pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, January 14th Notes

The Cologne Python User Group met at the computer centre of the University of Cologne. The meeting was attended by 14 people. German speakers might want to refer to our wiki page http://www.pycologne.de.

Announcements

• EuroPython 2009 from June, 29th to July, 4th 2009 in Birmingham (UK)

Book-Presentations

• Python for Unix and Linux System Administration (J. Jones, N. Gift) O'Reilly
  
  Python from the perspective of System-Administrators. How to create tools using python.
  
  
• Exploring Python (Markus Nix (Hrsg.), Martin Grimme, Torsten Marek, Michael Weigend, Wolfgang Weitz) entwickler.press
  
  Attention: The book cover carries an English title. However, the text is in German. The book contains four essays about special Python topics, which are covered thoroughly: Generators, Objectoriented-Programming, gDesklets and "Python and the Java world".

This time we had two talks

Introduction Doug Hellmanns Python Module of The Week (PyMOTW-) series (RalfSchönian)

• Doug Hellmann writes documentation for Python-Modules on a regular basis and organizes his articles by topics.
• Additionally, topics can be found using an alphabetic index
• PyMOTW is an ideal supplement to the Python standard library documentation because it covers certain topics in more detail.
  
• There are some translations into other languages like Chinese and Spanish
• Ralf has started a German translation which he puts on his own homepage for the moment. He invites people to take part and help out translating articles from PyMOTW.

Network- and Server-Programming with Python (KlausBremer)

• Klaus offered a broad introduction to network-programming with Python. He covered different types of communication with increasing complexity, presenting sample programs as well as specific benchmark results.
• Foundations of network-programming and the different layers: low-level, sockets, high-level (like: HTTP, FTP, etc.)
• Presentation of an "echo"-server and its corresponding client using a socket-connection.
• Introduction of the BaseHTTPServer, which is used as well by the Wiki-System MoinMoin.
• Several techniques to increase responsiveness of servers by holding and processing many connections at a time:
• ThreadingTCPServer: Using several threads for processing.
• ForkingTCPServer: Using several processes instead of threads.
• At this point, there developed a lively discussion among the participants about the implementation within the Standard-Libray. The Standard-Library delegates only the processing of received data to a thread or process. The reception even of large blocks of data still remains within the main thread/process.
• Introduction of select() and poll() as methods to process network data from many connections asynchronously without the need to use several threads and processes.
• As highlevel frameworks CherryPy and Twisted are named.

Please find the addtional information to this talk (in German language) here.

The minutes of the meeting in German language can be found here.

The next meeting will be held on, Wednesday, February, 11th.

We enjoyed the rest of the evening in our usual italian restaurant having food, drinks and friendly conversation.

pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, January, 14th, Announcement

The next meeting of pyCologne will take place

Wednesday, January, 14th
starting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pm
at Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)
University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, Germany

Agenda:

• Network- and Server-Programming with Python (Klaus Bremer)
• Presentation of Doug Hellmanns Python Module of The Week (PyMOTW-) - series (Ralf Schönian)
  

At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the evening in a nearby restaurant.

Further information including directions how to get to the location can be found at:
http://www.pycologne.de (Sorry, this page is in German only)

Omaha Python Users Group, January 7, Notes

Meeting/Talk Topics:

• CherryPy and Adobe Flex (Jeff Hinrichs) - Jeff showed a standard CherryPy + Cheetah application that he used as a base and then how he integrated Adobe Flex for a spiffed up interface. A code walk through was given featuring the MXML used and the Flex Builder for Linux alpha
• Wing IDE (Charles Kaminski) - Charles had a great presentation on the Wing IDE Charles ran a completely live presentation showing code intelligence, debugging and lots of other goodies that Wing has to offer Python programmers. It was such a good presentation that I am seriously considering buying it.
• A number of people attending retold their stories of their first exposure to Python and how they get to use Python at work.

It was a great meeting. Charles brought up the idea of possibly finding a mid-town watering hole and having the meetings in a back room. So if anyone knows of a place that supports both libations and presentations in the mid-town area please let us know.

A partial list of other topics discussed include:

• Shed Skin - An Optimizing Python-to-C++ Compiler
• Android
• GvR and BDFL
• Nearest Neighbor Searches
• Cover Trees
• R-trees
• Linux vs. Windows as a development platform
• Multi-platform capabilities of Python
• Silicon Prairie News
• Tech Omaha

pyCologne Python User Group, Cologne, Germany, Notes, September to December

Happy New Year to all!

First of all I apologize for not having posted the notes for the meetings of pyCologne from September to December. I have been bound to other commitments and had too little time left.

Therefore, I decided to cover our latest meetings (September to December) in one post:

September, 10th.:

• Discussion of creating a pyCologne-Yearbook as a collection of all the talks held within the year. There has been a lively discussion about what to do and how: Creation of a leaflet with some of the most interesting talks, to give away at public events; creating a catalog of the talks using a standard template, creation of templates for slides (using REST S5). Since then, we have discussed and created a form within the German Python Wiki wich can be found at: http://wiki.python.de/User_Group_K%C3%B6ln/VorschlagVortragsTemplate
• Günter Jantzen held a talk about Python 3.0 (alias Python 3000). Among other topics he covered changes of string-handling within Python. Python 3.0 does use Unicode-Strings as a Standard. Instead of the %-operator for formatting tasks the new format string-method is used. As marker for substitutions the curly-brackets {} are used. Furthermore, list-comprehension-like syntax is introduced for sets and dicts.

October, 8th:

• Some new Python-books were introduced:
• Expert Python Programming
• Agile Software Development with Python
• Das python Praxisbuch (Text in German)
• Todays talks by Rebecca Breu and Ralf Schönian were dedicated to wxPython a Python GUI-Toolkit.
• Rebecca gave a detailed overview of programming with wxPython introducing the concept of wx-Events and covering the main widgetes like static-text and entry field.
• She concluded with a demomstration of the grid-widgets which allows to plugin self-written renderers and editors into the grid.
• Ralf gave a presentation of his wxPython based vocabulary-trainer.
  
• The book "wxPython in Action" was introduced.

November, 12th:

• Today we had another talk within our GUI-series: pyGTK by Andi Albrecht:
• Andi introduced the basics of pyGTK and the use of signals for the event-handling.
• He gave an overview of the available documentation and introduced some widgets and layout-facilities aka. boxes.
• Furthermore, he described the organisation of pyGTK in several modules and gave an overview about Glade the Interface-Designer for GTK.
• The talk and the examples (in German) can be found at: http://wiki.python.de/User_Group_K%C3%B6ln/VortragPyGTKEinfuehrung

December, 10th:

• Today we celebrated pyColognes second anniversary and had our christmas party. Many thanks to Uwe Döbereiner for offering his own rooms for the party. We enjoyed nice conversation, with food and drink supplied by all the members.
• As a highlight of the evening Rebecca Breu gave a talk about the perfomance of Santa-Claus sleigh in comparison with the worlds best supercomputers and as well her own laptop :-).