[Chicago] Pycon! Bags! Meeting!

[Pete]

On Monday March 10 2008 12:02:18 pm Chris McAvoy wrote:
> Thursday night we're going to try and have an official ChiPy meeting.
> However, it's pretty sketchy as to where it will be.  So you'll have
> to do some detective work.  As details become available, they'll be
> put on the list.  Also, bring your stuffing hands, as we'll probably
> be stuffing more bags.

There's an open 30 minute slot on Saturday 2:10-2:45 in Ballroom 3. 
http://us.pycon.org/2008/conference/schedule/

It has been suggested by yours truly on #pycon and pycon-organizers at python.org 
that we have our meeting then.  This would be not only ChiPy's best, and 
perhaps biggest, meeting ever, but also our most timely.

The main problem with a Thursday night meeting was lack of space.  Here's a 
space lacking a meeting. ;-)  What do y'all think?

--Pete

PS: Here's an outline of the talk I pitched.

Title: GrassyKnoll: A Search Engine in Python

Summary: GrassyKnoll is a search engine written in Python.  It features a 
powerful storage model supporting several backends, a RESTful HTTP inteface 
and message passing concurrency for multi-core and distributed programming. 
It was conceived and prototyped at the PyCon 2007 sprints.

This talk will discuss GrassyKnoll's archictecture and its potential for 
large-scale computing.  It is intended for intermediate to advanced Python 
programmers.  Familiarity with HTTP, threads and distributed computing is 
helpful but not required.

Outline
======= 
 - Introduction
   - project goals
   - project history
   - status
 - Collections: a universal storage model
   - description of the model
   - comparison to traditional databases
   - Supported backends: lucene, sqlite, etc.
   - Queries: Questions Answered, quickly
 - REST: Embracing HTTP
   - description of REST
   - comparison to RPC
   - advantages of REST
   - REST and the Collection model
 - Message Passing: Concurrency Simplified
   - description, theory and influences
   - Advantages: Death to deadlock & Killing the GIL
   - Distributed Computing with HTTP : turtles all the way down
 - Future Work
   - Sprinting
   - More backends
   - Towards a new HTTP library for Python
   - Possible use cases


-- 
Peter Fein   ||   773-575-0694   ||   pfein at pobox.com
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