CFP: PyCon 2006

[A.M. Kuchling]

PyCon 2006 Call for Proposals


Want to share your expertise? PyCon 2006 is looking for proposals to
fill the formal presentation tracks.  PyCon 2006 will be held
February 24-26 2006 in Addison, Texas (near Dallas).

Previous PyCons have had a broad range of presentations, from reports
on academic and commercial projects to tutorials and case studies, and
we hope to continue that tradition this year.  As long as the
presentation is interesting and potentially useful to the Python
community, it will be considered for inclusion in the program.

For 2006, we're especially interested in tutorial presentations
that will teach conference-goers something new and useful.  Can you
show attendees how to: use a module?  explore a Python language
feature?  package an application?  


Important Dates
==

 * Submission deadline: October 31, 2005 
 * Acceptance deadline: November 15, 2005 
 * Electronic copy deadline: February 15, 2006


PyCon Topics
===

Suitable topics for PyCon presentations include, but are not limited
to:

 * Core Python
 * Other implementations: Jython, IronPython, PyPy, and Stackless
 * Python libraries and extensions
 * Databases
 * Documentation
 * GUI Programming
 * Game Programming
 * Network Programming
 * Open Source Python projects
 * Packaging Issues
 * Programming Tools
 * Project Best Practices
 * Embedding and Extending
 * Science and Math
 * Web-based Systems


Submission Format


Proposals should be 250 to 1000 words long (i.e., one to four pages in
manuscript format), containing the following information:

 * Author name(s)
 * Contact Information
 * Requested timeslot (30 minutes, 45 minutes, or either)
 * Summary of proposed presentation
 * Presentation outline
 * Intended audience (non-programmers, beginning programmers, advanced users, 
   CPython developers, etc.)

ASCII format is preferred (plain or reST), with HTML as a secondary
alternative. If you have any queries about submission, or if you would
like to discuss the possibility of submitting in a different format or
style, please send mail to the conference organizers at
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Session lengths include time for audience questions.  You should
budget at least five minutes for questions; for example, a 30-minute
talk will be 25 minutes of presentation and 5 minutes of questions.  

The preferred length for talks is 30 minutes.  You can request a
45-minute slot, but proposals requiring 45 minutes will be reviewed
more stringently and tutorial talks will be preferred for these longer
slots.


Submission Mechanics
===

Use the PyCon Online Proposal Submission  to
send us your proposals and ideas. If your proposal is accepted, you
have the option of including a companion paper along with your
presentation. The paper will get published on the PyCon web site.

Presentations and papers may be in text (plain or reST), HTML, or PDF;
HTML or text are preferred.

We suggest, but do not require, that authors place their papers under
a Creative Commons license. Please visit the CC 'Choose a License'
page to select a license that meets your requirements. 

A Wiki page has suggestions and advice for speakers:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyCon2006/SpeakerNotes


Other Presentations
===

If you don't want to make a formal presentation, you can still bring
your new project or idea to PyCon.

There will be several Lightning Talk sessions for talks no longer than
five minutes.

There will be a significant amount of Open Space for informal and
spur-of-the-moment presentations.  Open Space consists of
thirty-minute blocks that are allocated during PyCon. These blocks can
be used for presentations, round table discussions, hands-on
tutorials, or anything else. Typically, people propose ideas for the
sessions which are then voted on by attendees.

-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-announce-list

Support the Python Software Foundation:
http://www.python.org/psf/donations.html

ANN: PyTables 1.1.1 released

[Francesc Altet]

==
 Announcing PyTables 1.1.1
==

This is a maintenance release of PyTables. In it, several optimizations
and bug fixes have been made. As some of the fixed bugs were quite
important, it's strongly recommended for users to upgrade.

Go to the PyTables web site for downloading the beast:
http://pytables.sourceforge.net/

or keep reading for more info about the improvements and bugs fixed.


Changes more in depth
=

Improvements:

- Optimized the opening of files with a large number of objects. Now,
  files with table objects open a 50% faster, and files with arrays open
  more than twice as fast (up to 2000 objects/s on a Pentium
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Hence, a file with a combination of both kinds of objects
  opens between a 50% and 100% faster than in 1.1.

- Optimized the creation of ``NestedRecArray`` objects using
  ``NumArray`` objects as columns, so that filling a table with the
  ``Table.append()`` method achieves a performance similar to PyTables
  pre-1.1 releases.

Bug fixes:

- ``Table.readCoordinates()`` now converts the coords parameter into ``Int64``
  indices automatically.

- Fixed a bug that prevented appending to tables (though
  ``Table.append()``) using a list of ``NumArray`` objects.

- ``Int32`` attributes are handled correctly in 64-bit platforms now.

