Clevelanders who want to help out bringing Python’s premier conference to our fair city should head on over to the bid page on the Python wiki and lend their names and support.

Non-Clevelanders, have no fear! Cleveland’s really quite misunderstood and under-appreciated. We’ve got a great restaurant scene (we’re home to the newest Iron Chef!), tons of attractions (like the Science Center and Rock Hall), world-class museums and other cultural institutions (maybe a few of you have heard of the Cleveland Orchestra, which is rated among the top 3-5 worldwide), the nation’s second largest performing arts center, beautiful parks and lake views, and more–all within walking distance of either the likely conference site or available with a quick jaunt on the rapid transit system. Plus the river hasn’t caught on fire for decades, but you can savor the legacy with really good local beer.

In short, there’s plenty to love about bringing PyCon to Cleveland. Let’s do it!

Asterisk turned up again during open discussion at this Monday’s meeting; while getting caught up, I got the scoop on Asterisk (since I’d missed the talk and been too busy with baby and work to read Nick’s PDF) and we had a good time talking about crazy PBX tricks; the coolest idea was to use Asterisk to hook up your desk phone as a combination lock to trigger a secret door to your underground lair (awesome!).

The meeting proper was a short one due to the sudden absence of one of our speakers; Monday’s lone presenter was Gary Bernhardt, who put three great packages together–httplib2, Beautiful Soup, and Feedparser–for a discussion of “Talking to the Web with Python.” In a particularly interesting example, Gary showed us how to combine Beautiful Soup with Feedparser to build a Technorati-ish blog link extractor in eight lines of code. Note that combining these in a nice, sparse nested loop structure (or even in a super-l33t list comprehension) is a fabulous way to peg your CPU (you have been warned).

Our next meeting will be November 5–if chance finds you in the greater Cleveland area, drop on by!

At tonight’s (now yesterday’s) ClePy meeting, special guest presenter Brian Fitzpatrick, Engineer Manager for Google’s Chicago office, gave a talk entitled “Google, Bigtable, and Scalable Version Control.” I’d heard a bit about how GFS and Bigtable work before at a previous Google talk, but it was very cool to see it applied as the back-end for Subversion.

That developed into an interesting discussion on what sorts of bottlenecks the big G has to worry about, which segued into a nifty bit of stuff on a storage/data transmission system that Google’s working on to allow scientists to shove 100+TB data sets around–sort of a Drobo on steroids, with a cool padded metal container for shipping that totally looks like it’s from a spy movie, because, when it comes down to it, you still can’t beat FedEx for data throughput on a sufficiently large scale (unless you are blessed enough to have Internet2 piped directly to where you need it).

From there we got into an entertaining discussion on the pros and cons of distributed and centralized version control systems, had some philosophical disagreement between the two, and managed to work in a Car Talk joke, and got the scoop on some forthcoming goodness in SVN-land. Matt Wilson has some good notes on this, including a clever joke about distributed VCS. Fitz made some great points in defense of centralized VCS that are making me rethink the take-my-toys-and-go-play-by-myself approach I’ve taken to try to get some personal momentum on Shindig, and maybe even managed to shame me into starting to commit publicly. Then again, I am in such deep love with committing frequently that perhaps I’ll find some middle path, using Bazaar for versioning things in between SVN commits. Or something. We’ll see.

A bunch of us hung out afterward at the nearby Max & Erma’s for drinks and continued chatter, and from what I could tell the conversations were all pretty interesting. (No notes from that as I was busy enjoying beer and talk.)

I really want to thank Brian for the engaging talk and discussions (and for picking up the tab at the bar), and Susan Loh for getting everything squared away on the Google side (including taking care of pizza and beverages for the meeting, logo swag, etc.). Hopefully we can be a destination for future tech talks.

