February-06-2008

MeetingNotes

We met at Rosken’s Hall, Room 402 on UNO’s campus courtesy of Burch. Thanks Burch!

Mike Hostetler gave a great presentation/demonstration of django. After some opening comments comparing different styles of web development, Mike took us through a blog application with django. There were lots of questions all through the presentation. Thanks Mike!

Topics:

Thanks to everyone who attended.

January-09-2008

MeetingNotes

We met at Rosken’s Hall on UNO’s campus courtesy of Burch. Thanks Burch!

This month’s meeting was a bit shorter than before due in fact to the great accommodations. It’s amazing how much nicer it is to meet in a less crowded environment.

Topics:

The talk generated some nice discussion.

Thanks to everyone who attended.

Refreshments:
The venue does not allow food/drink so after the meeting we decided to meet at a local establishment for some food and beverage and more talk.

Door Prize:
Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears, Mark Ramm

December-05-2007

MeetingNotes
We met at Godfather’s Pizza (75th & Pacific)

Burch has arranged for us to meet at Rosken’s Hall on the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s campus. Watch for more specific details to follow on the mail list and on the website.

Jeff gave a presentation/overview of functional programming in Python

Eli talked about:

  • Google’s MapReduce – a software framework implemented by Google to support parallel computations over large (greater than 100 terabyte) data sets on unreliable clusters of computers.
  • HardOCP – Hadoop implements MapReduce, using the Hadoop Distributed File SystemHDFS) (see figure below.) MapReduce divides applications into many small blocks of work.
  • glusterfs – a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes.

Jeff gave a short presentation on anecdotes about optimizing Python code.

  1. Premature speed optimizations are the root of all evil
  2. Enhanced readability is an optimization
  3. Follow pep8 and use structured code — you get an automatic speed up by just keeping your name spaces clean and local
  4. Know where your code is spending it’s time and optimize their first — when in doubt, optimize the inner loop first
  5. Remove the dots – short circuit lookup intensive operations. i.e. _lstappend = lst.append
  6. Check out shedskin — although it can compile entire programs, it is perhaps most useful at speeding up a targeted area of code. ShedSkin makes writing a C++ based importable module child’s play compared to using C++, and bindings — see “optimize the inner loop first”

We enjoyed some decent pizza and shop talk between talks.

The door prize, “Python in a Nutshell” was won by Burch. A big Thank You to O’Reilly for the door prizes at our meetings. Thanks to you to Marsee!

November-07-2007

MeetingNotes

This month’s meeting revolved around parallelism, python in the workplace and podcasts. We talked about Parallel Python and attempts at applying it to the NetFlix Prize contest. Jeff gave an impromptu overview on how python is used in his workplace. There was a demo of icepodder, a dolphin safe podcast client written in python.

There was also talk about the number of linux distros that are using python. Ubuntu, Red Hat’s Anaconda installer, and Gentoo’s Portage package manager.

MIT is using Python for it’s core EE/CS programs.

Chad was talking about gOS which has been getting a lot of press lately. Eli was talking about how MapReduce works in python. Google Android Phone Platform (maybe it’ll run python?)

Rich won the door prize of “Python in a Nutshell” courtesy of O’Reilly. Thanks for your support!

If you missed this month’s meeting we look forward to seeing you next month. Check the groups website @ http://www.omahapython.org for meeting details and how to join the mailing list.