Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.

As life is short I will start at the end with dessert and mention that I am out of Pocky.

There is a lot going on, so consider this a quick overview of things to come (maybe).

Executive overview: Potter good, Silverlight/CLR amazing, PyCon-Tech kicking, Storm brewing, and send more Pocky.

I did finally get a chance to read the last book of Harry Potter. I broke down on vacation and went to the Book Exchange, a great used book shop. I spent about an hour visiting and rediscovering some old friends, and left with one new one. (Translation: I perused books I love, buying the first two John Saul books I ever read, and picked up HP7.) The only negative of the entire book was the epilogue. It was either too short, or too long. I would have either liked to know a bit more, or done without it. There, how is that for no spoilers? Oh, and I am ranked #37 on potterpredictions! (which is now accepting comments) Given some of the predictions people added, I suspect some gaming of the system (i.e. some people read the images posted online the week before the books release).

Just before going on vacation, there was the July Cambridge Python Meetup, on Silverlight by Chris Bowen. This was a fantastic presentation, with live running demonstrations, including a python interpreter running in firefox, with the same objects being accessed in python, javascript, and VB! I know, I know, VB… But just think about it. It’s 100% in the browser, and the same object is accessible in all virtual machines at the same time (because it is really a common VM under it all). No, it’s not slow. Say what you want about Microsoft, but you cannot say they do not do innovative and revolutionary work. Well you can say that, and people do; they are just wrong. I will do an extensive writeup on this topic later, including the (extremely poor) audio of the talk and information on the linux port later. I should also note that Chris did a fantastic job and weathered some rather pointed questions quite well.

It’s PyCon-Tech Time!!!!! I would like to give a special thank you to Noah Kantrowitz for hosting the new PyCon-Tech Trac site. This means we now have a proper bug tracking system, and a roadmap! So come to the online meeting, give feedback, and join the fun. There is a ton of work to be done. We need people to take screen shots of the system running for documentation. We need code documentation. We also need some good examples of talk proposals (most likely taken from previous years). We will also be adding some cool new features to the system. things like change history, atompub feeds, comments in the schedule, social network integration, and will be fully functional even if you have no javascript. Oh, and if you think the web site is ugly, clustered, confusing, and think you can do better? Great! Let’s talk! Thought I was going to say ‘do it’? No, I don’t expect some mythical web guru to come in and replace the entire web design and whip a site out of their proxy. It’s all about a team effort.

Tonight was the August Cambridge Python Meetup on Storm by Chris Armstrong. Storm is an ORM for a new machine management system called Landscape. I have spent some time looking over Storm and reversed my initial reaction to it. I really like the multiple database support, and the advanced caching (more like instance management) is fantastic. It is very verbose, but very slim (huh?). Many of the issues I have with the Django ORM are solved by Storm. Unfortunately all the things I love about the Django ORM are missing. It is just a very different take on DB-Object mapping than other systems, and yet looks very very similar to all the others. The python classes are not special. There are no meta classes, nothing to inherit from, no ‘magic’. Well there is SOME magic, but it is relatively thin. All in all a very contradictory system I will have a much larger post going into details on this soon. I have the presentation, and will post the audio. I was able to get my hands on a wireless mic, mixer, noise filter, amp, and digital recorder. That means the audio, for once, does not suck.

Immortal words of Gabe, ‘…tell them to bring more Pocky‘.

Peter did another fantastic job putting together this months meetup. We decided to stick with Wednesdays so we would not collide with the Plone meetup which is on Thursdays, but um… oh well…

There were two guest speakers:

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

I decided to try something new and record the event on my little sensa mp3 player. The audio is bad at best, but it is mostly audible. We were in Somerville so at some points an airplane goes overhead. If these prove useful to people I will bring better recording equipment next time. My A/V production equipment is tied up on another project so all I did was split the audio into multiple tracks and do a lame re-encode. I tried to keep the files to under 25Meg while splitting based on topics. Unfortunately meetup.com has a 10Meg per file limit and a 100Meg per group max, so that was out of the question. The first file is under 8Meg, so please check that out first and only if you can withstand the audio quality, check out the others. I and my bandwidth will appreciate 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)
• Lightning rounds with George Lambert and Mike Pittaro. (mp3, ogg)
• Open Discussion (mp3, ogg)

The software George Lambert mentions which is used to view changes in the GPLv3 draft is Plone! Though there is talk of converting the FSF web site over to a Django based one. I sent an e-mail to the lists giving better information on OLPC for those interested as well. Noah Kantrowitz responded offering to help anyone in the group get started with development.

There are a number of python events in the next few weeks, and I have started a google calendar to share and manage them. If you know of an upcoming event, let me know! If you have a local user group or schedule events, contact me (doug at dougma dot com) and I can give you admin access! If you want to keep up to date, there are ical, xml, html, RSS, and GCal Subscription links! The ical and xml links are feed based, so only outlook users will have to re-import as things change. I must say that I am digging the google non-trademarked colored sugar water. You can also embed the calendar on your site! Genius!

