Downgraded to Python 2.7.1? How did that happen?

So I was doing some work on my home computer tonight which involved a little bit of Python hacking in Windows.  At one point I wanted to make sure that I had a certain library installed such that it was accessible to the script I was working with, so naturally I opened up an interpreter and tried importing it.  It failed, which surprised me since I had just finished using pip to install it and no errors occurred.

The script I was working with was one I wrote a few years ago, so my first thought was that maybe they released a newer version of the library with different capitalization.  Kind of a strange guess, I know, but not too far-fetched considering PEP 8 is still not completely followed by the community and some maintainers of certain libraries are changing this to conform to the standard, but I digress.  I run the pip install command one more time, just to make sure that there wasn't an issue with naming.  Nope, dependency already resolved.

Finally, I noticed that the interpreter I was running was Python 2.7.1.  Well, I knew that couldn't be the problem, but I like to always have the latest version of Python installed so I thought I'd take a minute to rectify that.  But that was another issue... why wasn't I running 2.7.3?  It was weird that I had such an old version running when I'm usually so on top of updating Python.  Whatever.

So I first tried a repair.  Still showed up as 2.7.1.  Downloaded a fresh copy of the installer and verify the checksum.  Still showed up as 2.7.1.  Removed it completely after making a backup of site-packages, then re-installed it.  Still showed up as 2.7.1.  Uninstalled it again without re-installing it.  The interpreter still ran and showed up as 2.7.1.  What the...?

I was starting to get fed up at this point.  The system path didn't have anything out of the ordinary, like a separate folder for an old installation, nothing.  Finally, I found this StackOverflow article which, oddly enough, had an example of exactly what I needed to figure out what was going on and where this rouge installation of Python was that was driving me crazy. Here's what I got:

C:\Users\Mike>for %i in (python.exe) do @echo %~$PATH:i
C:\Program Files\Box Sync\Python.exe

Box Sync includes its own Python interpreter?  That's what's going on?  And it somehow became the default interpreter instead of my 2.7.3 installation?  Okay... I guess that's great they're using Python, but why force my computer to use an old interpreter?  I'm no Windows expert, but it seems like there should be a better way to do whatever it is they're trying to do.  But I can also have sympathy for them not wanting to use Py2Exe... shudder

Apparently, this is something Box is already aware of, but the whole thing is still just so weird.  I don't use Box that much as it is, so I think I'll just nuke their version of Python for the time being.  And yes, it did fix my problem.

Debian on Android and my quest for a full-fledged terminal Python IDE

So when I recently discovered that my Asus Transformer Prime has Python on it, but that it only has version 2.6.2 and is missing some needed libraries, I could tell that setting up a sweet Python programming environment was going to be possible, but a little longer road than I thought it was going to be.  Head past the break to read how I successfully overcame multiple obstacles to get things working.

Pydroid at last!

Well, hello there, my little friend!  So good to see you where I had given up hope you would ever be:

So just a few minutes ago, I was poking around on my Asus Transformer Prime using the old reliable Terminal Emulator and ran ls /system/bin just to see what kind of executables were there, and lo and behold there was Python installed!  I was a bit surprised to see it, since I haven't done anything to modify the default installation of Ice Cream Sandwich from the factory, but here's the evidence that it runs:

There are a few things to take note of here.  First, it's running Python 2.6.2, which is a little dated since as of this writing, the 2.6 series is up to 2.6.8, which was released April 10 of this year.  So that means there are a number of security patches absent, but I'll likely only be running my own code on here.  Still, I wish I could have some of the new features from 2.7 like the multiple clause support in the with statement to do things like this:

with open(file1) as var1, open(file2) as var2:

    ... 

Second thing of note is the warning "Could not find platform independent libraries...", which may be a result of:

• Running Python from within an app, which all have limited permissions that may be preventing access to those libraries
• Terminal Emulator may need to be told to export the path to the libraries
• Something else that will undoubtedly be tedious to discover and fix

In any case, I'm one step closer to getting my tablet to completely replace my notebook, which I'm totally okay with.