From jek at discorporate.us Mon Jul 9 01:39:05 2007 From: jek at discorporate.us (jason kirtland) Date: Sun, 08 Jul 2007 16:39:05 -0700 Subject: [portland] Meeting Reminder: 7pm Tuesday July 10th at CubeSpace Message-ID: <46917599.7090906@discorporate.us> Portland Python Users Group Tuesday, July 10th 7pm **New Location**: CubeSpace This month we try out new digs at CubeSpace, located just a few blocks away from the Lucky Lab. The agenda at the moment is: - OSCON happenings & festivities - A round of lightning talks - Retire to the pub for social hour We need more lightning talks! They're fun and open to everyone at all levels of expertise. Here's how it works: you stand up and talk about something you find interesting for 5 minutes. It can be code you wrote, a module you've found, nifty Python syntax, a project you're working on, tools, a demo, anything. It's very informal and you do NOT need to be an expert! There will (likely) be a projector available for demos. Here are some topics I personally would like to hear about. Any takers? - "How I Write Python"- bring in your laptop and show how you use your editor or IDE - PyMOTW, Portland style. Pick a module from the standard library, figure out how to use it, and share with the group - Demos of Python-powered projects or works in progress - Desktop scripting tricks in OSX, Linux or Windows - ipython - The debugger - Mercurial - Embedded Python The CubeSpace room is quiet and promises to be a very pleasant place to speak and hear. Again, we need more talks- there are only a couple lightning talks lined up that I know of, and it would be great to have at least 5. CubeSpace is located at 622 SE Grand Avenue, just north of Morrison. CubeSpace occupies the second floor, above US Bank. There are a few pub options for post-presentation socializing. The Lucky Labrador is a few blocks away at SE Hawthorne and 9th. Maiden in the Mist is just around the corner from CubeSpace. The Rose and Raindrop across the street has closed, sadly. Suggestions welcome! Hope to see everyone Tuesday! Cheers, Jason From kevin at freegeek.org Mon Jul 9 02:59:51 2007 From: kevin at freegeek.org (Kevin Turner) Date: Sun, 08 Jul 2007 17:59:51 -0700 Subject: [portland] Meeting Reminder: 7pm Tuesday July 10th at CubeSpace In-Reply-To: <46917599.7090906@discorporate.us> References: <46917599.7090906@discorporate.us> Message-ID: <1183942791.24371.60.camel@grinky> On Sun, 2007-07-08 at 16:39 -0700, jason kirtland wrote: > Here are some topics I personally would like to hear about. Any takers? > > - "How I Write Python"- bring in your laptop and show how you use > your editor or IDE I like that idea. My laptop isn't actually what I use as my regular development platform, but I might be able to set it up. > - ipython Hmm. I do use ipython, but 95% of the reason I do is only that I never remember the magic you need to do to turn on tab completion in python's interactive mode. I think my ipython talk would be limited to "aptitude install ipython", "ipython", "See? Pretty colors." which is pretty short, even for a lightning talk. :) > - The debugger That'd be good. I might be able to do a quick pdb thing. Also good to see would be winpdb. Other things that I might be able to talk about include: - OpenID for Twisted, a current pet project of mine. - (or OpenID for anything else, which is my day job.) - ZenOSS. I haven't actually touched the Python in that at all, but I played with the app recently. Don't think I want to try to get it running on my laptop though. :-/ - buildbot, I guess. If I did a little more research first, I could talk about - AMP, the Asynchronous Messaging Protocol. - Foolscap, a sequel to my Perspective Broker presentation four years ago? - Q2Q / Vertex / Juice. Honestly, I have no clue, but presenting on it would force me to figure it out. ;) Some other things I'd like to hear about are - pypy and/or rpython - testing, especially testing web applications > There are a few pub options for post-presentation socializing. The > Lucky Labrador is a few blocks away at SE Hawthorne and 9th. Maiden > in > the Mist is just around the corner from CubeSpace. The Rose and > Raindrop across the street has closed, sadly. Suggestions welcome! There's the Acme on 8th. I guess there's a rumor that it's just changed hands, but as long as it's still open it's an option. Other note: It is forecast to be 100 Fahrenheit at 6 PM on Tuesday. I may die in the attempt to get from my air-conditioned office to CubeSpace by 7 pm. From adam at therobots.org Tue Jul 10 00:15:16 2007 From: adam at therobots.org (Adam Lowry) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2007 15:15:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [portland] Lightning talks Message-ID: <51461.64.242.113.150.1184019316.squirrel@merritt.hmdnsgroup.com> Has