November 13, 2007 Meeting Summary

This was the first meeting of OPy and we had nearly twenty people there. I was pleasantly surprised by the large number. The attendees mainly consisted of weather researchers, faculty, and students, but we also had a few from the library services. We started off by introducing ourselves and telling what we did and why we were interested in Python.

We held four mini-talks that consisted of some of the Python projects that the founding members were involved in just to build some curiosity. BrianFiedler went first and talked about his vplot library to generate Postscript and SVG graphics. The ActiveState Python Cookbook was also mentioned as a good resource for code snippets.

LouWicker went next and discussed a variety of tools that he uses in his research including pyTables, f2py, and many others. You can see his list of resources at http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/users/lwicker/public_html/Python/index.html.

EricBruning presented a couple of his projects involving Django and pyPDF. The Django projects projects that he has on the web are http://hsci.ou.edu/galleries/ and http://hsci.ou.edu/book/.

KevinSmith gave a high-level talk about his various uses of Python in his daily work including page templates (mainly Zope Page Templates; see simpleTAL as well), plasTeX, wxPython, and f2py.

Some of these topics will be turned into full-blown presentations for future meetings. We are also taking requests for presentations at TopicRequests. The next meeting will be in approximately four weeks and will include a general introduction to Python and the iPython shell.