Hi All, Thursday's meeting was an enjoyable event of talks and discussions. The characterful Northern Quarter loft space and obliging projector were kindly donated by MadLab. In attendance were Anand, Chris L, Daley C, David H, David J, James B, Michael S and Safe H.
David J got the ball rolling with a talk on floating point and Python. After a quick plug for the Climate Code Foundation (http://climatecode.org) and their role in promoting Open Source in climate science, we each received an informative handout cunningly formatted as a Python interactive interpreter session. David's single but elegant slide was accompanied by a discussion on the representation of floating point in Python and how the number 0.1 cannot be accurately represented, and that p < 2.7 or (3.0 <= p < 3.1) where p = Python were thankfully the last versions of Python which don't use Guy Steele's parsimonious printing. (Try entering 0.1 in an interactive session in Python 2.6). Interesting fact: only the Cray and some Mainframes don't represent floating point using the IEEE standard. Next up, Safe H gave a talk about PyMT (http://pymt.eu), the open source cross platform multitouch library for Python. After a quick discussion about the definition of multitouch and its increasing prevalence, particularly in consumer devices at the expense of the traditional desktop paradigm, he turned to PyMT itself. With the help of a shiny new Apple Magic Trackpad, he ran a demo PyMT application to see how many coloured lines he could create on the screen to reflect the number of finger touches which could be detected. He then displayed the code to a simple "Hello, World!" application and rounded of by describing some of the built in utilities in PyMT including the animations framework. And finally, Chris L gave an impassioned talk about environmental sensors and the 1-Wire device communications system in the context of energy conservation, generation and self-sufficiency. After kindly starting with an "apology for what was to come", he admitted that he had placed 38 sensors (37 still functional) under his floorboards using the 1-Wire system. We viewed a photograph of his house complete with solar panels and other energy conservation devices all built and installed by Chris himself. He described his temperamental software controlled lighting system in his garage and his purpose built multi-hundred litre water tank complete with sensors (naturally). We also learnt what a Methane Digester was. The software domain is awash with a huge amount of sensory data which needs filtering and analysing and Python is emerging as the de facto language. The link of links is Ivan's http://www.navitron.org.uk for both equipment and information. A hearty thanks to all the speakers! After the talks we discussed plans for November's meeting and there was strong support (as already discussed on the list) for a Code Dojo. Any thoughts or experiences with this are welcomed. Similar to last month, I'll send out a quick voting link to see which day will suit most people. Cheers, Safe -- To post: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] Feeds: http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west/feeds More options: http://groups.google.com/group/python-north-west
