PySIG notes, 26-April-2007

Ted Roche tedroche at tedroche.com
Fri Apr 27 17:28:59 EDT 2007


Thirteen attendees made it to the April meeting of the Python Special
Interest Group, held as usual at the Amoskeag Business Incubator,
Commercial Street, Manchester, NH on the fourth Thursday of the month at
7 PM.

Bill Sconce lead off the meeting with a printed agenda and a round of
introductions. Several new people were welcomed to the group; a range of
levels of experience with computers and specifically Python made for a
good mixed crowd.

Martin LeDoux showed off homemade bookbinding of the Python tutorial.
Using an HP laser and Adobe Acrobat, Martin printed duplex 2-up folded,
cut, glued and bound a pretty handy homemade book. Very cool.

Shawn K. O'Shea showed off the tarfile module
(http://docs.python.org/lib/module-tarfile.html) which allows creation,
querying, extraction and manipulation of tar files (with gz or bz2
compression) from within Python. This can be a real handy way to create
cross-platform installable packages that would run on OS X, Linux or
Windows.

Shawn also mentioned that there was a Google API for the Google Calendar
with examples in Python scripting. Someone asked what that might be used
for, and I offered the LUG coordinator Nag-O-Matic as a great example of
using automation with calendars.

Bill attempted an introduction to Python datatypes by creating a
hierarchy from primitive to complex objects. Kent had an objection to
the terminology, and countered with chapter 3 of the _library_ reference
(not chapter 3 of the Python reference which Bill was using) and a
vigorous discussion ensued. That's the point of the meeting, after all.
And it's far less likely to erupt into a flamewar in person. All sides
had some good points, examples and counterexamples, and most of us
learned more about Python internals. Good stuff.

Kent started Kent's Korner at 9 PM, when the milk and cookies were
starting to kick in, The crowd was a bit more subdued, having spent
their energy harassing Bill (and heckling Ben, in abstentia). Iterators
went quite quickly. Generators woke the crowd up. Bill Sconce came up
with a great example of greenbar color code generator, where the boss
decides there through be two reds, three greens. Off-script, Kent took
off with this example, and followed it with a discussion of parameter
passing to a generator.

http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/kk/00004.html

Kent really has a gift for shedding light on these sometimes obuse
topics; his examples really helped make the functionality clear, and
working through the real-world example proposed at the meeting gave us
all some idea of what was involved.

Kent also mentioned that he's using IPython (note the capitalization;
guess it's not an Apple product!) an improved interactive shell. Learn
more about it at:

http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/FrontPage

Meeting called at 9:44. Wow. Long meeting, but a very productive one.
One of the attendees wrote to me this morning that he went home and
altered some of his scripts based on what he learned at the meeting. No
greater praise could we ask for.

Thanks to Bill Sconce for running the meeting, the Amoskeag Business
Incubator for the facilities, Alex Hewitt for wrestling with the
network, to Martin, Shawn and Kent for presenting, and to all for
attending and participating.

Next meeting May 24th, topic TBA.

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


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