TuPLE (Tucson, AZ) - January 2010 recap

The Tucson Python Language Enthusiasts met Monday, January 11, 2010 at 1702 Pizza & Beer.

We had 8 attendees with 2 new faces (Welcome Jude and Leslie!)

We had 5 short-form "lightning talks" to kick off the new year.

• Generating PDFs with Reportlab (http://reportlab.org) - (Chris Niswander)
• Multiple ways to consume PDFs, with Reportlab being the best option for generating
• Using S5, Docutils, and reST to create web based slideshows (http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/slide-shows.html)  - (Chris Merle)
• Why I hate ORMs - (Scott Schanel)
• Lively discussion about the (mis)use of ORMs (Object Relational Mapper) to manage data access. Good arguments for using an existing, if imperfect, query language (SQL) and understanding the 'relation' in relational database.
• Django syndication. Generating Media RSS feeds from Photologue galleries - (Lucas Taylor)
• Django makes it trivial to generate RSS feeds and reasonably easy to create custom syndication formats. A demo application was presented showing multiple galleries using the CoolIris plugin for consuming the feeds.
• iftd, a multi-transport protocol file transfer program - (Jude Nelson)
• iftd is a data transfer daemon that allows clients to access files via a variety of transfer protocols (http, ftp, bittorrent, et al.). Protocol and error handling are encapsulated in the iftd daemon, freeing clients from having to perform these functions as it chooses the best available transfer protocol. It is a component of the Stork project at the University of Arizona.

At least 4 TuPLE members are planning to attend PyCon 2010 in Atlanta next month, so our March meeting will be a recap of the conference. February remains a mystery.

TuPLE (Tucson, AZ) - April recap

The TuPLE (Tucson, AZ) group met on Monday, April 20th, attended by 10 members.

We had some good conversation and it was great to see more new faces show up. 

Rich Saunders gave a presentation on Pycon 09, touching on some issues relevant to his work at Rincon Research. 
General discussion of Pycon structure (tutorials, general conference, sprints), Lightning Talks, and Open Spaces.

3 of our members attended Pycon. Generally agreed the lightning talks and open spaces were popular and enjoyable conference additions.

All pycon videos are available at http://pycon.blip.tv/ 

Pycon Tutorial sessions (http://us.pycon.org/2009/tutorials/schedule/) were filmed and are available 
in addition to the talks and general conference videos. These look to 
be a great resource for in-depth exploration of python topics, from 
Python 101 to "A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency" 

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O'Reilly User Group program 
We are now part of the O'Reilly UG program, which offers benefits to 
us as members (35% discount and free review copies)

Details and registration for other user groups available here: http://ug.oreilly.com/

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We also briefly discussed setting up a website for the group using Google App Engine as an exercise/group project. There seems to be some interest in possible group projects or hack days, but there wasn't much in the way of commitment moving forward. We aren't using meetup.com so it would be nice to have an RSVP function and a more active web presence than the google group.

Encouraged members to bring in their projects/code samples for group review and discussion for the next meeting. 

TuPLE (Tucson, AZ) - March recap

There seems to be a good bit of interest in Python in the Tucson area, with new attendees from the UofA and several local companies who use Python for their daily work.

Ben Reynwar gave us an intro to Django, including basic project setup and routing urls to python methods.

Lucas Taylor introduced the Twisted framework and basic concepts including the Reactor, Deferreds, and Protocols. Demo code was shown to illustrate the basics of a simple server implementation.

Dave Thompson gave his Flash & Python talk. Included an overview of what Flash and Flex are, the AMF (Adobe Messaging Format), and python tools used for parsing and encoding objects in AMF. Discussed pyAMF and his own new library AmFast.  AmFast is an AMF3 encoder/decoder implemented for speed. Initial tests show an 18x increase in speed for the encode/decode operations.   Slides available on the limscoder blog

TuPLE (Tucson, AZ) - First official meeting recap

TuPLE (Tucson Python Language Enthusiasts) is off to a good start. Our first official meeting went well, with 6 attending.

Chris Merle started us off with an overview of Plone and two products that help to
inspect and interrogate the python objects in use:
DocFinderTab
DocFinderTab adds a tab to the ZMI that parses the docstrings of the class of the object you are using and presents them to you in the tab.
Clouseau
Clouseau embeds a live ajax based python interpreter into your plone site for debugging purposes. It looks to have some nice autocompletion features and lets you poke around the internals of a live instance.

Chris then demoed his news portlet modification that shows an excerpted portion of the news items (vs just the title and link), and explained how DocFinderTab and Clouseau both helped him determine which object attributes were going to be useful for displaying the content.

We had some good conversation about general interests, IDEs, reference books, and what kinds of presentations everyone is interested in. Django, advanced python, and C extensions are heading up the list for the future.

Misc. Notes:

• Civilization 4 allows mod authors to use Python to modify aspects of
  the game. Hopefully we'll hear more about it in the future.
• PyScripter - Free Windows Editor/IDE
• Core Python (http://corepython.com/) was recommended as a good
  reference, others thought the online docs were adequate.
• A couple of members are repeat pycon attendees. This year we'll have 2
  or 3 attending. April's meeting will be good for a pycon recap.
  
• A python obfuscation tool was discussed
  

Thanks to Chris for presenting and everyone for attending!