From wam at cisco.com  Mon Apr  2 22:16:36 2007
From: wam at cisco.com (William McVey)
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:16:36 -0400
Subject: [CentralOH] Long time python programmer,
	first time Ohian... (Buckeye?)
Message-ID: <1175544997.6418.55.camel@tardis.cisco.com>

Hey folks, I've been a (quiet) member of the list since it formed (as I
knew I'd be moving before long). Well I've now moved up here to
Cincinnati from Austin TX and felt it was time to introduce myself. I've
been using python for the past 7+ years (former perl/awk/bash/C
programmer), writing a lot of code I can't really talk about, but also
contributing to a variety of various pre-existing open tools. In the
past year or so, I've done quite a bit of web development in Django, but
most of my work with python has been in networking protocols, security
testing and text/XML processing. I've been to the past couple of PyCon's
and am looking forward to PyCon 2008 (convenient that it followed me up
from TX to the midwest).

I've not seen much activity on the list. Are there ever
meetings/presentations within this group? Any other pythoneers residing
here in Cinci?

  -- William

From catherine.devlin at gmail.com  Tue Apr 10 04:19:27 2007
From: catherine.devlin at gmail.com (Catherine Devlin)
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 22:19:27 -0400
Subject: [CentralOH] Long time python programmer,
	first time Ohian... (Buckeye?)
In-Reply-To: <1175544997.6418.55.camel@tardis.cisco.com>
References: <1175544997.6418.55.camel@tardis.cisco.com>
Message-ID: <6523e39a0704091919x5d569b5an4dfef3f5e769fb85@mail.gmail.com>

Hi, William, and welcome!

Well, we're pretty much an embryonic group right now - the main purpose of
the mailing list is to keep track of each other so we can start to plan for
some events.  With luck, eventually we'll start up regular meetings once
we've got enough people to form critical mass.

Sorry, we named the group centralOH, which doesn't sound all that inviting
to Cinci folks.  But not-cleveland at python.org would be a little clumsy.
Hopefully you won't be the only Cinci person involved.  Oh!  You just
reminded me - I have to follow up with a PyCon contact who said he knew some
Cincinnati Pythonistas.

In the meantime, the mission is to get that critical mass... so let
everybody who might be interested in the mailing list know about it.  And
kidnap innocent children and brainwash them into the joys of Python.

Actually, I've got some brainwashing coming up - I'm repeating that intro to
Python talk I gave at Dayton Perl Mongers this coming Friday at a Wright
State ACM chapter meeting.  Wish me luck!  In the meantime, the Mongers have
scheduled a Ruby speaker for April.  Turncoats.  ;)

On 4/2/07, William McVey <wam at cisco.com> wrote:
>
> Hey folks, I've been a (quiet) member of the list since it formed (as I
> knew I'd be moving before long). Well I've now moved up here to
> Cincinnati from Austin TX and felt it was time to introduce myself. I've
> been using python for the past 7+ years (former perl/awk/bash/C
> programmer), writing a lot of code I can't really talk about, but also
> contributing to a variety of various pre-existing open tools. In the
> past year or so, I've done quite a bit of web development in Django, but
> most of my work with python has been in networking protocols, security
> testing and text/XML processing. I've been to the past couple of PyCon's
> and am looking forward to PyCon 2008 (convenient that it followed me up
> from TX to the midwest).
>
> I've not seen much activity on the list. Are there ever
> meetings/presentations within this group? Any other pythoneers residing
> here in Cinci?
>
>   -- William
>

-- 
- Catherine
http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/
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From steven.huwig at gmail.com  Wed Apr 18 02:20:29 2007
From: steven.huwig at gmail.com (Steven Huwig)
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 20:20:29 -0400
Subject: [CentralOH] from __future__ import central_oh_python_user_group ?
Message-ID: <668ED4E0-F188-4569-A10F-76C74E5B5A2F@acm.org>

Hello,

I came across this mailing list while looking for a Python user
group in central Ohio.  I'm happy to report that I've found one!

