All the data stored in a Python program is built around the concept of an object. Objects include fundamental data types such as numbers, strings, lists, and dictionaries. It's also possible to create user-defined objects in the form of classes or extension types. This chapter describes the Python object model and provides an overview of the built-in data types.

This chapter begins with a historical perspective of the Mac OS X graphics system and the evolution of technology behind Quartz 2D. It also explores crucial aspects of the graphics technology that is shaping the graphics architecture of the Macintosh.

Jeff Langr's poker application has come a long way in the last few installments of this series. In this segment, he adds the first set of code for handling some of those specialized poker terms you've might recognize from TV: the flop, the turn, the river, and the blinds.

Have you heard the pitch for the tool that gives a 600% productivity improvement, or the new programming language that will solve all of your problems? Matt Heusser explains that confidence games abound in software development—and suggests what to do about them.

As I sit back, here on March 19th 2019, to review the past 13 years, I cannot help but feel slightly melancholic. I felt it was time to summarize the period in the tech industry between 2006 and 2019. Where did we leave off, where did we go, and where are we going to end up? Note: Yes, the Sunday Eve Column.

Linux.com reviews GNOME 2.14, and concludes: "GNOME 2.14 continues the steady improvement visible in the last few releases. It is an incremental upgrade, consisting largely of tweaks and the filling in of gaps in functionality. If few of these changes are major by themselves, the overall result is welcome. Perhaps the best way of looking at the release is not as an end in itself, but as a milestone on the road to desktop usability in free operation systems. From this perspective, GNOME 2.14 is a sign that much of the journey is already over - and that the remaining distance is less than many observers think."

In a move that alleviates some privacy concerns, a federal judge granted part of a Justice Department request for Google search data but said users' search queries were off-limits. The 21-page order issued Friday by US District Judge James Ware, represented little change from his stance at a hearing earlier this week.

Apple released another version of the security patch it distributed on March 13 to users of its OS X operating system software, in order to address a problem reported with the update. The company said it distributed the new patch, dubbed Update 2006-002 v1.1, in order to fix an issue with Apple's Safari Web browser that some users observed after installing its 2006-002 security update. According to a post on the company's Web site, the previous update had caused some Safari users to have problems launching the browser.

"The recent emphasis of the Linux community has been on desktop distros that make it easy to install and configure the system without venturing beyond the GUI. Despite the success of these beginner-friendly systems, a significant segment of the Linux population prefers a simpler approach. These back-to-basics users want clarity, stability, and speed, and they do not care about the proliferation of redundant tools and glossy configuration helpers that populate the GUI-based systems. In the past, no-frills Linux users gravitated to systems such as Slackware, Gentoo, or Debian, but another back-to-basics distro is gaining favor among the Linux faithful: Arch Linux."

Chris Muench is a mobile and embedded MVP. Here he shows how to write a managed Direct3D application for Windows Mobile devices.

The inaugural release of Mandriva One, a new live CD that aims to simplify the installation of the Mandriva Linux operating system to a hard disk directly from the live CD, has been released: "An operating system is generally available as a live CD or a set of installation CDs, but not both on the same disc. Mandriva One differs in offering an all-in-one CD based on Mandriva Linux 2006."

Learn Objective-C with Xcode in the new free PDF book from Bert Altenburg, Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin. Jump into Cocoa Development with some ready made classes and example code for XCode 2.0 and above. The book starts from scratch with basic programming knowlegde and ends up in the depth of Objective-C and Cocoa.

"I've been working for the past 15 months on repairing my rusty math skills, ever since I read a biography of Johnny von Neumann. I've read a huge stack of math books, and I have an even bigger stack of unread math books. And it's starting to come together. Let me tell you about it," writes programmer Steve Yegge.

The Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) is a new Eclipse project devoted to providing an open source framework supporting the creation of communications-based applications on the Eclipse platform. This article gives gives you a quick glimpse into ECF and an example that demonstrated one of the many capabilities the framework provides, and its future direction.