Forget the cute dictionary definition tonight, we all know what being backlogged is like. Too many projects, tasks, bugs, deadlines, and a sever lack of time. A co-worker once called it suffering from ‘an acute temporal deficiency and a terminal case of deadline-itous.’ Terminal in the sense that you either the item gets killed off, or you do. You can’t do it all and something has to give. June and July have been fully booked for months, and I will be making a few announcements of some interesting things soon. It looks like some plone classes, and two sprints are going to be casualties. A few of the things I have been able to get done (NOTE: these were all team efforts):

1. 15 new Yew shrubs planted in the back yard (NEE!)
2. All the beds cut, weeded, trimmed, pruned, and a huge new bed one roughed out
3. First half of the border stones are in, awaiting four yards of mulch
4. New feature productized in the engine after four years of research and development
5. Re-re-re-re-re-re-re-learned how complex SWIG typemaps can get
6. Learned how roundup differs from trac, and how it does not (conference paper submission and review, NICE!)
7. Created a detailed list of new features and code snippits to incorporate into the PyCon-Tech code base (dynamic schema creation rocks!)
8. Was present at two very successful python meetups (can’t really take credit for their success, but I actually made it to them on time!)
9. Wrapping my brain around multi-threading (ipython + Stackless + scipy + matplotlib = my new shell; too bad matplotlib is not thread safe on win32)
10. Got the LightScribe CD art done for a set of Sugar Live CD’s I am planning on burning

I have 6 other blog posts started (most very short). All last week I was sleep deprived. This weekend improved things, mainly because my body shut down. I promised myself I would not write e-mails or these posts late at night or when I was over tired, as I tend to ramble and go off on tangents. oops….

Lots to cover today. Lots of things going on and me under a deadline!

Boston/Cambridge Python Meetup - Wednesday, May 23, 2007, 7:00 PM

Boston Plone Meetup - Thursday, May 24, 2007, 7:00 PM

UPDATE: New Location for the Plone Meetup
Nature Conservancy
11 Ave. de Lafayette
Boston, MA 02111
(617) 542-1908

Peter Marquez has lined up a great speaker for the Cambridge meetup Wednesday! George Lambert of Goldenware Travel will be talking about his companies switch to python and what impacts (good and bad) this decision has had. This is not our normal day, week, or location for a meetup, but was chosen for availability of people and the guest speaker. One of the topics at the meetup will be when and where to hold future meetings, and to schedule future speakers as well as informal sessions. We will also be saying farewell to a Chris Curvey who worked hard for years managing the Boston Python Interest Group.

The Cambridge Python May Meetup

When:

Wednesday, May 23, 2007, 7:00 PM

Where:

Brickbottom Building
1 Fitchburg St, Somerville MA Suite 151 Building B
Somerville , MA 02143
617 620 3071

• Info/Map
• This venue has been marked “private” by the Organizer.

Description:

Why did you choose Python?Developers and their companies are using Python to do all kinds of tasks. From utilities to ERP systems. Why are they choosing Python over Java, C++ and other proven enterprise 3 and 4gls?At this meeting we’ll all get a chance to meet each other, learn why we’ve made this choice and what we’ve learned in the process.To kick off the meeting, I have asked George Lambert of Goldenware Travel to explain why his company has switched to Python and the benefits and challenges they are seeing.The meeting will be held at my office in Somerville. We currently have 7 RSVP’s and 10 “Maybe’s”. Of course that may change with the date change.

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Chris Curvey has been running the Boston Python Interest Group for a few years now and done a fantastic job. Work and other commitments will be keeping him from keeping this up, and for a while now he has been asking for someone else to step forward. No one person can manage everything, and a number of people have stepped forward to help out. Sally Kleinfieldt of the The Nature Conservatory will continue to host the semi-monthly formal presentations. I will deal with announcements and scheduling. Will Guaraldi offered to pay for a year of meetup.com, but we will try to get some corporate sponsorship first.

This evening was the second informal meet up of the year, held at Trident Booksellers on Newbury Street. In total there were five of us, which is about average for informal sessions rescheduled with one day notice (oops). This allowed for some intense discussion with a fair amount of depth, on a wide range of topics. I originally planned a seed discussion on a number of open source projects which are in need of more volunteer (and paid) support. We were so busy talking about education, engineering, Python 3000, and the differences between object and functional programming that we never really got to any projects besides OLPC; which is good as I left the materials on the printer at work. I love informal gatherings like this because it allows for some amazing free association and everyone comes away learning something. Hearing how others are using python and other technologies to solve real world problems or just for fun; it never gets old. Here are the highlights (as much as I can remember………)

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