So ordinarily, I’d be psyched about how much I’d be able to get done this weekend… Except that the stupid Harry Potter book is showing up in the mail tomorrow, and that basically means that it will consume every waking, lighted hour until it’s done. I love the books, I really do, but it’s really putting a crimp on my Python geek-out sessions. But I have to be done reading by Monday, that’s for sure, or else I will have to gouge my eyes out to avoid spoilers. My predictions: Snape dies (he’s obviously been set up for a hard-core double-agent redemption arc, so he’ll probably save the day somehow), Harry lives (and will be the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher ever), and Ron and Hermione will finally succumb to the powerful call of teenage hormones and romantic comedy conventions and hook up in a major way.

Oh, yes, and I’m going to see Howard Shore conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in performance of his Lord of the Rings Symphony tomorrow night, so that knocks out a couple more hours of potential coding time. Which I guess I can live with; enjoying some of my favorite music, conducted by its composer, performed by one of the world’s foremost orchestras, under the night sky, with a picnic and a nice glass of wine… Should be a real treat.

…

Tonight marks 24 hours since the arrival of the Apple TV. So far, I’m very, very impressed. I have modest needs, primarily to replace an aging SlimP3 that’s prone to chronic buffer under-runs ever since I replaced my dying firewall, and it solves all of my most common use cases with total aplomb. I’ve been delightfully impressed by its streaming performance, which, even with an 802.11b/g setup, is nothing short of freaking amazing. I’m also very satisfied with the image quality out of the component video cables (chosen since our altar to the television gods predates HDMI by a generation or so). My advice so far, to any prospective owners, boils down to two points:

1. Don’t do your initial sync over wireless if you don’t have 802.11n hardware. Wired ethernet is your friend by orders of magnitude.
2. Its case serves as its heat sink, which is to say it gets hot like you wouldn’t believe. Don’t set it on top of your DVD player or other hardware (unless you want to cook your gear), and make sure that it gets plenty of airflow. Honestly, I used oven mitts to bring it upstairs to wire it into my switch to finish the initial sync. Yikes!

Beware of the YouTube integration; Liz and I must have spent an hour tonight watching videos of cats doing stupidly cute things. It is a powerful and addictive time-sink.

…

Finally, I’m happy to report that the first of two freebie poster-size prints from Shutterfly arrived today and it looks great. I picked up a 50mm prime lens for my Canon (Digital Rebel XT) recently, and the folks at Amazon threw in a coupon for one free 11×14 and 16×20 print. The 16×20 (which I expect sometime Saturday or Monday) will probably end up framed and in our dining room, next to some other wine-related art, and the 11×14 (which showed up today) will probably find a home in our living room. I’m really quite tickled–I’ve never printed any of my work larger than 5×7 before–but I fear that I could start going poor making prints of my better photos. Oh well; Liz said I should find a hobby….

Since we ended a bit earlier than usual, we popped down the street for a bite to eat and a round of beer and more chatter. We talked a little bit about the general failure of our sprints to, well, happen, and will hopefully be kicking around some ideas on how to make the project into something that people are excited about contributing to. Personally, I think the “let’s integrate a bunch of existing, mature products” approach that we planned is what’s hurting us the most. Taking four or five disparate (and probably more-complicated-than-necessary) things and getting them all to play nicely and be consistent with one another just feels too much like real work. I think we’d be much happier creating something small, simple, and original, even if it’s not tremendously groundbreaking or the category of problem has already been done.

Next month we’ll be sponsored by and hosting a presentation from Google. The topic and speaker are still to be determined, but there will be swag, so that’s good enough for me.

Christian also gave away a copy of CherryPy Essentials through the magic of random.randint(). Sadly, it didn’t cough up my number this time, but then again I’m already way behind in my pile of things to read…

David Stanek provided a recap of our recent sprint, and we scheduled our next sprint, based on lessons learned in April. We’ll be meeting up at the Bier Markt again on Saturday, May 19, around 2 PM–and you’re welcome to come on down and join in the fun!

Our next meeting will be Monday, June 4, at American Greetings. Brian Beck will be showing off some TuxDroid tricks, and Matt Wilson will be bringing it RPy-style. Hopefully we’ll see you there!

We’ve set a real, solid date for our first sprint (finally!): Saturday, April 14 at noon at the Bier Markt. More info will surely follow on the mailing list; give us a shout or come on down if you want to join us as we embark on our group website replacement/Meetup-killer.

