Past Meetings

Acxiom

7 PM, Thursday January 12th

Acxiom Corp. Illinois office. (Across from Fry's)

Presentations:

• Lightning presentations on the Python golf contest that stirred up interest during the holidays on our mailing list. (At least a couple of us who got around to submitting solutions will talk briefly about the clever encodings and nasty tricks we used to turn a simple little algorithm into a dense, contorted bit of ugly (but short) code.)
• David will talk about the datetime module, saver of bacon
• Jason will show off some 3D designs, thinly disguised as an introduction to VPython

Holiday Cheer

No meeting this month. A few hardy souls got together for some seasonal cheer, I think.

Remote, Generic and Random

November brought presentations on a variety of topics:

• Generic Functions (aka RuleDispatch) By Python God: Ian Bicking
• The Random Module Presented By Mathematician: Robert Ramsdell
• PYRO (Python Remote Objects) library By our Linux lover from the Middle East: Fawad Halim

Failure of Will

We just couldn't get it together for an October meeting.

Interoperability

For the September meeting we had:

• John Hunter, author of the matplotlib plotting package, will introduce

  us to using SWIG, the most common glue strategy in the Python world

• Brian Ray will introduce us to strategies to call python from C, and

  tell us a bit about his GULP project

• Michael Tobis will present an overview of Python interoperability

  pointing to tools to interoperate with Java, Fortran and others

Middleproxy, Distutils, pdb

For the August meeting, we did:

• Aaron Lav talked about Unicode and middleproxy. The talk is here.
• A talk on distutils and setuptools -- how to use Python packages, and how to make your own. The talk is at http://ianbicking.org/docs/setuptools-presentation
• As the first installment in our "standard module of the month" club, an introduction to the pdb library. Here's a promised link to a nice pdb tutorial.

A Triplet

For the July meeting, we did:

• Adrian Holovaty will be giving a preview of his new web framework Django.
• Ian Bicking will discuss some functional programming techniques available in Python.

This was cancelled, unfortunately:

• John Hunter will talk about using Python with C and C++ projects.

Lightning! Boom!

For the June meeting, we had an extensive series of lightning talks:

• Michael Tobis told us about operator overloading, with an example of how he gets around writing regular expressions (he hates them, he‚Äôs in the minority).
• Robert Ramsdell compared Tkinter and wxPython (no clear verdict).
• Chris McAvoy talked about mx.DateTime.
• Jason Gessner presented Myghty .
• Ed Summers showed us pylucene .
• Adrian Holovaty lifted the curtain on chicagocrime.org .
• Jason Huggins presented his web testing suite, Selenium .

Chris , Ed, and Jason all have commentary, check it out!

Web programming in Python with Paste

Ian Bicking presented a tutorial Python web programming, using several different systems: Python Paste, Webware/WebKit, Zope Page Templates (not just for Zope!), and SQLObject. The technology covered is similar to those presented in the To-Do tutorial. Except live and in person.

Subversion and Making Apples from Applesauce

The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community.

Brian Fitzpatrick will tell us about how to use Subversion, the Python bindings, and about cvs2svn, which he was one of the leads on-- Fitz says that 'cvs2svn is the most difficult piece of code I've ever written--I'm going to write a paper for CodeCon next year about it called "Making Apples from Applesauce." '

SimPy and WSGIKit

Robert Ramsdell told us about SimPy , an object-oriented, process-based discrete-event simulation language based on standard Python. It provides the modeler with components of a simulation model including processes, for active components like customers, messages, and vehicles, and resources, for passive components that form limited capacity congestion points like servers, checkout counters, and tunnels. It also provides monitor variables to aid in gathering statistics. Here is Robert's SimPy presentation .

Ian Bicking told us about WSGIKit , which implements both WSGI Webware and a set of Webware-neutral WSGI middleware components that WSGI Webware is built on top of. WSGI is a middleware layer to allow interoperability of Python web applications which implements PEP333.

Matplotlib

John Hunter of the University of Chicago School of Medicine gave a presentation on Matplotlib, a Python package for scientific plotting that (among other things) emulates Matlab plotting. Matplotlib is a python 2D plotting library which produces publication quality figures using in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive GUI environments across platforms. matplotlib can be used in python scripts, interactively from the python shell (as in matlab or mathematica), in web application servers generating dynamic charts, or embedded in GUI applications.

Jython

On Thursday 13 January 2005, Brian Zimmer gave a presentation on Jython.

Jython is an implementation of Python that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. Brian recently receive a grant from the Python Software Foundation for his project Moving Jython Forward.

Testing

We talked about testing. A bit about Fit, a bit about py.test, a bit about doctest. See the py.test presentation.

Topics: Cat Feeder & SQLobject

On Thursday 11 November 2004, we talked about Chris McAvoy's cat feeder:

Ian Bicking gave a presentation on SQLObject -- you can see the presentation here.

Chris McAvoy says: Yes, it's a cat feeder that talks to Python, which talks to you, via the world wide internet. The interface to the feeder can be found at http://kittens.lonelylion.com.

LEO

On Thursday October 14 2004, We met at SMS on North Michigan Avenue again. Edward Ream told us about his open source pythonic tool for "literate programming", LEO.

Leo is an outlining editor that creates and displays relationships between code and data in a new way; you can't do what Leo does with Emacs or any other tool. Leo shows these relationships in an outline using noweb, a simple markup language.

Edward's talk will briefly discuss outlines, noweb and clones, and then show how these three powerful features can be combined to clarify and simplify all aspects of programming: design, coding, testing and unit test, maintenance, data management and project management.

SpamBayes

On Thursday, September 9 2004, we met at Imaginary Landscape LLC on Chicago's North side.

Skip Montanaro told us about his Pythonic efforts in combating Spam through the SpamBayes project.

Paraphrasing from the SpamBayes Page on SourceForge , it is an effort at developing a Bayesian anti-spam filter, initially based on the work of Paul Graham. The major difference between SpamBayes and other, similar projects is the emphasis on testing newer approaches to scoring messages. While most anti-spam projects are still working with the original Graham algorithm, SpamBayes uses a number of alternate methods that yielded a more useful response.

In addition to his involvement in SpamBayes, Skip is also one of the core maintainers of the Python interpreter. We also had some interesting discussion about how to contribute to Python itself.

Nevow

On Thursday, August 12th, 7pm, we met at SMS on beautiful Michigan Ave, Chicago.

Aaron Lav presented the uses of the Nevow framework, which is built on top of the Twisted server environment. Nevow describes itself as a "web application construction kit".

Aaron's slides can be found at http://www.pobox.com/~asl2/talks/nevow/out/