Wednesday, August 11, 2010

PPUG 2010.8.10

Our Portland Python User Group spanned several tables. Our spot at WebTrends was not available this month, so we repaired to Produce Row, newly remodeled. Impressive.

I took my place at the head of one table, making more room for Michelle to join Josh. They fed me beer and a piece of sandwich respectively, leaving me feeling the grateful circus seal. But did I have any worthy tricks?

I tried to bring up Visual FoxPro at one point, but the geek I was telling my story to drew a blank. I'm this old fossil I realize. At least "dBase" rang a bell, but I gave up trying to talk about anything PSU.

Another theme of the evening, for me anyway, was Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC), its rules and regs. Some of our Python super stars are minors, coming to conferences from out of town. Where can they socialize and how late? At Produce Row, until 9 pm. I got back to our Chairman on that issue later the same evening, as Djangocon is coming up and these questions are relevant.

Having just completed Martian Math, I had some momentos in my bag to show around, including the new Flextegrity book. Some Python was used in the making of the two graphics I'm credited with. POV-Ray was my other tool of choice, for rendering.

Some of the things geeks are into sound like critical infrastructure. There's some switched messaging going on, serving those cell phones. Some Java application listens in real time on thousands of ports... sounded low level. Python does other tricks.