I don't get to work with Python as much as I'd like, but I am an
enthusiast that uses it as much as possible.  Very recently, I
have coded up a simple Tkinter interface to automate the testing
of a web-based data transformation program.  That pleasant
experience is what made me go web searching...

I'm also an avid GNU Emacs user and would like to hear from any
other Emacs users.  The Python mode in the upcoming Emacs 22
release is a significant improvement over earlier efforts.

Hope to see/hear from you soon,

Steve Huwig


From robenalt at gmail.com  Wed Apr 18 04:54:24 2007
From: robenalt at gmail.com (John Robenalt)
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:54:24 -0400
Subject: [CentralOH] Hello
Message-ID: <2cc159ec0704171954j1bfefcfdr285f4ae9168a86e4@mail.gmail.com>

Hi

I am from the Cincy area and using python ( mostly TurboGears for web apps
and some custom integration work)

Just thought I would say hi to the group

John Robenalt
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From gacsinger at gmail.com  Wed Apr 18 04:58:04 2007
From: gacsinger at gmail.com (Greg Singer)
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:58:04 -0400
Subject: [CentralOH] from __future__ import central_oh_python_user_group
	?
In-Reply-To: <668ED4E0-F188-4569-A10F-76C74E5B5A2F@acm.org>
References: <668ED4E0-F188-4569-A10F-76C74E5B5A2F@acm.org>
Message-ID: <b032e3360704171958u75b09fal2bf099173335241d@mail.gmail.com>

Welcome, Steven. Unfortunately I think you'll find this to be an
extremely low-traffic list with only a handful of members.
Nevertheless, we're obviously all living in the central-OH region and
we're all enthusiastic about Python. I suppose we're just not sure
what to do about it!

 - Greg

From pythondevdang at lazytwinacres.net  Wed Apr 18 14:00:33 2007
From: pythondevdang at lazytwinacres.net (Daniel 'Dang' Griffith)
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 08:00:33 -0400
Subject: [CentralOH] That for Which I Use Python
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20070418070238.02ce6340@mail.jencospeed.net>

I use Python primarily for text manipulation. Some of my first "real" work
with it was parsing Delphi source files, and extracting various metrics
from the code, including a call-reference map. I used the excellent
Pyparsing framework (pyparsing.wikispaces.com), developed by Paul
McGuire. (Interesting anecdote:after a few emails to/from Paul, we discovered
that we both attended university at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
although he had graduated by the time I started.)

I'm currently using it to analyze Microsoft SQL Server TSQL code, as
part of an effort to migrate it into Oracle PL/SQL. If you ever want a
regular expression that can suck your Oracle procedure declarations out
of a package or procedure, including the name, parameters, and their types,
just let me know. I haven't used Pyparsing on this effort, and I'm 
not sure why.
Probably because there is too much grammar for me to define, and it has
seemed that simply processing a line at a time is working (thank goodness the
source files are consistently formatted).

I've written an RPN calculator that supports input of binary, hex, and decimal,
and ASCII; supports multiplier suffixes of e, pi, k (kilo), m (mega), 
g (giga), and t (tera);
and displays the results in hex and if the value is within range, 
ASCII. It supports
trig functions, binary manipulations, and so on. It's no big deal, 
but it's kind of neat
to head a presentation on IPv6, and being able to enter "rpn 2 128 
**" and have it
spit back out 0.34 duodecilion (well, it doesn't spit *that* out--it 
spits out the 39-digit
value).

I've written a program that analyzes PowerBuilder source files (exported from
the PBL), and produces a cross reference of stored procedure calls. Well, the
stored procedures that are called from code, not from DataWindow queries.

I wrote a mind-numbingly simple program to help someone remember things
by rote. This started from a C version I wrote maybe 15years ago when a
friend and I were taking a Japanese language course, when we both lived
in California. I moved out of state, and we don't communicate as often as we
should, but out of the blue, last year, he asked if I had such a program he
could run on his Mac. It was a quickie, and fun as well. It worked 
the first time,
once he added a line to tell the Mac where to find the Python interpreter.

