Happenings in Python Usergroups

The next meeting of the Python User Group Austria (PyUGAT) will take place this Wednesday, January 19th, 2011 around 19h at the Metalab in Vienna (how to get there). You can also find us on Meetup.

Main event this time is a talk about Zope and Plone by Gogo.

The Python User Group Austria is celebrating its first birthday - one year of PyUGAT :) There will be a hands-on talk and workshop about PySide and QML for creating good-looking mobile UIs with Python. The meeting will take place on Sunday, December 12th 2010 around 19h at the Metalab in Vienna (how to get there). Wiki page for the December meeting

As always, everyone is kindly invited to join in and meet local Pythonistas in and around Vienna. Bring your scripts, projects and hacks and present your findings as lightning talk, get answers to your questions or get help with your problems.

PyUGAT is also on Meetup, Twitter and Identi.ca.

German version:

Die Python User Group Austria feiert ihren ersten Geburtstag - Ein Jahr PyUGAT :) Es wird einen Hands-On Talk und Workshop zum Thema PySide und QML geben, womit man hübsche, mobile UIs in Python erstellen kann. Gefeiert wird beim nächsten Meeting am Sonntag, 12. Dezember 2010 um ca. 19 Uhr im Wiener Metalab (Anfahrtsplan). Wiki-Seite zum Dezember-Meeting

Wie immer ist auch diesmal jede(r) herzlich eingeladen bei uns vorbei zu schauen, und Pythonistas aus der Umgebung zu treffen. Bringe deine Scripts, Projekte und Hacks und präsentiere deine Erkenntnisse in einem Lightning Talk, finde Antworten auf deine Fragen oder erhalte Hilfe bei Problemen.

PyUGAT findest du auch auf Meetup, Twitter und Identi.ca.

Authors: Reimar Bauer, Thomas Lenarz

On April 17th, 2010, pyCologne, the Python-User-Group of Cologne, Germany, welcomed about 20 participants at the first German Python-BarCamp at the site of GFU Cyrus AG in Cologne.

GFU, a Cologne based IT training company (http://www.gfu.net/), provided a set of three conference rooms, their cafeteria, and an assembly hall, which built up a perfect venue for the barcamp.

O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.de/) sponsored selected Python-books, which were raffled in addition to a special Barcamp T-Shirt among the participants. The start of the event was awaited with eager anticipation since at a barcamp the participants themselves take care of the content. pyCologne took care of the organizational preparations.

After a warm welcome from Reimar Bauer and Muharem Hrnjadovic on behalf of pyCologne and a brief round of introductions, planning of the slots using the prepared Flipcharts started immediately. Planning just finished, the participants swarmed out to join the different sessions: PyPy, Plone, MoinMoin-2.0, Django, imap2xmpp und bildout. Couchdb, from frameworks to libraries, 3D-graphics programming, Midi as well as Python and Java found enthusiastic participants, following the scheme "presentations last as long as it takes or the next slot is about to start".

To get motivated again after the lunch break with pizza and drinks, Christopher Arndt invited the participants into the sunny assembly-hall for the lightning talks: speakers talk for five minutes max, the goal is to entertain. After four minutes the moderator signals that their is one minute left and breaks off the talk after five minutes unconditionally.

Topics were: Coworking Project Cologne, pyCologne@FrOSCon, PyPy, RPX für Plone und Twitter, Zotero, html2wiki, Web-Development Client vs. Server, scriptutil for fun and profit and Django OR-M im Backend.

Again keen for action, the afternoon started with further sessions. Easily noticed by the noise of the keyboards many of the new learned topics were transferred immediately to the internet. Using the hashtags #pybar and #pybarcamp everybody from inside and outside the camp could follow the event.

After the closing session and the group-photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/12317756@N08/4530807440/sizes/o/) it was time to say goodbye to GFU.

Ben Reynwar gave us an intro to Django, including basic project setup and routing urls to python methods.

TuPLE (Tucson Python Language Enthusiasts) is off to a good start. Our first official meeting went well, with 6 attending.

