The Mouse Vs. The Python

PyCon USA is looking for people to come and give talks, tutorials and poster sessions. So whether you are one of those people who just loves to talk or you’re more of a visual person, there’s a place for you. For the talkers, and I mean serious talkers, I would recommend the tutorial or regular talk sessions. If you’re not a talker or you want to get better, then you’d want to choose a 30-minute talk, a poster session or just get your feet wet with a lightning talk, the last of which you’d have to sign up for onsite.

Don’t know what to talk about? PyCon’s got your back. They wrote a whole article on the topic. There’s also an article on tutorial topics and a brand new article about the poster session. So if you don’t know what to talk about, those posts should get your creative juices flowing.

Regardless of what you choose, you only have until October 12th to get your submission in. What are you waiting for? Christmas? That’s too late! Get on this right now!

Note: If you just hate talking, join the PyCon organizers mailing list and help in some other way. It’s not tax deductible, but it might give you warm fuzzies.

We had our October Pyowa meeting last night (10/07/2011) at the IMT Group building in West Des Moines, IA. One of their programmers gave a talk on the python open document (pod) library that is included with the Appy framework. The gist of the talk was that you could create template files in LibreOffice or OpenOffice using either its “Track Changes” feature or its “Field” feature and then use Appy’s pod to a merge of your data, much like a mail merge in Microsoft Word. He went on to show more advanced stuff, like using the Comments functionality of LibreOffice to create loops to make tables or insert pictures.

After the presentation, there was mention of hosting your own local PyPI and a discussion on the merits and pitfalls of Git Vs. Mercurial. There was also some talk of combining Pyowa with the local Ruby group. We also talked about having a meeting where we might discuss Mercurial, Git, and other source code management systems in the future. Also note that there was free pizza and pop at this meeting. We hope you will be able to make it to our next meeting.