- Correction for accepting lists of numarrays as input for
  ``NestedRecArrays``.

- Fixed a problem when creating rank 1 multi-dimensional string columns
  in ``Table`` objects. Closes SF bug #1269023.

- Avoid errors when unpickling objects stored in attributes.  See the
  section ``AttributeSet`` in the reference chapter of the User's
  Manual for more information. Closes SF bug #1254636.

- Assignment for ``*Array`` slices has been improved in order to solve
  some issues with shapes. Closes SF bug #1288792.

- The indexation properties were lost in case the table was closed
  before an index was created. Now, these properties are saved even in
  this case.

Known bugs:

- Classes inheriting from ``IsDescription`` subclasses do not inherit
  columns defined in the super-class. See SF bug #1207732 for more info.

- Time datatypes are non-portable between big-endian and little-endian
  architectures. This is ultimately a consequence of a HDF5
  limitation. See SF bug #1234709 for more info.

Backward-incompatible changes:

- None (that we are aware of).


Important note for MacOSX users
===

UCL compressor works badly on MacOSX platforms. Recent investigation
seems to point to a bug in the development tools in MacOSX (Panther).
Until the problem is isolated and eventually solved, UCL support will
not be compiled by default on MacOSX platforms, even if the installer
finds it in the system. However, if you still want to get UCL support
on MacOSX, you can use the ``--force-ucl`` flag in ``setup.py``.


Important note for Python 2.4 and Windows users
===

If you are willing to use PyTables with Python 2.4 in Windows
platforms, you will need to get the HDF5 library compiled for MSVC
7.1, aka .NET 2003.  It can be found at:
ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF5/current/bin/windows/5-164-win-net.ZIP

Users of Python 2.3 on Windows will have to download the version of
HDF5 compiled with MSVC 6.0 available in:
ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF/HDF5/current/bin/windows/5-164-win.ZIP


What it is
==

**PyTables** is a package for managing hierarchical datasets and
designed to efficiently cope with extremely large amounts of data
(with support for full 64-bit file addressing).  It features an
object-oriented interface that, combined with C extensions for the
performance-critical parts of the code, makes it a very easy-to-use
tool for high performance data storage and retrieval.

PyTables runs on top of the HDF5 library and numarray (Numeric is also
supported) package for achieving maximum throughput and convenient use.

Besides, PyTables I/O for table objects is buffered, implemented in C
and carefully tuned so that you can reach much better performance with
PyTables than with your own home-grown wrappings to the HDF5
library. PyTables sports indexing capabilities as well, allowing doing
selections in tables exceeding one billion of rows in just seconds.


Platforms
=

This version has been extensively checked on quite a few platforms,
like Linux on Intel32 (Pentium), Win on Intel32 (Pentium), Linux on
Intel64 (Itanium2), FreeBSD on AMD64 (Opteron), Linux on PowerPC and
MacOSX on PowerPC. For other platforms, chances are that the code can
be easily compiled and run without further issues. Please, contact us
in case you are experiencing problems.


Resources
=

Go to the PyTables web site for more details:

http://pytables.sourceforge.net/

About the HDF5 library:

http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/

About numarray:

http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/numarray

To know more about the co

pybwidget release 0.1.2

[jepler]

pybwidget is a Python wrapper around the 'bwidget' family of widgets for
Tkinter.  It includes these classes:
Entry Label Button ArrowButton ProgressBar ScrollView Separator
MainFrame LabelFrame TitleFrame PanelFrame ScrolledWindow
ScrollableFrame PanedWindow ButtonBox PagesManager NoteBook Dialog
StatusBar LabelEntry ComboBox SpinBox Tree ListBox MessageDialog
ProgressDialog PasswordDialog SelectFont SelectColor 

I know it's been a long time, but I've finally gotten around to making a
new release of pybwidget, called 0.1.2_1.7.0.

It has all the fixes I could find that have been mentioned in the
tkinter-discuss mailing list archives.  Compared to 0.1.1, here's a
summary of changes:
* add ROOT as a module-level constant, as requested
* bindtabs, bind_image, bind_text all handle the 'func' parameter
  properly
* several instances of 'self.tl' corrected to 'self.tk'
* the 'nodes' function of the Tree widget now passes all arguments
  to Tk
* The xbm-format images are installed by setup.py
* how to run setup.py is mentioned in README.html

This release is available at
http://tkinter.unpythonic.net/bwidget

Please report your experiences, good or bad, on the Tkinter mailing list
tkinter-discuss@python.org 

Jeff Epler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


pgpidcZT87hcU.pgp
Description: PGP signature
-- 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-announce-list

Support the Python Software Foundation:
http://www.python.org/psf/donations.html