I've experimented a little with PAMIE (pamie.sourceforge.net), a program that
lets you use Python to control Internet Explorer. I used it to 
develop a "proof
of concept" for GUI-testing a web-based I was part of developing. But PAMIE
is a little too low-level to just hand off to our test team (or even 
most of our
developers).  I was in the process of writing a wrapper, that would use the
terminology we used on the project, instead of the IE-specific and DOM-based
terms, but then I was assigned other work, and never finished it. If anyone is
interested in controlling IE, PAMIE is worth considering.

I've also done some tinkering with Jython, but I've not embedded it in an
Oracle database, or anything fancy. I just used it to experiment with
interactively developing a Java GUI, without needing a fully compiled
program just to open a window.

Actually, I've done very little at all with GUI and Python. I played 
with Tkinter
when I started using Python, and have played with wxPython. But most of
my work seems to not require a GUI, so I've never spent the time learning
a library well enough for it to seem easy or natural. If anyone has used one
enough to make a recommendation, I'd appreciate it.

I've been working on a long-term (due to time availability) project to analyze
a data model (using foreign key constraints to determine relationships). The
user then specifies a set of data from a single table, and the program will
extract the complete set of dependent data. The purpose of this would be
to extract meaningful development/test data from databases too large to
host in a developer's environment. Instead, meaningful and complete subsets
could be used, instead. I have it to the point where it can parse a schema
(exported from Oracle) and generate a simple set of SELECT queries. As with
the PAMIE project, I have the proof-of-concept, but have not had time to
complete the project.

I just thought I'd pass that along, in case you know anyone in your 
organization who
could be using Python for doing things like these.

Have a nice day!
     --dang


From wam at cisco.com  Thu Apr 19 18:19:28 2007
From: wam at cisco.com (William McVey)
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:19:28 -0400
Subject: [CentralOH] That for Which I Use Python
In-Reply-To: <6.2.3.4.2.20070418070238.02ce6340@mail.jencospeed.net>
References: <6.2.3.4.2.20070418070238.02ce6340@mail.jencospeed.net>
Message-ID: <1176999568.5956.48.camel@tardis.cisco.com>

On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 08:00 -0400, Daniel 'Dang' Griffith wrote:
> I use Python primarily for text manipulation. Some of my first "real" work
> with it was parsing Delphi source files, and extracting various metrics
> from the code, including a call-reference map. I used the excellent
> Pyparsing framework (pyparsing.wikispaces.com), developed by Paul
> McGuire. 

Hey, cool. I'm a fellow pyparsing fan. I first used it a few years ago
to build a parser for a subset of a SQL dialect being used by the OVAL
project (before they migrated their data format to XML). Later, I ended
up using it to help in the parsing of IOS config files.

> I've experimented a little with PAMIE (pamie.sourceforge.net), a program that
> lets you use Python to control Internet Explorer. I used it to 
> develop a "proof
> of concept" for GUI-testing a web-based I was part of developing.

If the testing you want to perform is at the level of controlling IE,
then another test approach that you might want to consider (or at least
be aware of) is Selenium (http://openqa.org/selenium/). Selenium is a
Javascript application that runs in your browser (supported under IE,
Firefox, Safari, etc) that reads test definitions out of an HTML file
and uses iframes to execute the particular test. The test definitions
are able to use higher level constructs than "raw" Javascript. In fact,
you can even code your tests in python and then convert that python code
into the HTML pages that are used by the Selenium (using
make_selenium.py -
http://joker.linuxstuff.pl/documentation/make_selenium). You can also
now use python scripts to speak to Selenium Remote Control
(http://www.openqa.org/selenium-rc/) (a web application) which can end
up controlling an browser running the Selenium javascript test engine.

The great thing about Selenium over an approach like pamie is that the
same testcases you write to test IE's behaviour with your web app can be
reused to test the other browser's use as well. This includes testing
things like AJAX interactions within the browser doing the testing.

