Aug 12 2005
August ChiPy Meeting
We had three great presentations tonight. asl2/”>Aaron Lav gave us a rundown on the current state of Unicode (in Python, and out in the world in general), and showed us his Chinese language annotator. It’s a pretty neat system. You set it as your proxy server, and it rewrites Chinese language pages with links from the individual characters on the page to their literal translation. He built the system as a step towards learning the language, but ended up learning more about Unicode than Chinese.
Ian Bicking compared and contrasted distutils and setuptools. The number of options for packaging your Python modules is increasing as of late, so it was good to survey the territory.
Finally, tobis/”>Michael Tobis kicked off a new series of presentations aimed at the Python new-folks. He covered the Python Debugger. Although it was geared for people new to Python, it ended up being very informative for the whole room.
We’re going to continue making at least one presentation per month focus on relatively beginner level introductory stuff, and mix it up with more advanced presentations. Next month Brian Ray has offered to give a presentation on embedded Python, and someone (still up in the air who exactly) will most likely give a presentation on extending Python. It should be a good September.
The meeting was held at Imaginary Landscapes, who also provided pizza and pop for everyone. Thanks Landscapers!
Incidentally, we made a couple of half-assed attempts at recording the presentations. A variety of technical gotchas may make them un-watch-a-listen-able. We’ll see. It was a good experiment. We consistently have great presentations at the ChiPy meetings, and we’re trying to get the content out there folks that can’t make it in person.
