Cambridge Boston Python June Podcast

The June meeting was a big success. We had two guest speakers and covered a lot of ground.

1. George Lambert, Goldenware Technology
2. Mike Pittaro, SnapLogic open source data integration Project implemented in 100% Python

We attempted to do a podcast of the meeting, but the audio is rather poor. Please check out the first file first, and only down load the others if you can withstand it.

NOTE: The audio is extremely soft at points and at the beginning, so you will need to crank the volume up.

• Introductions and Django.June recap (mp3, ogg)
• Mass TLC recap, and an extensive discussion on GPLv3, Licensing, Patents, and Python (mp3, ogg)
• Ligntning rounds with George Lambert and Mike Pittaro. (mp3, ogg)
• Open Discussion (mp3, ogg)

More details on the event can be found here.

Dallas-Ft. Worth Pythoneers Meeting THIS Saturday

This Saturday we'll be holding our 4th Saturday meeting of the DFW Pythoneers, at the usual location of Nerdbooks.com bookstore in Richardson. For directions, visit the Nerdbooks.com website. We start at 2pm and run until 5pm, and then go out for a group dinner.

At this meeting one of our local members, Jeremy Dunck, will be giving us a preview of a 60-minute advanced Django tutorial he is helping to give at OSCON next month. The advanced material will cover the unicode branch, signals and either stateful views or gis branch.

Since many of our members are not experienced with Django, Jeremy will present a 45-minute introduction to Django first, which will cover URLConf, views, models and perhaps middleware.

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By the way, I've been contacted by a developer at the Dallas Travelocity office, who is looking for Python developers with experience in Django or Genshi. If you're interested, let me know and I can put you in touch.
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And just to give a heads-up for July, Patrick R. Michaud has agreed to give our group a presentation on the status of support for Python in the virtual machine, Parrot, underlying Perl 6 and many other languages. If you're not familiar with what Parrot is, check out:

http://www.parrotcode.org

Patrick will present to us on the 2nd Saturday of July, the 14th.

See you there!

Jeff Rush
DFW Pythoneers Organizer

Omaha Python Users Group, June 14 -- Meeting Notes

June 14, 2007

Another banner meeting occurred this evening. Although it was a bit warm there were some cool conversations going on at the meeting tonight. There were questions and talk about -
targeting win32:

• ctypes - http://python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/)
• win32all - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=78018

database:

• db api - http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0249/
• sqlalchemy - http://www.sqlalchemy.org/
  

packaging:

• py2exe - http://www.py2exe.org/
• cx_freeze - http://python.net/crew/atuining/cx_Freeze/
• distutils - http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/distutils-sig/
• easy_install - http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall

UI:

• wxPython - http://www.wxpython.org/
  
• pythoncard - http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/

Web:

• django - http://www.djangoproject.com/
• turbogears - http://www.turbogears.org/
• pylons - http://pylonshq.com/
• mod_python - http://www.modpython.org/
• cheetah - http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/

Jeff gave a short presentation on the subprocess module http://docs.python.org/dev/lib/module-subprocess.html The slides and example code are available on the website. http://www.omahapython.org/ He also gave a little demo of his current internal project showing off subprocess, mod_python and pyRSS2Gen.

There was also a round of talk about using python as a tool to target multiple platforms at once, giving the user leverage to move between those platforms as they see fit. Also the ability of python to leverage existing code and services. A number of the attendees illustrated this topic by talking about how they are using python to build on existing resources and integrate systems on the application and OS level. It is interesting to see Python being used in banks and
hospitals.

As with previous meetings, kudos to Jay and Reboot The User for graciously donating the space for the gathering. Pizza and Pop sponsored by DM&T.

The door prize winner tonight, Todd, will receive "Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition" courtesy of O'Reilly. Unfortunately I left the house in such a rush tonight, that I didn't remember to bring it along. Todd, if you are going to be at the OLUG East luncheon Friday, I will have it with me and you can get it there. Otherwise, email me off list and we can make arrangements to get it to you pdq.

Mark your calendars early, July 12, and don't miss out on the fun. Here is gCal link so you can add it to your calendar. http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=epouplrdducr6atraggiflnfeg%40group.calendar.google.com

We'll be giving away something for a door prize. There will be food and drink and hopefully many more "lightning" talks about projects by local python developers.