it been a month already? It's been a busy month for me, so I haven't been paying as much attention as I should have. Has anyone announced their lightning talk topic? I don't have anything cool that I've been working on to show, but if there's interest I can do a quick presentation on using mechanize to automate web forms, which is how I've done functional testing of web apps in the past. Interesting at all, or old hat? Adam From jek at discorporate.us Tue Jul 10 01:28:35 2007 From: jek at discorporate.us (jason kirtland) Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:28:35 -0700 Subject: [portland] Lightning talks In-Reply-To: <51461.64.242.113.150.1184019316.squirrel@merritt.hmdnsgroup.com> References: <51461.64.242.113.150.1184019316.squirrel@merritt.hmdnsgroup.com> Message-ID: Adam wrote: > It's been a busy month for me, so I haven't been paying as much > attention as I should have. Has anyone announced their lightning > talk topic? I don't have anything cool that I've been working on > to show, but if there's interest I can do a quick presentation on > using mechanize to automate web forms, which is how I've done > functional testing of web apps in the past. Interesting at all, > or old hat? That sounds great to me. As far as announced topics, I have two at hand- - SQLAlchemy in 5 minutes - New stuff in Python 2.5 plus Kevin mentioned a few topics he might talk on. Any others out there? -j From akf at aracnet.com Tue Jul 10 01:40:11 2007 From: akf at aracnet.com (Amy K. Farrell) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2007 16:40:11 -0700 Subject: [portland] Lightning talks In-Reply-To: <51461.64.242.113.150.1184019316.squirrel@merritt.hmdnsgroup.com> References: <51461.64.242.113.150.1184019316.squirrel@merritt.hmdnsgroup.com> Message-ID: <20070709234011.GA18894@aracnet.com> On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 03:15:16PM -0700, Adam Lowry wrote: > [... ] if there's > interest I can do a quick presentation on using mechanize to automate web > forms, which is how I've done functional testing of web apps in the past. > Interesting at all, or old hat? Sounds interesting to me, but then I'm a bit of an outlier. ;-) - Amy -- A.K. Farrell From chris at waitingforthefuture.org Tue Jul 10 03:49:22 2007 From: chris at waitingforthefuture.org (Chris Henderson) Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:49:22 -0700 Subject: [portland] Lightning talks In-Reply-To: <51461.64.242.113.150.1184019316.squirrel@merritt.hmdnsgroup.com> References: <51461.64.242.113.150.1184019316.squirrel@merritt.hmdnsgroup.com> Message-ID: <4692E5A2.20604@waitingforthefuture.org> Adam Lowry wrote: > Has it been a month already? > > It's been a busy month for me, so I haven't been paying as much attention > as I should have. Has anyone announced their lightning talk topic? I don't > have anything cool that I've been working on to show, but if there's > interest I can do a quick presentation on using mechanize to automate web > forms, which is how I've done functional testing of web apps in the past. > Interesting at all, or old hat? > A talk on mechanize would be very interesting to me, but I am a Python newb, so there isn't much that is old-hat for me ;) chris. From Ron at FascinatingElectronics.com Tue Jul 17 05:32:52 2007 From: Ron at FascinatingElectronics.com (Ron Jackson) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:32:52 -0700 Subject: [portland] Python Frontend to Microcontoller demo Message-ID: <469C3864.3090909@FascinatingElectronics.com> PDX Pythoneers, Thanks for taking a look at my demo of a Python program communicating with a USB-enabled microcontroller! I've attached the code I used. By next month I expect to have a demo using my own Python class derived from pySerial that provides convenient sending and receiving of commands. I'd like to use that to write another console application, this one to exercise the servos while reporting sensor values. And after that I'd like to do a GUI ap providing more versatile control using wxPython. I'd appreciate feedback on this code from more experienced Python programmers, particularly to use the favored Python programming style. -- Ron -- Website: http://www.FascinatingElectronics.com Fascinating Electronics Inc, 925 SW 83 Avenue, Portland, OR 97225-6307 Toll Free: 800.683.5487 Direct Dial: 503.296.8579 -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: uTerm.py Url: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/portland/attachments/20070716/481cc764/attachment.asc From jeff at taupro.com Tue Jul 17 06:11:15 2007 From: jeff at taupro.com (Jeff Rush) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 23:11:15 -0500 Subject: [portland] Python Frontend to Microcontoller demo In-Reply-To: <469C3864.3090909@FascinatingElectronics.com> References: <469C3864.3090909@FascinatingElectronics.com> Message-ID: <469C4163.3020202@taupro.com> Ron Jackson wrote: > > Thanks for taking a look at my demo of a Python program communicating with a > USB-enabled microcontroller! I've attached the code I used. Cool! > I'd appreciate feedback on this code from more experienced Python programmers, > particularly to use the favored Python programming style. You have a tiny bug in the fallback code where a COM number is not entered. You need to change serial.Serial(i) to serial.Serial('COM' + i), as you did in the try clause agove that. for i in range(256): try: s = serial.Serial(i) print s.portstr, s.close() except serial.SerialException: pass Overall the code looks fine, very Pythonic in style so far. Although I'm not in Portland, I look forward to seeing where you go with this. Looking over your website, FascinatingElectronics.com, I see you do really neat controllers. For more complex serial protocols, you might want to look into the Twisted Framework for Python (http://twistedmatrix.com/). It provides some nice asynchronous event processing facilities, where you can easily design your own serial protocol and interact with it cleanly. It takes some work to understand the async way of programming but once you do, it is very powerful. -Jeff From Ron at FascinatingElectronics.com Tue Jul 17 07:12:04 2007 From: Ron at FascinatingElectronics.com (Ron Jackson) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 22:12:04 -0700 Subject: [portland] Python Frontend to Microcontoller demo In-Reply-To: <469C4163.3020202@taupro.com> References: <469C3864.3090909@FascinatingElectronics.com> <469C4163.3020202@taupro.com> Message-ID: <469C4FA4.5050000@FascinatingElectronics.com> Jeff, Thanks for your comments! Glad to hear the code looks Pythonic! The Serial method is peculiar in that you can specify a port by a number from 0 to 255 (corresponding to COM1 to COM256), or by name 'COM1' to 'COM256'. Though apparently the name required for COM10 and above is of the form '\\\\.\\COM10'. Method makeDeviceName(9) produces the string above. What the story with all the '\' is, I'm not fully sure. Some Windows thing, I think. If the Serial method requires all those '\' for ports over 9, then I'll just take the user input and convert it to an integer, subtract one, then pass that to open the instance of Serial. The fallback code does work as presented, in that it prints out the names of all of the available commports. I would like to support both the new USB-based modules and the existing RS-232 based product (the Experimenter) with the same extension of PySerial. I'd like to keep it reasonably simple for these examples. I'll look into Twisted when I get further along. It sounds interesting. -- Ron Jeff Rush wrote: > Ron Jackson wrote: > >>Thanks for taking a look at my demo of a Python program communicating with a >>USB-enabled microcontroller! I've attached the code I used. > > > Cool! > > >>I'd appreciate feedback on this code from more experienced Python programmers, >>particularly to use the favored Python programming style. > > > You have a tiny bug in the fallback code where a COM number is not entered. > You need to change serial.Serial(i) to serial.Serial('COM' + i), as you did in > the try clause agove that. > > for i in range(256): > try: > s = serial.Serial(i) > print s.portstr, > s.close() > except serial.SerialException: > pass > > Overall the code looks fine, very Pythonic in style so far. Although I'm not > in Portland, I look forward to seeing where you go with this. > > Looking over your website, FascinatingElectronics.com, I see you do really > neat controllers. For more complex serial protocols, you might want to look > into the Twisted Framework for Python (http://twistedmatrix.com/). It > provides some nice asynchronous event processing facilities, where you can > easily design your own serial protocol and interact with it cleanly. It takes > some work to understand the async way of programming but once you do, it is > very powerful. > > -Jeff > _______________________________________________ > Portland mailing list > Portland at python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/portland > > -- Website: http://www.FascinatingElectronics.com Fascinating Electronics Inc, 925 SW 83 Avenue, Portland, OR 97225-6307 Toll Free: 800.683.5487 Direct Dial: 503.296.8579 From jek at discorporate.us Wed Jul 18 02:57:23 2007 From: jek at discorporate.us (jason kirtland) Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:57:23 -0700 Subject: [portland] July meeting wrap-up Message-ID: <59FFE21F586864518E85156C@[10.8.15.22]> Hi everyone, The July meeting was great! It was our first meeting at CubeSpace, and I think the space