Notes from PySIG, 23-Feb-2007

[Bill Sconce]

Wow.  Now THERE'S a nice job!

I didn't realize we had so much fun.  The part about Python on
Linux/Mac/W32 is a great catch.

Thanks, Ted!

-Bill



On Sun, 25 Feb 2007 15:14:53 -0500
Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
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