> Actually, I've done very little at all with GUI and Python. I played 
> with Tkinter
> when I started using Python, and have played with wxPython. But most of
> my work seems to not require a GUI, so I've never spent the time learning
> a library well enough for it to seem easy or natural. If anyone has used one
> enough to make a recommendation, I'd appreciate it.

Most of my GUI work has been under Linux. I like the pygnome and pygtk
libraries for GUI work (especially libglade, along with the glade
interface builder) and can generally get something that works cranked
out pretty quickly. On the other hand, it's really hard to beat the
portability and native look/feel of wxPython. I really wish it was as
easy to use as the pygnome and glade combination. I was left
dissatisfied with my experimentation with wxglade as well as Boa
Constructor.

> I've been working on a long-term (due to time availability) project to analyze
> a data model (using foreign key constraints to determine relationships). The
> user then specifies a set of data from a single table, and the program will
> extract the complete set of dependent data. The purpose of this would be
> to extract meaningful development/test data from databases too large to
> host in a developer's environment. Instead, meaningful and complete subsets
> could be used, instead. I have it to the point where it can parse a schema
> (exported from Oracle) and generate a simple set of SELECT queries. As with
> the PAMIE project, I have the proof-of-concept, but have not had time to
> complete the project.

Are you familar with the various ORM's that exist for python? In
particular, it sounds like your project could fairly easily be
accomplished with SQLAlchemy or perhaps Django's ORM (you'd have to use
the multiple-database-support branch if you wanted to be able to write
your subset of data to new db.)

> I just thought I'd pass that along, in case you know anyone in your 
> organization who
> could be using Python for doing things like these.

Thanks! It's always interesting to hear what other people are using
Python to do and especially the approaches they choose to solve real
problems.

  -- William



From wam at cisco.com  Thu Apr 19 17:43:04 2007
From: wam at cisco.com (William McVey)
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:43:04 -0400
Subject: [CentralOH] from __future__ import	central_oh_python_user_group
	?
In-Reply-To: <668ED4E0-F188-4569-A10F-76C74E5B5A2F@acm.org>
References: <668ED4E0-F188-4569-A10F-76C74E5B5A2F@acm.org>
Message-ID: <1176997384.5956.17.camel@tardis.cisco.com>

On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 20:20 -0400, Steven Huwig wrote:
> I'm also an avid GNU Emacs user and would like to hear from any
> other Emacs users.  The Python mode in the upcoming Emacs 22
> release is a significant improvement over earlier efforts.
> 
> Hope to see/hear from you soon,

Hey Steve, welcome to the group. Personally, I'm a vi/vim guy, but at
the recent PyCon conference, I overheard the statement that to get the
latest/greatest python mode for Emacs, the best resource is to get it
from the python-mode project on sourceforge
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/python-mode). This was the project
forked off from the main Python distribution when Barry Warsaw ran out
of time/energy to work on Misc/python-mode.el from the main Python
distribution. 

Looking at the subversion logs for the sourceforge project seems to make
me think the project is fairly stable (stagnant?). There have been a
grand total of 3 edits in the past year; although it doesn't seem to be
abandoned entirely, since the last rev was little more than a month ago
to have it support the new 'with' keyword.

  -- William

From pythondevdang at lazytwinacres.net  Tue Apr 24 23:51:31 2007
From: pythondevdang at lazytwinacres.net (Daniel 'Dang' Griffith)
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 17:51:31 -0400
Subject: [CentralOH] That for Which I Use Python
In-Reply-To: <1176999568.5956.48.camel@tardis.cisco.com>
References: <6.2.3.4.2.20070418070238.02ce6340@mail.jencospeed.net>
	<1176999568.5956.48.camel@tardis.cisco.com>
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20070424174013.02cf8568@mail.lazytwinacres.net>

