Montreal Python

Montréal-Python 13 will take place at UQAM, on Monday 2010-04-26 in room SH-3420 of the Sherbrooke building. 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

Flash Presenters will be:

• Hao Deng on Pointfree Functional Programming in Python
• Pierre Thibault on ipython
• Alexandre Bourget on WebUndo
• Sébastien Pierre on a surprise topic
• Yannick Gingras on the Montréal-Python wiki

Our main presenter is going to be Andrew Francis and he’s going to talk about Implementing Go’s select in Stackless Python.

Google’s introduction of the Go language raised eyebrows in the Stackless Python community. Although very different languages, Go and Stackless Python’s concurrency model share a common ancestor: the Bell Labs family of languages (i.e., Newsqueak, Limbo). The common feature are channels: a synchronous message passing mechanism based on Tony Hoare’s Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP).

Both Go and Python have channels. However with the select language statement. Go has the ability to wait on multiple channels simultaneously. Stackless Python does not have this feature.

This talk discusses implementing a Select like feature in Stackless Python. The technique will be to prototype the feature with stackless.py – the PyPy’s project implementation of Stackless Python written in Python!

Along the way, audience will learn Stackless Python basics and get a glimpse at greenlets and PyPy. In the process, the audience will see how Stackless Python’s API reflects philosophical differences between Go and Stackless Python’s approach to concurrency.

Living in Montréal, Andrew Francis has an academic background in the humanities, computer science, and management. Professionally, Andrew has worked at companies such as BNR, Omnimark, and Adobe Systems in California. Ever since 2005, Andrew has been playing with Stackless Python, as a part of his work with WS-BPEL, and he has never looked back! At Pycon 2008, Andrew gave the talk “Adventures in Stackless Python/Twisted Integration.”

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.

Thanks to our sponsors for making Montréal-Python 13 possible:

• UQAM
• Benelux
• Savoir-faire Linux
• Ecometrica
• Apress

Given the popularity of the first and second Django translation sprints, we decided to keep going. The next sprint will be on 2010-03-31 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 participant.

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 seats; 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.

We are happy to annouce the list of flash presentations for Montréal-Python 12 next Monday:

• Antoine Reversat — Python for Sysadmins
• Francis Piéraut — Jython and Tomcat
• Sébastien Pierre — Rugg: crash-testing for your hard drives
• Hadrien David — Déploiement sur AppEngine
• Gary Haran — Montreal, from Ghetto to Hub

We recently held both a Distribute and a TurboGears sprint and both were really successful.

The TurboGears sprint, mentored by Chris Perkins, was the most informal and probably the hardest to contribute to but we still got a very good participation. Sprinters were:

• Alice Bevan-McGregor
• Nicolas Cadou
• Yannick Gingras
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel
• Chris Perkins
• Antoine Pitrou
• Alexandre Vassalotti
• Tarek Ziadé

The Distribute sprint was shorter but since packagin touches everyone, it was expected that more people would show up. Tarek Ziadé did a good introduction to get everyone up to speed and he was very pro active with the coaching. Tarek has a longer write-up of the Distribute sprint on his blog.

Distribute sprinters were:

• Ahmed Al-Saadi
• Davin Baragiotta
• Nicolas Cadou
• Yannick Gingras
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel
• Thomas Noël
• Antoine Pitrou
• Jean Schurger
• Alexandre Vassalotti
• Tarek Ziadé

Both sprints were held at Brasseur Numériques’ office and Ubity, provider of VoIP solution in Montréal, deserves a special thank for supplying the food for the Distribute sprint.

It turns out that sprints are a very effective way to get our local Pythonistas to work together and to share tips on how to be efficient with Python. Stay tuned because we will certainly organize more of these.

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 room SH-3420 of the Sherbrooke building. 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

Flash presenters will be:

• Antoine Reversat — Python for Sysadmins
• Francis Piéraut — Jython and Tomcat
• Sébastien Pierre — Rugg: crash-testing for your hard drives
• Hadrien David — Déploiement sur AppEngine
• Gary Haran — Montreal, from Ghetto to Hub

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
• Savoir-faire Linux
• Ecometrica
• O’Reilly