Chris Merle started us off with an overview of Plone and two products that help to
inspect and interrogate the python objects in use:
DocFinderTab
DocFinderTab adds a tab to the ZMI that parses the docstrings of the class of the object you are using and presents them to you in the tab.
Clouseau
Clouseau embeds a live ajax based python interpreter into your plone site for debugging purposes. It looks to have some nice autocompletion features and lets you poke around the internals of a live instance.

Chris then demoed his news portlet modification that shows an excerpted portion of the news items (vs just the title and link), and explained how DocFinderTab and Clouseau both helped him determine which object attributes were going to be useful for displaying the content.

We had some good conversation about general interests, IDEs, reference books, and what kinds of presentations everyone is interested in. Django, advanced python, and C extensions are heading up the list for the future.

Misc. Notes:

• Civilization 4 allows mod authors to use Python to modify aspects of
  the game. Hopefully we'll hear more about it in the future.
• PyScripter - Free Windows Editor/IDE
• Core Python (http://corepython.com/) was recommended as a good
  reference, others thought the online docs were adequate.
• A couple of members are repeat pycon attendees. This year we'll have 2
  or 3 attending. April's meeting will be good for a pycon recap.
  
• A python obfuscation tool was discussed
  

Thanks to Chris for presenting and everyone for attending!

Here in Dallas we had our 2nd Saturday (April 12th) meeting at the Nerdbooks.com store. We covered a diverse set of topics, as follows:

• the Texas Python Community and regional conference planning
• the Pasta Theory of Software
• what is so bad about Potato Programming
• a New Edition of The Python Papers
  
• a survey of cool Twisted technologies, many not so well known
• Athena - a best-of-breed approach to developing interactive JavaScript (AJAX / Comet) applications
• Vertex - a better concept for a peer-to-peer technology
  
• Imaginary - simulation engine re role playing, interactive fiction, and multiplayer dungeons
• Mantissa - an application server over Axiom db, Nevow templating and Athena
  
• Axiom - an innovative database object relational mapper
  
• Nevow - template language, form processing and really cool STAN, a Pythonic DOM for XML
  
• talk and demo of the Google AppEngine
• The Decorator Module

Much of the time was on the Google AppEngine, the darling of the blogosphere at the moment. A couple of us managed to get accounts so we went through the demonstration site provided with the Google SDK, and create a trivial application at http://dfwpython.appspot.com. The AppEngine infrastructure allows one to grant development privileges to other people, so we opened this application up to experimentation by other user group members.

For more information about our group, check out our user group wiki.

-Jeff

The gathering stayed strong again this month with 2 new people joining in the fray. A presentation on mod_python, publisher and psp was given while pizza was eaten. (Funny thing about having good pizza in an Irish pub)

Talk then went on about using python in sysadmin tasks and then on to how best to setup some massive home storage. GlusterFS , ZFS and NFS. We all seem to have a need for terra type storage

A copy of "The Python Cookbook" was handed out to the winner of the door prize (Thanks O'Reilly)

After the meeting a social hour(s) ensued with wild eyed talk of google phones and grand central.

We look forward to seeing old friends and new faces at the next meeting. Details are on the website, www.OmahaPython.org .

The June meeting was a big success. We had two guest speakers and covered a lot of ground.

1. George Lambert, Goldenware Technology
2. Mike Pittaro, SnapLogic open source data integration Project implemented in 100% Python

We attempted to do a podcast of the meeting, but the audio is rather poor. Please check out the first file first, and only down load the others if you can withstand it.

NOTE: The audio is extremely soft at points and at the beginning, so you will need to crank the volume up.

• Introductions and Django.June recap (mp3, ogg)
• Mass TLC recap, and an extensive discussion on GPLv3, Licensing, Patents, and Python (mp3, ogg)
• Ligntning rounds with George Lambert and Mike Pittaro. (mp3, ogg)
• Open Discussion (mp3, ogg)

More details on the event can be found here.