At 12:19 PM 4/19/2007, William McVey wrote:
>On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 08:00 -0400, Daniel 'Dang' Griffith wrote:
> > I've experimented a little with PAMIE (pamie.sourceforge.net), a 
> program that
> > lets you use Python to control Internet Explorer. I used it to
> > develop a "proof
> > of concept" for GUI-testing a web-based I was part of developing.
>
>If the testing you want to perform is at the level of controlling IE,
>then another test approach that you might want to consider (or at least
>be aware of) is Selenium (http://openqa.org/selenium/). Selenium is a
>Javascript application that runs in your browser (supported under IE,
>Firefox, Safari, etc) that reads test definitions out of an HTML file
>and uses iframes to execute the particular test. The test definitions
>are able to use higher level constructs than "raw" Javascript. In fact,
>you can even code your tests in python and then convert that python code
>into the HTML pages that are used by the Selenium (using
>make_selenium.py -
>http://joker.linuxstuff.pl/documentation/make_selenium). You can also
>now use python scripts to speak to Selenium Remote Control
>(http://www.openqa.org/selenium-rc/) (a web application) which can end
>up controlling an browser running the Selenium javascript test engine.
>
>The great thing about Selenium over an approach like pamie is that the
>same testcases you write to test IE's behaviour with your web app can be
>reused to test the other browser's use as well. This includes testing
>things like AJAX interactions within the browser doing the testing.

Thanks--I'll have to look into that. Unfortunately, we won't be able 
to use the Selenium IDE.
A mandatory third-party framework we use explicitly checks for and 
requires IE. I don't
know if there is any DOM or event things that actually require IE, 
but it's too late to
worry about that.

> > I've been working on a long-term (due to time availability) 
> project to analyze
> > a data model (using foreign key constraints to determine 
> relationships). The
> > user then specifies a set of data from a single table, and the program will
> > extract the complete set of dependent data. The purpose of this would be
> > to extract meaningful development/test data from databases too large to
> > host in a developer's environment. Instead, meaningful and complete subsets
> > could be used, instead. I have it to the point where it can parse a schema
> > (exported from Oracle) and generate a simple set of SELECT queries. As with
> > the PAMIE project, I have the proof-of-concept, but have not had time to
> > complete the project.
>
>Are you familar with the various ORM's that exist for python? In
>particular, it sounds like your project could fairly easily be
>accomplished with SQLAlchemy or perhaps Django's ORM (you'd have to use
>the multiple-database-support branch if you wanted to be able to write
>your subset of data to new db.)

Actually, I just happened across an article by Catherine Devlin, or 
some other ORM.
Like I said, the project is long term due to limited time resources. 
Looking into those
further is also on my list of things to look into.

     --dang 


From catherine.devlin at gmail.com  Wed Apr 25 23:06:01 2007
From: catherine.devlin at gmail.com (Catherine Devlin)
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:06:01 -0400
Subject: [CentralOH] Ohio LinuxFest
Message-ID: <6523e39a0704251406k211bf95ak85f29362d7f777e4@mail.gmail.com>

Well, the call for speakers for Ohio LinuxFest 2007 (Sep. 29) is up (
www.ohiolinux.org/speakers.html)... what are we going to do about it?

I'm thinking that I could give my Intro-to-Python-with-crashing-planets talk
there, in hopes of grabbing some people who've never quite taken the plunge
to learn their Python.  But I think it would be great if we had some other
stuff there, too.  Some less-introductory talks?  Talks on hot topics, like
web app platforms?

A Birds-of-a-Feather workshop, at the very least - maybe a couple.

A sprint of our own on the day after?

One thing that would be really topical and that I'd really like to
understand better - either to mention in my own talk, or (better) to see as
a full talk by somebody who does understand it - is hacking Linux with
Python.  For instance, I know that Ubuntu and the OLPC project both rely
heavily on Python, but I've really never seen how.  Do we have anybody among
us who gets it?  Hmm... if we don't, I slightly know Jorge Castro, and maybe
he could be talked into presenting on it.

What else?  Brainstorm!

-- 
- Catherine
http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/
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