PySIG Notes, 22-May-2008

[Ted Roche]

Twelve folks attended the May meeting of the Python Special Interest 
Group, held as usual at 7 PM on the fourth Thursday at the Amoskeag 
Business Incubator in Manchester, New Hampshire. Vigorous discussion, 
idea exchange, job openings and, yes, Python, was discussed in depth.

Bill Sconce was the master of ceremonies and lead off with his usual 
printed agenda of items: Welcome, Announcements, a round of 
introductions, Janet's Famous Cookies (this week, Frangoes! Awesome!), 
open announcements and discussions of gotchas.

Sample Q: how to debug binary text that may or may not be Unicode? A: 
Mark Pilgrim's Character Encoding Detection, originally part of his 
famous Universal Feed Parser.

Sample Gotcha: scripts with a she-bang line might not always be 
transportable between Windows, Unix and OS X because of line ending 
differences. If your parser complains about invalid commands on the 
she-bang line, make sure your line endings are correct for the platform.

Shawn K. O'Shea arrived and proceded to note every passing mention (with 
links!) in his great blog entry at: http://www.eth0.net/blog/?p=12 -- 
thanks, Shawn!

Kent asked about using Python to interface with an existing C++ code and 
a lot of useful suggestions were forthcoming.

Arc updated us on the state of PySoy: the major bug that was crashing 
PySoy seems to have been isolated, and the code is orders of magnitude 
more stable. Bug fixing is proceding apace and an end-of-summer major 
release appears feasible.

Discussion on the upcoming Software Freedom Day got an enthusiastic 
reception, with several folks considering something in their communities.

On to the main presentation: Kent presented his monthly Kent's Korner 
featuring the IPython interactive shell. IPython is slick, with a slew 
of features and quite a bit of documentation as well. (Again, see 
Shawn's posting for links). IPython is not just a shell, but also an 
embeddable library that can bring scripting features into your 
application, and can also be used as a non-blocking inteface to 
graphical environments like GTK, Qt and Wx (unlike the standard Python 
shell, which only works against Tk). Anyone doing a lot of work with 
Python from the shell needs to check out IPython!

Thanks to Kent for the presentation, to Bill for running and promoting 
the show, to Janet for the awesome Frango cookies, to Shawn for the 
excellent capture of the night's events, and to all for participating!

-- 

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