Notes from PySIG, 28-May-2009

[Ted Roche]

It was a dark and stormy night. Nonetheless, six members made it to the 
May meeting of the Python Special Interest Group, held as usual on the 
fourth Thursday of the month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in 
Manchester.

We had an Open Mike Night format, a round-table discussion where 
everyone shared what they were working on.

I plugged upcoming meetings, available as always at http://gnhlug.org -- 
MonadLUG in particular, is to be praised for posting 4 months worth of 
meetings in advance.

Mark has a client who's weaning off a proprietary OS and looking for a 
replacement document management system / word processing system, and is 
considering LyX, which might be a Python front end to LaTeX. Mark asked 
for suggestions for additional resources and the two Bills were able to 
come up with some ideas.

Arc talked about some wireless technologies he's researching (neat 
stuff!). Arc also reported the Gaming SIG is coming along nicely: 5 
people at the first meeting, 10 at the second. Details at gnhlug.org . 
Hoping to schedule a FPS (First Person Shooter) night soon. Coming up 
next Friday June 5th, the SIG will take a look at the awesome audio 
utility, Audacity, as it relates to gaming, and then engage in the 
Battle of Wesnoth.  Gaming SIG meets at the Brady Sullivan building in 
the DynInc offices on the fifth floor - see 
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/GamingSIG.

Shawn O'Shea completed a course in Network Design and Planning at UMass 
Lowell (and got an 'A', congrats!) and showed us his lab work, written 
in Python! He very bravely showed us his code and we talked about some 
of his algorithms and looked at a couple of the modules he used, 
including optparse [1], netaddr [2] cmd [3]

[1] http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html
[2] http://packages.python.org/netaddr/netaddr-module.html
[3] http://docs.python.org/library/cmd.html

Bill Freeman reported he'd been working in Plone and Python 2.4 and 
missed some of the features available in later versions. He created some 
code to address the worst of the problems, and hopes to be able to 
release it freely soon. Stay tuned.

Thanks to Bill for organizing the meeting, to the Amoskeag Business 
Incubator for the fine facilities, to Arc for bailing us out with an 
extension cord, to Janet for the awesome (!) cookies, and to all for 
attending and participating!

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