Living Code

Unit Testing in Vancouver

2009-02-02T18:56:41Z

Just a quick reminder: Henry Prêcheur will be presenting Unit Testing in Python at the VanPyZ meeting tomorrow, February 3rd. The meeting will be at Workspace in Gastown (see map on VanPyZ page). Meetings are from 7-8:30, then we head out for beers afterwards.

Hope to see you there!

MetaProgramming at VanPyZ

2008-04-01T04:01:59Z

Just a reminder for Pythonistas in the Vancouver area: The Vancouver Python and Zope user group (VanPyZ) is tomorrow (Tuesday, April 1). Paul Prescod will be talking about metaprogramming in Python. Details and directions are on the VanPyZ site. And, as usual, we’ll be heading out to the pub afterwards for more discussion.

Hope to see you there!

from vanpyz import cannon

2008-03-04T06:07:04Z

The March Vancouver Python and Zope User Group meeting snuck up on me. It is tomorrow night, March 4th, in the conference room of the Bentall Five building. Same location for three months in a row, that’s got to be some kind of a record! For anyone who has not attended recently and would like to, there is a map on the VanPyZ website. Tomorrow’s talk will be by Brett Cannon:

The once and future Import: How import works in Python 2.6 and beyond, and what it means for you.

This should be interesting. The import mechanism has some interesting hooks, and Brett has been re-working it for some time now. Also, the recent meetings have had a great turnout with lots of good conversation, both during the meeting itself, and afterwards at the pub. So come on out, if you’re in Vancouver. And if you’re not in Vancouver, well from whereeveryouare import yourself. See you there!

VanDjangoJam

2008-01-25T20:50:01Z

The next Vancouver Python users’ group meeting will have a special guest: Adrian Holovaty, lead developer for the Django web framework. The meeting will be on Tuesday, February 6th from 7-9 pm, hosted by Sophos at their Vancouver office.

To prepare for this, there will be workshop before-hand to learn more about Django. The introduction to Django web framework workshop will be a hands-on tutorial on February 4th from 1-4 pm, also at the Sophos office. To make this event even more special (at least for me) it happens to be my birthday, when I get in touch with Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Details on both events can be found at the VanDjangoJam page. Thanks to Paul for organizing this, and to everyone who has volunteered to help out.

PyObjC at VanPyZ

2008-01-16T07:11:45Z

On Tuesday, October 3rd, at 7 pm, the Vancouver Python and Zope user’s group (VanPyZ) will be hosting two speakers. Paul Prescod will be discussing full-stack web frameworks in Python, and I will be presenting OS X programming in Python. This will probably not be a repeat of my presentation at the Vancouver Python Workshop (PDF slides, for anyone who is interested) but using Drawing Board and the InputManager hack to show how you can use PyObjC to build new applications in Python quickly and extend existing Cocoa applications easily. My focus these days is on how to take control of your computer and make it work for you, rather than the other way around.

The VanPyZ meeting will be at the Uniserve office, where Paul and I now work, Suite 1550, 1055 West Hastings Street, in Vancouver, BC. Mark Mayo took time out from his new baby (congratulations, Mark!) to create an Upcoming event for it. We’ll be going out for drinks afterwards, so come hang out with the Vancouver pythoneers.

Slides up

2008-01-25T06:25:56Z

After much delay, my slides are finally up from the VanPyZ talk last week.

Using Python and Cocoa on OS X

Again I’m using Eric Meyer’s S5 tool for HTML slides, but it still ends up being a large download because it includes a completely unneccesary quicktime movie. My daughter and I have been playing with iStopMotion and this was one of our first forays into claymation.

The reason it’s in the slideshow, is that movie making is now completely accessible to an eight-year-old, and I want to writing games and other programs equally accessible to her.

Still a ways to go…

Not dead yet

2008-01-26T04:30:22Z

I’m still here. I’m going to post the previous examples .dmg with some corrections pointed out by Bob Ippolito (4-space indents, don’t modify data directly in the Bundle). I’ve been quiet because a) I’ve been hitting some walls with Renaissance and investigating work-arounds and alternatives, and b) my coding/blogging time is pretty much between the time I get the kids to bed and the time my wife comes home from tutoring.

I’m investigating the PyGUI and Wax APIs, to see if they are worth porting to run on top of Cocoa (PyGUI runs on Carbon, Wax runs on top of wxPython). Both are attempts to make GUI creation more “Pythonic,” which is a Good Thing™. I have figured out how to get the menus initialized using pure Python (on top of PyObjC, of course), or maybe the newer pyobjc/py2app has fixed the problem, but it is possible to build applications in Python with no Nib file (or Renaissance .gsmarkup file) at all. My earlier inabillity to do that is what drove me to Renaissance in the first place.

I’ve also discovered the nibtool utility, which I did not know about. This allows you to see a textual representation of the nibs created by Interface Builder, search and replace strings (class names, etc.). This is a major discovery. Now if you could take the textual representation and put it back… I’m going to have to investigate this further.

In other news, I will be giving a presentation on Tuesday, February 1 at the Vancouver Zope and Python Users Group (VanPyZ) at 7:00 p.m. It will be a variation on the talk I gave in December to the XML users group, updated with what I’ve been exploring since then. Specifically I will show a simple (Hello World) application built three different ways, with Renaissance, with Interface Builder, and in pure Python. I’ll also show some apps written in other toolkits (wxPython, tkinter) for comparison. I hope some of my readers are close enough to make it.

I’ll also be attending the Northern Voice blogging conference here in Vancouver on Saturday, February 19th. I’m looking forward to meeting some fellow bloggers face to face, rather than RSS to RSS.

Finally, I managed to install Python 2.4 today, and so far nothing has been obviously screwed up, so I’ll be exploring some of the crunchy new features here in the near future.