February 2010 Meeting Recap

[chrisn]

Feel free to correct or add to this--

Chris Merle reviewed the book _Core Python Programming_ (published by
Prentice-Hall.) He likes it and uses its exercises to help polish his
Python skills.

Lucas talked about and demoed virtualenv, a tool that provides
relatively isolated environments for developing software in Python and
for running Python programs. In doing so, he demoed other tools such
as ipython (a system shell that uses Python as the language for input
& scripting.)

Rich (Richard T. Saunders) brought his poster for the PyCon poster
session. Rich developed pickling tools for C++, which
1. Implement Python data types such as a Python-style dict,
for use in pure C++ code.
2. Let C++ code read and write data in Python pickle format.
With these tools, C++ code and Python code can communicate by sending
Python pickles back and forth through files, sockets, emails, etc.

Leslie Town talked about her time at the recent iSchools conference.
She found two speakers especially interesting:
- Steven Wolfram, who demoed Wolfram Alpha
- Marti Henst, who spoke on attempts
to make government more transparent.

Aside from the above, we had lively (and even thoughtful!)
conversations on such topics as 'Agile' (What's good about it? What's
bad or even laughable?)

After 4 1/2 hours, when maybe half of us had gone off to bed (maybe he
waited because his code was in C# or some .NET thing, not in Python),
Scott Schanel demoed a diagramming system he's developed. The
beginning user can use this system to draw diagrams such as software
design diagrams. The advanced user can compose a set of rules and
relationships (in XML) which define a new type of diagram. A software
developer can use Scott's code and some XML to provide most of the
diagramming functionality in an app.

I refused to conduct 'regular expressions workshop' until someone
admits to having actual questions or regular expression needs that we
could address in the workshop. :-)
So if there's some regular expressions task, topic, or area of
confusion that you, dear reader, would like addressed in a TuPLE
meeting, you might want to post a specific request to this Google
group.

Chris Merle also shared how to get a good discount code for the
professional version of the WING Python editor/IDE, but you weren't at
the meeting. :-)

[Chris Merle]

Thanks for the recap, Chris. I think you pretty much covered it.

Chris
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(sent via mobile)

On Feb 13, 2010, at 6:00 PM, chrisn <google...@bitboost.com> wrote: