Notes from PySIG, 23-Feb-2007

[Ted Roche]

What a jam-packed evening! Thanks to all who attended the February  
meeting of the Python Special Interest Group, held as usual on the  
fourth Thursday of the month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in  
Manchester, NH starting at 7 PM. A record crowd of twenty-three  
people made it to the meeting: a special salute to the groups who  
traveled north from MITRE and west from UNH.

After a round of congratulations on his new job, Kent Johnson wowed  
us as usual with Kent's Korner, this month featuring the path module  
[1]. Path wraps and extends functions in the os and shutiil modules  
and makes file manipulation much easier. Sadly not a part of the  
standard distribution, it's fairly well-documented on its home page  
[2] and Kent encourages its use.

Bill Sconce ran the general announcements and showed off difflib  
module, a means of calculating the differences between two text files  
and generating a resulting document. In the case of his demo, Bill  
generated HTML, handy to view and print.

Following a break, Shawn O'Shea pointed out two handy sites he had  
run across this week: PyVault provides updated RPMs in case you need  
a more recent Python version on a system (such as CentOS) that might  
be a couple revisions behind. He also pointed to a site [4] which  
describes how the Reddit site was rewritten from Lisp to Python  
(heresy!) in a single weekend, and the messages of shock and horror  
such a switch made. Entertaining reading.

Finally, we got to the main presentation. Dave Rowell of Appropriate  
Solutions presented Django. (Dave had a handout, as soon as I get a  
copy, I'll update this post with a link). Django is a web framework  
with an elegant and simple URL-to-Python module mapping, an object- 
relational mapper, a clean admin interface that builds basic data  
access and maintenance pages as you build your model, templating,  
caching, internationalization and more. Dave had his hands full  
giving us an overview in the time allotted, but did a great job.

A remarkable (and not-remarked-on) item happened that evening, too:  
presentations were made on Kent's new MacBook, running OS X, Bill's  
ThinkPad running Linux and Fluxbox, and on Dave Rowell's Dell running  
WinXP (in a VM, I think). Python ran just fine on all platforms. I'm  
not sure which was more remarkable: that Python runs flawlessly on  
all platforms, or that we got the projector to work on all the machines!

Thanks to Kent, Bill and Dave for the presentations, Janet for the  
cookies, Alex Hewitt and the Amoskeag Business Incubator for the  
facilities and networking, and to all who made the effort to attend.

Next month's meeting will be an open "project" meeting: bring your  
project and ask questions, demo it, or tap the wisdom of the crowd.

[1] http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/stories/00021.html
[2] http://www.jorendorff.com/articles/python/path/index.html
[3] http://www.python.org/pyvault/
[4] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit


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