Hi Everyone, Many thanks to all who could make it to last Thursday's Python Northwest meeting for a great evening. Below is a potted summary. Next meeting will be a coding meeting on 15th March. See you there ...
""" In a break from the norm, we went round the table and talked about interesting Python libraries we'd recently seen or used. In order: Safe presented pyPdf (http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/), a library for manipulating PDF files (e.g. chopping and combining pages, extracting text and decrypting files) and commented on its usefulness in unit testing PDF report generation. The pyPdf library is not designed for generating PDF's, so reportlab (http://www.reportlab.com) was also presented, and in particular, a demonstration of its ability to generate a wide variety of barcode formats. Dave loves lego! Take a look at http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/ for some of the stuff he's been playing with and his quest to make this stuff programmable from linux. Dave also runs a server which stores his better half's comics in SVG format then delivers them in PNG (which are then stored as blobs in a database) ... he attempted to show us how his server would crash as soon he requested a new comic for convertion to PNG, but alas his demonstration worked perfectly. Daley gave us a well received demonstration of Lettuce ( http://packages.python.org/lettuce/index.html), a Python port of Cucumber, the Ruby-based Behaviour Driven Development tool. Expected behaviours are described in a "Feature File" in a natural language called Gherkin. The steps for these behaviours are expressed in Python in a "Steps File". Lettuce run tests based on these two files. Apart from amusing us with the vegetable references, Daley highlighed how in an Agile environment, the Feature File could be edited by non-programmers such as testers and end-users to describe requirements and validate code delivered by programmers. Jonathan presented Scrapy (http://scrapy.org/), a web crawling and scraping framework based on Twisted (http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/). We were shown some demo code which explained how the crawler is built from pipelines for sequential processing with an ability to control many aspects of the crawler's behaviour. Scrapy also notably has an interactive console scraping environment. The scraper is based on XPath which everyone agreed was way down their list of favourite tools. We discussed combining the Scrapy crawler with either Beautiful Soup ( http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/) or lxml (http://lxml.de/). We were also shown some RRDtool (http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/) diagrams of server load while the web crawler was active which prompted Robie to mention du2rrd (http://oss.oetiker.ch/optools/wiki/du2rrd), a useful sysadmin tool for disk monitoring. Later in the pub, Ben and Robie hashed out why Tau was right and Pi was wrong (http://tauday.com/) and Ben introduced us to Geogebra ( http://www.geogebra.org/cms/) and the naturally beautiful sunflowers produced when using Phi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio) as an input. A huge thanks to all who came and joined in and made it a great evening! """ All the best, Safe Safe Hammad http://safehammad.com @safehammad -- 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