Our next meeting will be on Monday, May 7, again at American Greetings. Christian Wyglendowski will talk about the Bazaar source control system, and Gary Bernhardt will talk about his RESTdb project (or something else sufficiently interesting, perhaps sucks-rocks.com?).

If you’re in Northeast Ohio and feeling Pythonic, come on down and join us sometime!

We hope to be scheduling a sprint very shortly to work on Shindig, our fledgling meetup.com-killer that we’re mostly working on so that we can stop having to fight with Plone. One of our members has a connection at the Bier Markt, which (rumor has it) has both space and free wi-fi, so we may have a really great sprint location.

Next month, Microsoft’s Drew Robbins will be in town to give us the lowdown on IronPython, which should be great!

Mike Nugent put together a nice presentation on regular expressions in Python that resulted in a fun and entertaining discussion in the group.

Next month, Ralph Heimburger will talk about ReportLab, and there will again be pizza and pop–come on down if you’re feeling Pythonic! Or hit us up on the mailing list if you’ve got Python web-fu and want to help build a nice group management website with us.

Thanks to a bumper crop of ragweed, I have spent the last two weeks wanting to claw my eyes out. Puffy. Sore. Goopy. Crusted over when I wake up. I feel like someone has scraped sandpaper over my corneas. I feel like I haven’t slept since the allergies really kicked in.

Work is a super giant happy fun ball of stress as I attempt to coordinate a lot of last-minute things, deal with incomprehensible bug reports, and generally attempt to save the world. So far… meh… I think the world’s still in trouble. It’s taken me until today to start working on the things I was supposed to be doing on Monday. I guess it would help if I could get more than five minutes of uninterrupted time, but apparently that’s out of the question at this point. *sigh*

I’m way behind on dealing with some vaguely important email for Clepy. I have had a tiff with DirecTV over their habit of failing to send me a bill and then charging me lots of late fees. (Surprisingly, not the first time they’ve done that to me…)

And it doesn’t help that I’ve had things to do every night this week: Clepy (and post-Clepy festivities) on Monday, wine group Tuesday, German class Wednesday, and an appointment tonight. Tomorrow, I expect I’ll probably just stay late at work, except that the parts for the new closet organizer system thing have arrived and I want to get started on that too.

Good lord, it’s Thursday, and I still haven’t picked up the new Star Wars DVD’s, with the Han-shoots-first-thank-you-very-much original cut. For those that know me, that should give you an indication of what a general shitstorm it’s been lately.

On the plus side, I finished The Confusion over Labor Day weekend. On the minus side, I still have about a thousand pages (hardback!) of The System of the World still to go… by which point I suspect that I will need to re-read Cryptonomicon since it has enough bits that tie in with the other books. It’d be easier if my eyes didn’t feel like they were about to explode out of my head (see above).

…And I think I might have finally hit the point where Gentoo in particular, and Linux in general, is dead to me, the way someone who crosses Tony Soprano ends up in the deli slicer, or taken out to the Pine Barrens and disappeared. Midway through my third (fourth?) day of trying to get the emerge -eav world step of the upgrade to gcc-4.1, I am just about at the end of my geek rope. I fell in love with Gentoo because its packaging and update system “just worked”, freeing me up to waste my time configuring and tweaking everything else to be just so. But this update is just insultingly murderous, as all kinds of supposedly stable things just won’t fucking build right–because, y’know, that would be too easy. So, even if I have to turn in my geek badge and live life as a lesser mortal, beholden to the software update whims of Apple, I think that’d be okay with me, because this kind of time-waste is something I simply cannot allow in my life any longer.

Grr. Argh!

At tonight’s meeting, I presented “The Joy of Logging”, an introduction to the Python standard library’s logging module and all the various wicked cool things you can do with it. (Okay, so “wicked cool” is relative here…) After concluding my presentation in our parking lot (thanks to a spurious building evacuation alarm got triggered), David Stanek presented the first of two talks on the internals of Python functions, where it turned out that, ironically, the “new” method is deprecated (go figure). Mike Robellard showed off the beginnings of GMUVE, which will eventually be a shiny 3D MMO built with Pygame.

