Last night's PySIG meeting, 30-Nov-2006

[Ted Roche]

A long but worthwhile meeting last night! Ten attendees met at the  
Amoskeag Business Incubator last night to talk Python.

Bill Sconce emc'ed the meeting and ran us through his printed agenda.  
Thanks to Alex and Janet for the milk and pecan bars! Two items in  
the announcements weren't yet on the calendar -- Lloyd Kvam will  
reprise his presentation on using a LinkSys router to secure a  
contaminated Windows server from the Internet at the january MonadLUG  
meeting. Jaron Wilson will be presenting MythTV at the January  
MerriLUG meeting. Looking forward to both!

Ray Côté presented us with a Python programming question: in  
processing a dBASE file using pydbf, a for clause was followed by a   
property test that if passed, lead to a doubly-indented block of  
processing. Hoping to avoid the excessive indenting, he asked if  
there were ways to do it "better" with only one indent. Several  
suggestions arose, such as "for rec in (r for r in db if not  
r.deleted)" and "if rec.deleted continue" and the merits of the  
various solutions were debated.

On to news and announcements: Harold Abelson is reviving MIT's Intro  
to Programming courses for non-CompSci majors in Python, from Scheme.  
The TurboGears book is out, the Django book probably not Real Soon Now.

On to the presentations: Cole Tuininga did a great job presenting  
EpyDoc [0], a documenting system that generates HTML or PDF from  
inline comments in Python source code, producing slick diagrams and  
graphs. Discussion and "can it do X?" questions were common and many  
agreed this package was worth a look. Bill Sconce ran the second  
presentation: a review of Alex Martelli's slides from a recent  
BayPiggies [1] presentation on "What's new in Python 2.5." Kent  
Johnson was really helpful in filling in some of the insights in  
what's new and why and what it all means.

Kent Johnson volunteered to present a meeting on Decorators in December.

Thanks to the Amoskeag Incubator and Alex Hewitt for the facilities  
and networking, to Bill for organizing, to Cole, Bill and Kent for  
their presentations and to all for their participation.

[0] http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/
[1] http://www.baypiggies.net/


Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com