[portland] June 12 Meetup

[kirby urner]

I may have to miss this given a longstanding prior appointment.  Have
a Hawthorne Best Bitter for me (my fave at Lucky Lab).

Re local advocacy, PORPIG had guest speakers from neighboring
domains a lot e.g. Ward Cunningham of Wiki fame and the man
behind YAML, high in the Perl community but happy to talk Python.
I think we should reach out to our open source peers whenever
possible, helps counter the tendency of tourists to think it's about
flame wars.

I may have more good stories soon as the organizers behind
Europython have offered to pay my way again, as they did to
"Goth Town" (Gothenburg) in 2005.  My paper that year was on
Pythonic Math.  This year I'm adding more front matter.

Europython 2005:
http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/urner_europython4.pdf

Europython 2007:
http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/urner_europython_2007.pdf

I'm exploring finding an affordable place to stay in Vilnius for the
duration.  Something of a puzzle.

Also on the subject of advocacy, I could see ranking ISPs on their
Python friendliness.

I got one of mine, Digital Space, to install Python 2.2 on my host
(bunker.frogspace.net) awhile back, and now I'm asking for
Python 2.5 as well, given I have a cgi script that uses string.Template
(new in 2.4 http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/304004)

This time I'm encountering foot dragging, I think because ISPs
make their big bucks off no maintenance accounts and people like
me, a minority, seem like pains in the butt, even though we're the
ones who drive word of mouth, as recognized "computer gurus" in
our respective communities (I've directed a lot of people to Digital
Space over the years).

Anyway, I'm not suggesting getting ugly or anything, just rewarding
ISPs with strong Python (whatever that means) for their making our
lives easier.  It's more about recognizing excellence where we find it,
than about any kind of stigmatizing.

Finally, when a user group gets big, I think it's great to specialize
around ongoing themes e.g. web framework versus relational
database versus wx and/or qt, versus Zope/Plone (a subculture all
its own).  I'd like to work on my SQLAlchemy skills, plus I just had
a meeting about doing more with X3D (successor to VRML) -- both
areas I've worked in before, but there're lots of new wrinkles.

Kirby