Python(x,y) News: Python(x, y) 2.6.6.0 Released!

Python(x,y) News: Python(x, y) 2.6.6.0 Released!: "Hi All, Gabi Davar and I are pleased to announce that Python(x,y) 2.6.6.0 has been released. This is the last major release based on Python..."

IAS 19 Employee Benefits ( Board March'11 meeting): amendment effective date 01/01/2013

During its March meeting, the IASB Board unanimously confirmed that the IAS 19 Employee Benefits amendments would be effective from 1 January 2013.  The amendment itself is still expected to be issued in April 2011.

 

IAS 19 Employee Benefits (Board Feb'11 meeting) : amendment expected in March '11

The IASB continued its discussion of the proposals in the exposure draft Defined Benefit Plans (the ED). At this meeting the Board discussed:

• the presentation of remeasurements;
• disclosure and administration costs; and
• the effective date and transition requirements.

Presentation of remeasurements

In December 2010 the Board tentatively decided to allow an entity to present remeasurements in profit or loss. In January 2011 the Board confirmed that decision but added some restrictions, such as making the election irrevocable, and asked the staff to assess whether the option should be restricted further. At this meeting the Board decided, in the light of that initial assessment, to revert to, and confirm, the proposal in the ED that remeasurements should be presented in other comprehensive income. The decision was supported by eight Board members. The remaining seven Board members would have preferred either to confirm the decision reached in January or to allow a free choice. 

Disclosure and administration costs

At the November and December 2010 Board meetings the Board asked the staff to obtain input from the Employee Benefits Working Group on particular aspects of the tentative decisions to date on disclosure and administration costs.

On the basis of this feedback the Board tentatively decided unanimously:

• to require the disclosure of the weighted-average duration of the defined benefit obligation, and that the amendments should include examples of the types of additional information that could be provided about the maturity analysis to meet the disclosure objective; and
• that administration costs related to the management of plan assets should be deducted from the return on plan assets.

The Board also decided, by a vote of nine to six, not to proceed with a requirement to disclose a disaggregation of the defined benefit obligation. Instead, the amendment should include an example of the type of disclosure that may meet the disclosure objectives.

Effective date and transition requirements

The Board decided to defer its decision on the effective date but tentatively agreed that it should not be earlier than 1 January 2013. The Board will discuss the effective date as well as early application as part of the broader consideration of the feedback received from the consultation on the Request for Views on Effective Dates and Transition Methods.

Subject to the Board's broader consideration of transition, the Board tentatively decided unanimously:

• that for entities already applying IFRSs, the amendments to IAS 19 should be applied retrospectively in accordance with the general requirements of IAS 8 Accounting Policies, Changes in Accounting Estimates and Errors, except that:
• the carrying amount of assets outside the scope of IAS 19 need not be adjusted for changes in employee benefit costs that were included in the carrying amount before the beginning of the financial year in which this standard is first applied (ie previously unrecognised actuarial gains and losses and past service cost should be recognised by adjusting equity, not by adjusting the carrying amount of assets that include employee benefit costs); and
• comparatives need not be presented for the disclosures for the sensitivity of the defined benefit obligation for the year of initial application of the amendments to IAS 19;
• that for entities adopting IFRSs for the first time, the amendments to IAS 19 should be applied retrospectively in accordance with the general requirements of IFRS 1 First-time Adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards, except that the Board will allow a temporary exemption for entities adopting IFRSs with a date of transition to IFRSs before the effective date of the amendments to IAS 19. That exemption would mean that comparatives need not be presented for the disclosures for the sensitivity of the defined benefit obligation.
• to confirm the proposal in the 2010 exposure draft to delete paragraphs 153-156 of IAS 19 and paragraph D10 of Appendix D of IFRS 1.

Next steps

All the Board members agreed that, subject to balloting, the Board has satisfactorily completed all the steps required in the IASB Due Process Handbook.

The Board instructed the staff to begin the balloting process for the amendment to IAS 19. The Board plans to issue the amendment by the end of March 2011.

Python-based data/science environment from Microsoft

Microsoft's Ironpython?

I've noticed a recent post in a blog from http://www.johndcook.com/blog/category/python/

Sho is an interactive environment for data analysis and scientific computing that lets you seamlessly connect scripts (in IronPython) with compiled code (in .NET) to enable fast and flexible prototyping. The environment includes powerful and efficient libraries for linear algebra as well as data visualization that can be used from any .NET language, as well as a feature-rich interactive shell for rapid development.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/the_blog_of_sho/archive/2011/01/26/introducing-sho.aspx

See also http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/07/01/scipy-and-numpy-for-net/

IAS 19 Employee Benefits : From the Board - Remeasurement & Curtailment/Settlement

During its January meeting, the Board continued the discussions with regard to

• presentation of remeasurement: the Board tentatively decided that, although remeasurements should be presented in other comprehensive income, there were circumstances in which it would be appropriate to allow an entity to elect to present remeasurements in profit or loss (primarily to address accounting mismatches) for a given plan. 
• curtailment & settlement: the Board tentatively proposed recognition rules for
• gains and losses resulting from  a curtailment or plan amendment arising as part of a restructuring plan or is linked to termination benefits
• termination benefits arising as a part of plan amendment arises as part of a restructuring plan

More information available at this link.

Python Web-Hosting with Numpy : virtualising your environment

Many solutions can be found to host a Python-based website. But really few (none?) of them offer a solutions with pre-installed Numpy, Scipy and Matplotlib. A way for circumeventing this seems to rely on the virtualisation of your Python environment with tools such virtualenv. You would have to proceed as follows

1. Virtualisation of a own Python environment with the website hoster
2. Installation of the required tools with easy_install. 

This link points to the referred solution (copied hereunder)...that I have not tested ! 

For your information:

• I didn't know numpy, scipy and friends could be (easily) installed with easy_install
• This at least requires the gcc tools or the corresponding compiling and building tools to be installed with the server

You can indeed install third party packages to your hosted space. If it's a pure python package, all that's needed is to unpack it to a directory and then add that directory to your PYTHONPATH environment variable or sys.path.

This can be tiring to do often, and won't work easily for compiled modules. If you have shell access to your python host, the excellent virtualenv package allows you to do set up a private python environment with its own libraries.

To set up your virtualenv, you'll do something like this at the shell:

$ virtualenv $HOME/my_python
$ $HOME/my_python/bin/easy_install numpy

You can keep running easy_install for anything else you want to install in your personal python environment.

Now, when you write your python scripts, you will want to use your private python interpreter, if that is possible:

 #!/home/myuser/my_python/bin/python
import numpy
# script here

If your python env cannot be specified (such as if run by mod_wsgi), you will need to add it to the  import path:

import sys
sys.path.insert(0, '/home/myuser/my_python/lib/python2.5/site-packages')
import numpy

The difficult choice of a python IDE

The first steps in python often begin with the simple environment that comes with python. After a while you start looking for something more and there's a lot out there: Python wiki on IDE's, some are commercial, some are open source. I've tried out some open source versions and can't say there's a winner.
Here is a nice list of the possibilities: Open source Python IDE's

For the moment I work with Spyder and Eclipse(PyDev) that comes with a package that's interesting  because it gives you a lot of functionality at once (Python x,y (scientific-oriented Python Distribution))

I also tried out Eric and Pyscripter and Eric seems also interesting when you want some more help with GUI development (Qt) and webenabled development (Django).