PySIG notes, 22-March-2007: Project Night

Ted Roche tedroche at tedroche.com
Sun Mar 25 17:15:29 EDT 2007


An even dozen people showed up for the Python Special Interest Groups
March meeting, held as usual at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in
Manchester, NH.

Bill Sconce called us to order promptly at 7 PM and we proceeded through
the printed agenda. It was duly noted the Ben Scott deserved heckling
despite his absence. We ran through announcements of a couple of
upcoming meetings, plugging the MythTV installfest beta and pointing out
Jarod's book. We mentioned meetings upcoming for the LUGs, including ZFS
at DLSLUG, LVM at CentraLUG and the new Ruby group.

Kent's Korner: Kent S. Johnson presented his month talk, this month on
list comprehensions. Kent had a great handout [1], and has collected his
past couple of handouts in one place [2]. Starting with simple examples
and building in complexity, Kent lead us through what can be an
intimidating topic in a way most couple follow. Some great discussions,
on-topic and off-, regarding assignment and Python idioms, always make
this a fun part of the meeting.

There was some discussion of Python 3000 and its expected schedule. Bill
Sconce had a video of Guido practicing his Py3K presentation in front of
an audience at Google [4] which he went on to present at PyCon [3].

For the Gotcha of the month, Bill Freeman offered up an "Un-Gotcha:"
a=b=4 works, but not for the reason you might think. Assignments of this
style in C have a different underlying meaning, and perhaps in some
circumstances, different side effects. A key to understanding the single
= assignment in Python is to understand that it is a STATEMENT. There is
no value associated with the statement and "chained" assignments in
Python like the above are specially-coded as an exception case. This
lead to yet another great discussion.

Ric Werme showed off the web pages that result from his Python software
that collects and forwards weather data from his weather station.  His
current conditions page, http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wx/current.html
has links to everything else.  Ric bought the weather station in part to
have an excuse to write more Python code, and his current code runs the
gamut from implementing the weather station protocol through pyserial.py
and the serial port to CGI scripts that take data requests, fetches the
data from MySQL, creates gnuplot data files that create .gif files, and
returns a HTML page to display the results.  His description of the
software is at http://werme.8m.net/wx/vantage_software.html .

Ric also demonstrated a Python cgi script for collecting data for a
weather observers group that Todd Gross created while he was WHDH. It's
customizable, so people can create a form preloaded with their location
that offer just the data they collect, and the submission code adds it
to a MySQL database and recreates a web page of members reports over the
previous day.

Shawn O'Shea showed off Python running in the Win32 and COM
environments. Shawn does a lot of work administering and automating
Windows configurations, and the COM set of interfaces can allow a lot of
internal manipulation of the major applications, a big step up from the
VBScripts supplied by Microsoft with some of the tools. Shawn
demonstrated the canonical Hello, World with Microsoft Word, but then
dug into a couple more concrete and practical examples with querying the
Registry and spelunking in the IIS metabase.

Lots of interesting stuff coming up at future meetings: Martin Ledoux
offered to show something on the work he's done with amateur
book-binding with pytut/pyref books. Kent has promised an update soon on
his real-life experiences with Django. Ray Côté may be able to show off
the new web site he used as an excuse to miss the meeting. And I'll bet
Bill will wheedle some more cookies from Janet.

Thanks to Bill Sconce for organizing, Alex Hewitt for getting the
networking working, the Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the
great facilities, Janet for the awesome cookies, Kent for his great
Korner, Bill Freeman for the csv module and those strange blinking white
blocks, Ric Werme for demoing his weather projects, Shawn for the
Win32-COM-Automation and everyone for attending and participating.

P.S. Anyone got python running on a WRT54G?

P.P.S. Tom Mosco mentioned to me that the Chicago Python group had a
very long presentation on Django by the creators and also a Ruby on
Rails presentation by its author. Videos can be found at [5] and [6]

[1] http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/kk/00003.html
[2] http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/kk/index.html
[3] http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=197203
[4] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1189446823303316785
[5] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3548805983075267875
[6] http://www.djangoproject.com/snakesandrubies/

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



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