[Chicago] January Meeting Recap.

[Jason R Huggins]

Thanks for hosting the meeting last night, David. Since, Chris McAvoy 
wasn't there to do his customary blog post summary of the event, I'll take 
a go at it....

My short summary:
* I presented my little 3d machine prototype vis-a-vis the VPython 3d 
library. I think the most interesting comment was that my design was 
"beautiful lunacy". Everyone agreed I was wise to keep my day job while I 
find a market for my little contraption. :-)  I'll now start the process 
of blogging about my idea and gathering help from anyone in web-land who 
can help me build it. For those not in attendance, my idea is basically a 
motorized, programmable version of this: 
http://www.officeplayground.com/pinart.html

* David Rock presented the datetime python module. It raised some comments 
about missing convenience functions, whether leap seconds are supported or 
not (I think they are, but don't rely on it too heavily without checking 
it out further), and the usefulness(uselessness?) of the tzinfo class.

* Michael Tobis attempted to explain the winning, losing, and cheating 
solutions to pycontest.net. Brains were broken in the process. For the 
record, #5 (Ian) and #196 (Michael) were in attendance. (There were a few 
others who competed, too, but I can't remember the names.)

* One of David's co-workers (name?) at Acxiom posed a Python development 
problem he had with asynchronously communicating between several hundred 
computers on his LAN. Various suggestions were offered, some of which may 
even turn out to be helpful. I wonder if his problem could ever be a 
future pycontest challenge? I don't know how one would unit test the 
winning entry.

Anyone care to correct my facts before I blog this?

-Jason