(Okay, so you could just subscribe to the Daily Python-URL...)

Two potentially life-saving-for-me-in-a-few-months SOAP bindings have become available - Kevin Dangoor's TGWebServices and Optio's soaplib.  On a few minute's investigation, I prefer TGWebServices slightly - the code seems easier to get into (although it may just be that I'm used to Kevin's style from TurboGears?), and it makes nice use of generic functions, which should make doing unexpected-to-the-developers things possible.  Neither does WSSE (but who'd want to fight with that early on?), and TGWebServices doesn't try the client side of things.  (Personally, I hope that I can always convince people to use alternatives to SOAP.)

The much-anticipated new declarative layer over the excellent SQLAlchemy ORM was announced, called Elixir.  I'm not certain I like the syntax immediately, but I'm confident that the process of having a number of competing implementations and the associated experiences and observations from them has led the developers to something better than any of them individually, and which can handle the changes inherent with creating a new system more smoothly.

I've mentioned Brevé before, but not directly.  It's a templating system for XML (and HTML, if you don't do XHTML) that's also pure Python code, like this:

    html [
        head [
            title [ 'A Brevé Template' ]
        ],
        body [
            h1 [ 'Briefly, Brevé' ], br,
            div ( style = 'text-align: center;' ) [
                span [ '''
                    As you can see, Brevé maps very
                    directly to the final HTML output.
                ''' ]
            ]
        ]
    ]

It's not for every occasion, but it can make generating certain types of XML easier than alternatives that require actual XML templates - I'd use it for XML chunk generation, and use an XML-based template for broader structural work.  And, like an XML-based template, it escapes content correctly based on whether it's in an attribute or in general content, so you can feel reasonably safe from XSS and just plain old broken output.  Generating malformed XML is just hard.

Also, Gustav Niemeyer released (possibly not recently) dateutil.  It's a set of additional powerful functions for date manipulation, carrying on from where datetime stops.  Of particular interest is the rrule package for a superset of iCalendar recurrence rules from RFC2445.

Ian Bicking wrote a high-level comparison between Pylons and TurboGears.  Basically, they're very close philosophically, but each have areas where they currently lead the other.  There should be a great interplay between the communities going forward, and I can see myself having a more idealistic attachment to Pylons while probably pragmatically using TurboGears often because it'll be the more popular platform with better documentation (well, one day) for new developers to get up to speed on.

PyCon's looks like it's going to be great.  Over 500 registrations as of a few days ago.  Unfortunately I couldn't afford to go, and was too embarrassed to ask for funding - which, realistically, would and should have been declined in favour of letting a whole lot more, and more deserving, people attend.  Next year for sure!  (Unless, say, I, yet again, spend more money than I can really afford on open source events in Africa)