched corporate immorality not be front and centre in any discussion of the industrial destruction of global life-support systems?
2. The proven track record of big business in promoting catastrophic consumption regardless of the consequences for human and environmental health. Whether disregarding the links between smoke and cancer, junk food and obesity, Third World exploitation and human suffering, oil exploration and lethal climate change, factory farming and animal suffering, high salt consumption and illness, corporations have consistently subordinated human and animal welfare to short-term profits.
3. The relentless corporate lobbying of government to shape policies to promote and protect private power.
4. The billions spent by the advertising industry to promote consumer products and services, creating artificial 'needs', with children an increasing target.
5. The collusion between powerful companies, investors and state planners to install compliant dictators in client states around the world.
6. The extensive use of loans and tied aid that ensnare poor nations in webs of debt, ensuring that the West retains control of their resources, markets and development.
7. The deployment of threats, bribery and armed force against countries that attempt to pursue self-development, rather than economic or strategic planning sanctioned by 'the international community'.
8. The lethal role of the corporate media in promoting the planet-devouring aims of private power.

In a powerful book titled The Decline of Capitalism, economist Harry Shutt explains how the current system ensures "the wasteful diversion of economic value added into the pockets of the small minority who also (through their disproportionate wealth) exercise largely unaccountable political power". As Shutt rightly concludes, global capitalism is "too dysfunctional to be tolerable in a civilised society". Forty years ago, Martin Luther King called for "a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society". He observed: "Global capitalism is much more concerned with expanding the domain of market relations than with, say, establishing democracy, expanding elementary education, or enhancing the social opportunities of society's underdogs." Indeed, King increasingly questioned capitalism towards the end of his life: an aspect of his inspirational speeches that tends to be ignored by establishment commentators who are otherwise keen to praise him. He associated domestic racial and social inequality with US imperialism and social disparity abroad, denouncing what he called "the triple evils that are interrelated": "racism, economic exploitation, and war". In one speech, he said:

A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will 'thingify' them - make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.

King decried the "evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of society" which had "systematic rather than superficial flaws". He concluded that "radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced". But this deep problem, facing anyone hoping for genuine action to combat the environmental crisis, is beyond the pale of mainstream thought and public debate.

Ecologist Franz Broswimmer put it this way: "At its very core, the prevailing capitalist ethos and liberal word view of the modern industrial era remain expansionary and imperial, involving a calculated form of indifference to the social and ecological order." The social insanity of this capitalist-fuelled expansionism leads to 'inverted priorities', to adopt the phrase used by the social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein. Hence, dominant features of the economy include a trillion-dollar global arms budget, depletion of the planet's natural resources and a deepening economic apartheid between rich and poor. These features are, in the words of eco-feminist Mary Mellor: "not the neutral decisions of a market; they are the priorities of powerful people in powerful nations, mostly men whose gender, race, and class interests drive the capitalist political economic system and its worldwide system of accumulation and deprivation". It is simply not possible to understand, far less to address, the crises facing us without understanding these issues. But, of course, they are simply "not of this world" from the perspective of mainstream corporate news reporting and commentary.

These are compelling, evidence-based arguments that are buried beneath the complacent clichés favoured by even the best newspapers. We have sketched them only in the briefest detail here - the point is they are hardly ever discussed at all.

This screencast guides you through the process of creating an add-on for the Kotti content management system. In this tutorial we'll write a simple commenting system in 21 minutes in real-time.

You'll be guided through:

• Installing Kotti itself
• Creating your own Kotti add-on (a Python package)
• Configuring your Kotti site to include your add-on

(Click here if you don't see the video.)

Citizens fleeing Sirte on Saturday told Reuters they knew nothing of the ceasefire, and that the shelling by NTC forces had not stopped. NATO also continued its attacks on the city throughout the weekend.

The NTC's siege of Sirte started over a month ago, when rebel leaders said that they hoped to "starve into submission" the city, and cut off the city's electricity, water and supplies. Since then, Sirte has also seen daily NATO bombings and heavy artillery shelling by NTC forces. People fleeing Sirte on Sunday said that they had to leave because they were "caught between Nato bombings and shelling by rebels," with NATO "bombing at random and often hitting civilian buildings."

The Telegraph talked to people fleeing the city who said that Nato bombing and more recently, the attacks by the NTC had turned Sirte into a "living hell". An elderly lady shouted: "They are killing our children. Why are they doing this? For what? Life was good before!"

A Pakistani migrant worker who fled Sirte said: "Nato struck one big building, Imarat Tamim, two days ago, with 12 or 13 bombs. [...] The whole building with nearly 600 flats is razed to the ground now."

Videos that emerged out of Sirte a week ago show bombed out civilian homes, schools, a radio station, and a big number of casualties, among them many women and children.

The ICRC described the humanitarian situation in Sirte as very critical after they visited the city's main Ibn Sina hospital last weekend. The aid workers reported that the hospital lacks water, electricity, and basic medical supplies. A hospital doctor told Reuters that he saw "a child of 14 die on the operating table because the power went out during the operation."

Moreover, the ICRC reported that the hospital was in fact attacked by the NTC while their team was visiting. Hichem Khadhraoui from the ICRC said that "several rockets landed within the hospital buildings while [they] were there." From the AFP report:

After the ICRC team went in, National Transitional Council fighters launched a ferocious attack with rockets, anti-tank cannons and machine gun fire from a position less than a kilometre from the hospital. Gaddafi loyalists responded with mortar and sniper fire.

"We were surprised" that the attack took place while the Red Cross team was visiting, Mr Khadhraoui said, adding that they had "contacted all parties to say we were going in."

Update: According to the ICRC, the hospital was hit various times by NATO and NTC bombings. Press TV reports on Oct 6 that NATO has carried out a new round of airstrikes against Libya, targeting a hospital in the northern town of Sirte.

Bill Van Auken writes in a recent article titled Mass killing and humanitarian disaster in NATO siege of Sirte:

At the time, the US and its NATO allies claimed that intervention was required to halt a supposedly imminent massacre of civilians in the eastern city of Benghazi. Since then, the NATO bombings and the civil war fomented by the Western powers have claimed far more lives than were ever threatened by the Gaddafi regime.

Now this resolution is being invoked to justify NATO and the militias it supports carrying out in Sirte precisely the kind of murderous siege against a civilian population that the US and the European imperialist powers pretended to be preventing.

Seumas Milne described NATO's self-proclaimed "mission to protect civilians" in Libya a "charade."

TeleSUR's Diego Marín is in Sirte and reports that the Red Cross confirmed that the city's main hospital was bombed by NATO. He also witnessed how the NTC actively hindered the Red Cross from reaching the city:

CNN has actual footage of the Red Cross convoy being forced by rebel gunfire to turn around:

Further reading:

• NATO assault on Sirte inflicts more Libyan civilian casualties, Patrick O'Connor (World Socialist Web Site), Oct 4
• Related blog posts