Texas Unconference Over, Next DFW Pythoneers Meeting This Saturday

=== Texas Python Unconference ===

For those who didn't make it to Houston last weekend, the first Texas Python Unconference went very well. On Saturday we had at peak 44 attendees and on Sunday 12 attendees. You can see a group photo at:

http://pycamp.python.org/Texas

It was a single track of presentations with roughly 16 talks, a few of which made their slides available at:

http://pycamp.python.org/Texas/Schedule

There was lots of interesting conversation over lunches and dinners as well as in the breaks. My thanks to the University of Houston for hosting us with a great presentation facility (and generously providing snacks/drinks), Robin Friedrich for event coordination/MC, Josten Ma for getting us into the University and coordinating and the good folks at Enthought for springing for pizza during lunch (if I've overlooked a contribution, my sincere apologies).

I would encourage other regions of Python users to hold their own unconferences, which require much less work that a formal conference. You are welcome to make use of the wiki above - just create a folder off of the root for your region.


=== 4th Saturday Meeting of the DFW Pythoneers ===

This Saturday in Dallas we have our 4th Saturday meeting at Nerdbooks.com, at the usual 2 PM until 5 PM. If there is interest, I can repeat two of my Houston talks; a demonstration of how to program the TuxDroid to talk, wave and dance about, and a code walkthru of a simple program that uses the VPython (visual python) framework to animate simple geometric shapes (a pyramid slowly colliding with a checkerboard while a ball spaceship launches to get away) using OpenGL. Martin Thomas is going to bring his TuxDroid as well so we'll see how to coordinate them over their wireless network using Python.

If you want an early peek or cannot make it this Saturday, you can find the source to the two demos in our club version control system, at:

https://www.dfwpython.org/repo/Projects/tuxtoys/tuxdemo.py
https://www.dfwpython.org/repo/Projects/VPython/vdemo.py

We'll leave the OpenMoko cellphone GUI and pyMIDI piano trainer for our next meeting. ;-)

I'd also like to suggest folks install the Gobby application on their laptops. Gobby is a peer-to-peer networked, shared text editor and chat program. It is written completely in Python and may be good for collaborative notetaking at future events. A number of us would like to check it out for usability among a group.

http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/

It does run under Windows as well as Linux and Mac, although you must install some dependencies outlined in the install notes. It has also been packaged for various operating systems, so for some it will be a simple click install. Be sure to get the latest version as you cannot mix the old and new versions on the network.

Hope to see you this Saturday!

-Jeff