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 :-).