Intro to Python presentation

I've put the presentation for tonight's Intro to Python talk here.

It's not exactly the "slides" - it's a Bruce presentation. Bruce is great for live demos, especially for Python. Unfortunately, there's no "slide deck" that you can review statically - if you want to use it, you have to install Bruce and run it. The TAR I posted has a README with some basic instructions.

Since many conference organizers want a slide deck, one nice addition to Bruce would be a way to generate a slide deck. (No, I'm not volunteering... yet.) The other wart I ran into was the difficulty of changing the font sizes for the interpreter. Setting values in Socrates !CONFIG directives and config.py didn't work; I had to dig down into baseinterp.py and hard-code new font size values. That one, I probably could patch, if I get time.

Anyway, I did end up using Visual Python to do some fun solar system simulations. That should hold audience attention, I think...

Dayton, meet Python. Python, Dayton.

I'm giving an introduction to Python at the next Dayton Perl Mongers meeting:

March 14th 7pm to 9pm 2007 —
Introduction to Python at Dayton Perl Mongers—
at 119 Valley St. Dayton, Ohio, USA

Introductory talk on the Python programming language

This hCalendar event brought to you by the hCalendar Creator.

(Caution: the hCalendar creator didn't work for me with Opera or IE, only Firefox.)

If you're in the area, and still haven't learned Python (how have you put up with this blog?), please drop by!

I think that, to keep some visual interest up, I'll use Python's turtle module for some of my demonstrations. Not exactly snooty enterprise stuff, but turtle graphics are cute. Either that, or possibly vPython, which is certainly more impressive - but a bit more complex and less intuitive, possibly wrong for an introduction.

(I haven't forgotten my promise to post about PyCon. I'm waiting for presentation links to be published so I can refer to them.)

Geek Event Aggregator design notes

I finally created a central page for the Geek Event Aggregator - mostly it's design notes, but it's also a home less ephemeral than a bunch of blog posts:

http://catherine.devlin.googlepages.com/geekEventAggregator.html