-Jeff
http://www.OmahaPython.org

Cambridge Boston Python Meetup in One Week

Members, Python Newbies and Certified Snake Charmers,

Hope you can all make it to the next Python Meetup. This is a busy month for those of us interested in Python. So for those that can't make some of the events scheduled (pythoncalendar.inav2.com) we hope to review some of the events highlights.

This month's agenda: News and Events, Lighting Talks, General Discussion.

Scheduled Lighting Talks
1: George Lambert, Goldenware Technology
2: Mike Pittaro, SnapLogic open source data integration Project implemented in 100% Python

We are meeting once again at the amazing Brickbottom Gallery. It is worth the trip just to see the 'Immersed in Italy' exhibit before it ends.

Find out more and RSVP at: http://python.meetup.com/181/calendar/5811659/

Notes from PySIG, 24-May-2007: Python logging and wxPython

Thirteen participants made it to the May meeting of the Python Special Interest Group of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the fourth Thursday of the month at 7 PM at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, Manchester, NH.

It was a busy meeting. A quick round of introductions and announcements was followed by several terrific presentations.

Kent Johnson entertained us with Kent's Korner, this month featuring the logging module. Simple logging can be implemented in two lines of code and customized with a third, but the module can be expanded almost infinitely to include multiple handlers arranged in a hierarchical fashion with different levels of filtering and multiple output. As usual, Kent did a fine job of showing simple examples and clearly building on them.

Bill Sconce decided to defer his second attempt at describing a hierarchy of data types, a discussion sure to rouse an interesting and educational debate amongst the participants. Stay tuned for a future meeting...

Ric Werme made the main presentation on wxPython. He brought the most extensive handouts we've had today, with an engaging backstory of his several-decades tinkering with graphing and the Petals of the Rose patterns. The demo was arresting, and source code can be downloaded here and here. Ric walked us through the wxPython wrapper, explaining the various widgets used and spoke well of the new wxPython book.

Thanks to Ric and Kent for their presentations, to Bill Sconce and Alex Hewitt for arranging the meeting and facilities, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for their hospitality and to all who attended for their participation!

About This Past DFW Pythoneers 4th Sat Meeting

Although it was Memorial Day weekend, the DFW Pythoneers held their Saturday meeting at the Nerdbooks store as usual. For those who don't know, we meet at the store on the 2nd and 4th Saturday of every month, from 2pm until 5pm. We have a projector and draw around 7-14 attendees currently. At this meeting we had 8 people as I recall.

This meeting was a rapid fire sequence of mini-talks, by various people. As a result of the work on the Forrester survey, I had some simple, clearly documented source examples, provided by Martin Thomas (local), Mario Ruggier (not local) and myself. They can be found in our club subversion repository.

One of them is a mashup by Martin of placing temperature readings collected from one site using REST, onto a DFW Google map.

Another is HTML page generation using Twisted Nevow/STAN, along with an RSS feed parser module to embed a list of the N most recent news stories.

And one is a simple but powerful presentation and form validation using the Gizmo(QP) framework, which does the validation both in the server and in the browser using JavaScript. No big deal, until you realize the JavaScript in the browser is generated from the Python source, and the whole source fits on a couple of screens.

I had also had recent opportunity to toss together a simple RSS client (15-lines or so) that pulled down a collection of photos from an Apple site, for the non-Mac user and did a walk-thru of the source.

John Zurawski had at the previous meeting presented on his entry into the 48-hour PyGame challenge but since most of the attendees at this meeting had missed this, he walked through his source for us again.

And since I had had to compute some statistics for the Forrester survey of Python mail traffic, I walked thru my first use of the really cool BeautifulSoup module, for screenscaping the Mailman interface to locate and download the message archives.

And then we wrapped up with a quick examination of Raymond Hettinger's NamedTuples recipe from the Python Cookbook site. It had recently floated by on Planet Python and I just thought its implementation was neat.

We may have covered other topics that I've forgotten, but that was the gist of it.

Our 2nd Saturday meeting of June is this weekend, and we're looking for presentation ideas. There has been a request for a repeat of Martin's TuxDroid (programmable with Python) demo by those who missed the first one, and a test of having two TuxDroids within RF range. Brad has offered to cover the power of the Python logging module, and I can skim how you can write a filesystem in Python using the FUSE (filesystem in userspace) module. More topics are welcome, as these tend to be short.

Jeff Rush
DFW Pythoneers