Hey Pythoneers,<br><br>We had a great meeting Tuesday, thanks to everyone who came out! An extra special shout is going out to Chris & Charles for coming all the way from Salem. Also, of course, *huge* thanks to our presenters, Adam Lowry, Jason Kirtland, Kirby Urner and Michel Pelletier - you guys rocked it. Here's a quick summary and some links:<br>
<br>Michel Pelletier kicked off the meeting with a little demo of the turtle module (<a href="http://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html">http://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html</a>). turtle is part of the Python Standard Library and can be used to draw shapes and stuff. The turtle was pretty cute, and he drew half a rectangle for us.<br>
<br>Kirby Urner let the group have sneak peek of his PyCon tutorial slides, and entertained us with VPython (<a href="http://vpython.org/">http://vpython.org/</a>) demos. Kirby uses VPython to teach young people programming and mathematical concepts at the Saturday Academy (<a href="http://www.saturdayacademy.org/">http://www.saturdayacademy.org/</a>). Check out Kirby's website for more information about the curriculum he has developed (<a href="http://4dsolutions.net/ocn/index.html">http://4dsolutions.net/ocn/index.html</a>) and read his blog post about Tuesday's meeting (<a href="http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/02/ppug-2009210.html">http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/02/ppug-2009210.html</a>) if you're interested.<br>
<br>Jason Kirtland presented a new open source blogging engine called Zine (<a href="http://zine.pocoo.org/">http://zine.pocoo.org/</a>). Zine is built on Werkzeug and is extremely full-featured considering the latest release was only 0.1. It's easy to deploy, and supports a bunch of different markup languages for creating posts, as well as useful plugins like pygments. Even if you don't have a use for Zine right now, Jason recommends checking out the source code because it's *that* good.<br>
<br>Adam Lowry gave us a more in-depth look at Werkzeug (<a href="http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/">http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/</a>), an awesome WSGI toolkit that Michel Pelletier introduced to the group last year. Adam talked a bit about how he uses Werkzeug to create web applications without the constraints of a framework. He had a series of excellent slides and example code to go along with it. It isn't up online anywhere as of now, but Adam has said that if anyone is interested he can make the slides and examples available.<br>
<br>After the meeting most of the group headed over to rontoms (<a href="http://www.rontoms.net/">http://www.rontoms.net/</a> - hint: select all ;)) on Burnside for continued discussion, beverages and fondue. Photos of the evening are up on Flickr (<a href="http://tinyurl.com/pdxpy0209">http://tinyurl.com/pdxpy0209</a>) if anyone wants to see them!<br>
<br>If you weren't able to make it out this month, I hope you'll check out the next meeting on March 10th. Details about the March meeting should be coming up soon. Also, If anyone has an idea for a talk they'd like to give at an upcoming meeting, something they really want to hear about, or anything else PDX Python-related, send your ideas to the list, or to <a href="mailto:snakeherders@pdxpython.org">snakeherders@pdxpython.org</a>.<br>
<br><br>Thanks. :)<br><br>michelle<br>