Next month’s meeting will be Monday, October 2, and will probably be held at AG.com, which is pretty nice when the klaxons and emergency lights shut up. David Stanek will conclude the head-exploding function internals with a discussion of the descriptor protocol, Todd Randolph is on the hook to come up with something, and Brian Beck might be giving us the scoop on some of his Summer of Code tinkering .

Next month we’ll be at one of the Brulant offices. David Stanek will give a presentation on a topic yet to be determined, and I will give something on either the logging module or on dateutil. Eventually I plan to do an introductory wxPython presentation as well, but that’s probably a couple months off.

In general, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy, too crappy to even whine about things on LiveJournal. Work has been extraordinarily stressful–it’s been “crunch time” since early March, and I’ve lost count of the nights, weekends, and extra hours I’ve put in. To make things even better, I’ve had an especially difficult cycle of depression, much, much worse than the occasional gloomy day or down week that I get every six months or so. Nosiree, I’ve been having a soul-crushing feeling of complete emptiness, which, let me tell you, is a huge productivity boost. Liz has been a saint in putting up with me, but I’ve finally gotten it through my head that a patient wife alone won’t fix my issues, so I think it’s time for me to find some form of professional help to get my metaphorical shit together. Of course, that means I have to figure out when I will be able to do that, but at least it’s a start.

Back to this week… Last Friday I started getting a sore throat. It was worse on Saturday, but I still went into the office for our scheduled “I need you to come in this weekend, mm’kay” day. I spent most of Sunday in bed, my head spinning and full of goo, so that I could be rested enough to go to work on Monday… where my Monday to-do’s kept getting interrupted by more pressing matters. I was still feeling dead enough Monday night that I decided to ditch Clepy and come home to rest more; and it’s a good thing I did, because I was able to be home to play every home owner’s favorite game, “Why Is My Kitchen Ceiling Dripping?” I managed to find and shut off the source of the leak, but now we’ve got more unexpected action items on the “fix the stupid house” list. On Tuesday my cold started to shift out of my head and into my chest, and my still-unfulfilled Monday tasks lost out to again more immediate issues. When I woke up on Wednesday morning, I was coughing in great, uncontrollable fits, and I’d managed to wrench my neck and upper back such that normal motion wasn’t going to happen. Still, I had spillover work from Tuesday’s schedule-derailments, which I then spent most of the day fighting with from home. Yesterday I felt decent enough to go to work, where unplanned spillover from Tuesday and Wednesday’s unplanned work occupied most of the day.

Today, I am mostly recovered from the cold, though still a bit phlegmy, but my neck and back are worse than ever. Liz procured heat wraps and I downed a bunch of Advil; the plan was that I’d spend the day sprawled on my back on the couch, working from home with her laptop. It was a great plan until the cats decided that it was Thunderdome time, and Julia came rocketing onto me at top speed, leaving my arm torn and bleeding and exploding keys off of Liz’s Powerbook.

Liz got me bandaged up, and I managed to get everything reattached except for the “J” key, whose little grabby teeth had been snapped off by the force of the feline impact. She’s off to the Apple Store to see if they stock spare J’s at the Genius Bar, and I’m here waving the white flag at life.

You hear me life? You can let up now. Uncle. UNCLE!!!

Brian Beck gave a nice introductory presentation on “Releasing Your Python Package” that did a good job of demystifying setuptools, eggs, the Cheese Shop; he recommended Pudge for automating the generation of documentation for your project’s website.

Rather than a second presentation, we had a nice round of open discussion, with topics ranging from PyOpenGL to what happens to overly ambitious pythons who try to eat alligators. Matt Zipay is also looking for volunteers to assist with Aglyph, a dependency injection framework for Python.

Next time, we’ll be at AG.com; Ian Maurer will cover the “why” of unit testing, and David Stanek will address the “how” of it.