was well-liked by all. It was also the new group's first try at mini-presentations, and we had 4: Kevin demoed live code debugging with pdb Adam talked about automating everyday web tasks with mechanize Ron showed off his micro-controller for robots and its Python interface Jason presented basics of SQLAlchemy There was also video recording of the presentations, which I thought was pretty cool. A microphone would probably improve the quality if we want to try that again in the future. Any suggestions or requests for the August meeting? At the meeting I heard a couple requests for more introductory topics, and I fully support that as well. Code review sessions were also mentioned. There seemed to be general agreement that there should be more robots. A section for past events and topics has been added to the wiki and you can find slides from the SQLAlchemy talk there. Please feel free to add to that section, even if just linking to the modules or tools discussed. Also on the topic of code reviews and Python advice, this list is always open to questions. And the #pdxpython IRC channel on FreeNode is surprisingly active for such a small user group and in the summer months to boot. So, ask away! Lastly, I'll plug our Meetup site where you can subscribe to upcoming events and RSVP, which is very useful for anyone thinking of presenting. The service is paid up for a good stretch, courtesy of Brad, so why not use it? :) Thanks to everyone who came out and also to our presenters! Looking forward, Jason From jek at discorporate.us Sun Jul 22 06:27:38 2007 From: jek at discorporate.us (jason kirtland) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 21:27:38 -0700 Subject: [portland] Python and OSCON Week Message-ID: <46A2DCBA.4060702@discorporate.us> OSCON week 2007 is upon us! Many of you are probably saturated with event info, so I'll just very quickly recap my somewhat biased and haphazard list of Pythonic free events and shindigs: * Monday: Python Advocacy BoF, Monday 6:30-7:30pm * Tuesday: Open Source Hardware @ Powell's Technical 6pm DIY hardware with Make magazine's Phil Torrone FOSCON @ Holocene 7:30pm Yes, it's Ruby, but check out Greg Borenstein's presentation about his experiences writing a Ruby wrapper for the Arduino micro-controller * Wednesday: OSCamp 9am-6pm Will there be a Python track? Could be! Exhibit Hall 10am-5pm Check out the Tux Droid, a Linux-powered, Python-controlled robot at the KySoH booth "Beautiful Code" @ Powell's Technical Wednesday 7:30-8:30 Panel discussion with Ward Cunningham, chromatic, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Andy Oram, and Simon Peyton-Jones General Python BoF, 8:30-9:30pm Don't miss this one! * Thursday OSCamp 9am-6pm Exhibit Hall 10am-5pm BeerForge @ the Thirsty Lion Pub 6-8:30pm Grab an invite from one of the sponsors in the exhibit hall Chandler BoF, 7:30-8:30pm Plone BoF, 8:30-9:30pm Also, a convention badge will get you 20% off the full selection of new books at the downtown Powell's Technical during the convention. The free exhibit hall pass is needed for most of these events. If you're thinking about checking out Oscamp, check the mailing list archives for a registration code that also gets you free lunch. Hope to see everyone there! Cheers, Jason From altis at semi-retired.com Mon Jul 23 04:01:07 2007 From: altis at semi-retired.com (Kevin Altis) Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 19:01:07 -0700 Subject: [portland] OSCON 2007 guest pass availability Message-ID: <69B8B5E9-0780-4AB6-ADB9-0DD5F46C7B96@semi-retired.com> I wanted to let everyone know that O'Reilly was kind enough to give me a guest pass for use by one person at a time from the Python user group. In addition, I was able to confirm late this afternoon that the pass can also be used for the tutorial sessions on Monday and Tuesday. Chris Henderson will be using the pass tomorrow so he can attend the Django Master Class. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/58/tutorials.html At the last meeting, I think Jeff was the only other person besides Chris that spoke up about attending OSCON that hadn't already registered, but if anyone else is interested in attending the Tuesday tutorials or keynotes and sessions on Wednesday - Friday, please contact me ASAP at my email address altis at semi-retired.com, so that we can coordinate who has the pass during the week and where to meet to exchange it. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/58/keynotes.html http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/58/sessions.html Please browse the schedules above and let me know which items you're most interested in if you want to make use of the pass so I can work out any conflicts that might arise. Thanks, ka --- Kevin Altis altis at semi-retired.com