python packages

scikits has a number of packages paralleling the scipy effort, including some optimization and machine learning, audio and signal processing, a matlab wrapper, etc. fwrap looks to be a next-gen of f2py. makes interfaces to cython, c, c++. still alpha. mpi4py provides a c++ like interface via cython. if i'm ever forced at gunpoint to use mpi again, this is what i will use. the mayavi people have made a recorder for use with the traits ui (from enthought) to generate a human-readable python script that can reproduce the gui actions. that sounds like a cheap and easy way to automate journal files without any effort on my part. maybe i could relax my principled stand against making guis in general....