…

In other Pythonic news, I was lightly stunned to discover one of my PyCon photos at the Squidoo lens for Pythonology. Wacky! I’d wondered why it’d started getting so many views…

This month’s meeting featured a presentation of easyBay, a Pythonic eBay API wrapper, by Brian Beck; a lowdown on some handy Windows admin scripting possibilities and an intro to the Childsplay game framework by Mike Nugent; and a quick and somewhat impromptu overview of PyCon.

…

Speaking of PyCon, I have finally gotten around to uploading photos to flickr, so I’ve updated my previous entries accordingly. And there are other people’s PyCon 2006 photos on flickr, plus a lot of good ones at Jafo’s journal (there’s a whole row of us Clepy folks in this one, plus one of the TurboGears sprint in which I look pretty dorky). Enjoy!

We welcomed a lot of new folks this meeting; it’s really great to see the community starting to grow!

The next meeting is Monday, March 6 at American Greetings. The plan so far is a presentation from Brian Beck on his eBay Python API, possibly a starter on PyGame, and some highlights of PyCon.

Once that and my current work challenges get settled down, it’s back to TurboGears for me! I hope to be sufficiently clueful by the time the PyCon sprint rolls around.

Stay tuned!

We had some nice discussion of some miscellaneous things as well, including PyCon and why you should go (registration is now open!).

We may consider adopting feedparser as its author, Mark Pilgrim, doesn’t appear to be maintaining it any more; I’ve dropped an email his direction, but given his stated desire to find a hobby that doesn’t involve computing, who knows if I’ll get a response? (Okay, so a bit of googling about shows recent evidence of his continued existence, so maybe I’ll try some additional addresses before shouting “fork!” too loudly.)

We’re also planning on replacing the Plone installation of clepy.org with a shiny TurboGears-powered setup. This would at least give us an opportunity to contribute back to TG (through fixes, donated functionality, and general advocacy), as well as build some programming comeraderie through sprints (in person or online) to implement the features we want. Plus it might actually spur some mailing list activity during the weeks between meetings.

Should you find yourself in need of insomnia remedies (or perhaps causes if you, like me, like to read documentation late into the night), my presentation is available online, chock full of links to more things you can and probably should read if you are so motivated.

The short, short version: though not yet fully baked, TurboGears is maturing rapidly and (in my opinion) making some very good choices along the way; TG is already emerging as a strong contender in the Python “framework wars.” If you’re a Python geek, or a web application geek, it’s well worth your time to check it out.

[Updated @ 23:55]: Kevin Dangoor has just unleashed a new screencast tutorial on the world to show off some of the features in the forthcoming 0.9 version of TurboGears–behold TurboTunes!

I have a huge amount of exciting but challenging stuff to deal with at work (which I can’t go into). I’m excited by its excitingness but a bit fearful of its scope and ambition.

On Monday, I’m supposed to give a presentation to our local Python group about TurboGears. I’ve barely had time to keep up with the traffic on the mailing list, let alone do more than the most trivial experiments with actual code. It doesn’t help that our last meeting had a really well executed presentation on a similar theme, so whether I want to admit it or not, the bar has been set.

I also need to squeeze in another presentation for work sometime in the next week on some unrelated topics. Hopefully that will come together quickly, but it’s One More Thing.

House stuff continues to be crazy; it seems like there’s always something new cropping up, or something old that becomes more complicated. I’m woefully behind on my rotating cleaning schedule, and every day that I think I am going to be getting back into my workout schedule proves me wrong. And I’d like to think I could find time for a simple trip to the car wash and some errands, maybe even cook up a real meal again. Hah! In my dreams.

I lost the past weekend to travel (for good cause, so I’m not upset about that or anything); tomorrow night is blocked off for MirrorMask (finally!); Saturday potentially takes a significant dent from the World Series of Wine; and there’s more travel/vacation in my very near future too.

In a word: overwhelmed! I suppose I should be Doing Stuff instead of whining about it on my blog, but I have to do something to balance out the lack of cat photos.

…

Unrelated to all that, I found this presentation on “identity 2.0″ to be pretty interesting, and shockingly relevant for those of us who build stuff for the web.