Montreal Python

Hello Pythonistas !

This Friday, at 9 am., we want to invite you to an unofficial montreal-python gathering, at Savoir-Faire Linux’s booth, in the St-Pierre room (across from the blue “Dinner/Lunch” room). (Hilton Bonaventure Hotel)

Proposed subjects:
- Intro to Python, for newcomers
- Hands-on Pylons, Django and TG2
- Distutils2, packaging .deb, .rpm, .egg
- Documentation in Python, Sphinx and al
- …

And more than that, you can come if you’re registered to Confoo after 13h30 ! Wow !

ConFoo starts tomorrow but that it’s not too late to register. Don’t miss that unique opportunity to meet famous Pythonistas such as Mark Pilgrim (Dive into Python), Raymond Hettinger (core Python), Tarek Ziadé (Distribute), and Antoine Pitrou (new GIL).

Montréal-Python 12 will take place at UQAM, on Monday 2010-03-22 in the Sherbrooke building. The exact room number will be announced shortly. The SH building is located at 200 Sherbrooke west, Place-des-Arts metro station.

Here is our schedule for the evening:

• 18h00: Opening
• 18h20: Announcements
• 18h30: Flash presentations
• 19h00: Break
• 19h20: Main presentation
• 20h30: Discussions and refreshments at Benelux

Our main presenter is going to be Marcin Swiatek and he’s going to talk about Generating control images for microscopy software with Python and Numpy.

Numpy is the mainstay of all things numerical in Python. I will use one of my past projects – a pipeline for testing image analysis software – to introduce Numpy. The presentation will focus on basic array manipulation, random number generators, and elementwise operations. Real math will be given silent treatment. PIL, or Python Imaging Library will appear in a supporting role.

Marcin has been working on development of life sciences software for the past 12 years. He has been a Python user since the version 1.5.2.

We still have a few spots for flash presentations so don’t hesitate to contact us if you have something that you would like to present.

We want to thank our sponsors for making Montréal-Python 12 possible:

• UQAM
• Benelux
• O’Reilly
• AESS

ConFoo brings several experts in town and we take this opportunity to launch two sprints: one on TurboGears with Chris Perkins on 2010-03-13 starting at 10h30 am and one on Distribute with Tarek Ziadé on 2010-03-15 starting at 6 pm. Both sprints will be at Brasseurs Numériques’ office, 1124 Marie-Anne, suite 11.

The TurboGears sprint will focus on polishing the code base and the documentation for the upcoming 2.1 release. Some work on the Sprox from generator and on the C5T CMS is also very likely. Anyone somewhat familiar with Pylons should be able to contribute.

The Distribute sprint will focus on implementing the newly accepted PEPs: 345, Metadata; and 386, version schemas. Anyone who’ve used Setuptools to some exetent should be able to contribute.

Bring your laptop or make a pairing agreement on with someone else. As usual, capacity is limited to 12 sprinters so please sign up on the mailing list.

The second Django sprint was another clear success. It was a pleasant surprise to have so many volunteer and we filled the Brasseurs Numériques’ office at capacity with 12 sprinters.

Thanks to Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie for sponsoring the event and a very special thank to all the sprinters:

• Davin Baragiotta
• Benoit Caron
• Stéphane Duchesneau
• Alexandre Forget
• Yannick Gingras
• Ali Jetha
• Collin Lavoie
• Martin Paquette
• Cyril Robert
• Francois Savard
• Jean Schurger
• Alexandre Vassalotti

We will try to have another translation sprint toward the end of March.

Sunday is officially the last day to register for ConFoo at the current price.

Actually, that not quite exact because as a way to thank you for reading this blog, we offer you $100 of rebate. Simply follow this link to register at the community rate: http://confoo.ca/pymontreal

You probably recall that Chris Perkins is giving a one-day training session on Web development with Python and Turbogears. You get an additional $100 of rebate if you attend to both the training and the conference. Having seen Chris in the tutorials at PyCon, I can’t put enough emphasis on how good a teacher he is. This is a very unique opportunity to get high quality training on Web development with Python right here in Montréal.

As we mentioned during the last Montréal-Python meeting, Chris Perkins, core developer of TurboGears2, will be giving a one-day hands on training on TurboGears2 on March 9th. His tutorial covers several parts of TurboGears2 that are common to Pylons so those who were interested by the presentation by Alexandre Bourget will certainly get the opportunity to dig deeper into Pylons and the other parts of the WSGI ecosystem. At $300 and with the $100 rebate if you go to conference, it’s a real bargain.

Next Friday, why not celebrate the end of the week with members of
other user groups? Montréal-Python, W3Québec, PHP-Québec, AMUG, Montréal Girl Geek Dinners, and many others invite you for a drink or two at Pub Ste-Elizabeth starting at 6pm.

When I first got the book, I was surprised by the number of pages it had (>1000).

But still, I managed to finish it relatively quickly because the font is big and the content well organized / spaced. I have also ignored a quite a few pages on how to install and configure your environment.

The target audience is without doubt beginners. If you want to learn the Python language, get the book. You won’t be sorry.

If you already know Python 2.6 you can just learn the language changes introduced in 3.0.

Read the rest of this review on Alex Gal’s blog.

Given the popularity of the first Django translation sprint, we decided to do it again. The next sprint will be on 2010-02-15 at Brasseurs Numériques’ office:

1124 Marie-Anne, suite 11,  Montréal, Qc H2J 2B7

We warmly thank Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie for supporting the event with food and drinks for every participants.

The sprint begins at 18h and ends once everyone is too tired to type. Bring your own laptop or make an arrangement for pairing on the mailing list beforehand. We only have 12 places; use the mailing list to RSVP. If you can’t join us physically, you can still participate on IRC, on #montreal-python on irc.freenode.net.