Regular Toronto Python Users' Group (PyGTA) meeting Tuesday 19th, 7:15pm

[Mike C. Fletcher]

We will be having our regular PyGTA meeting at our regular time (7:15 on
the 19th) and place (Linux Caffe) this month.  Please note that *next*
month (June 2009) we'll be meeting on the 17th (a Wednesday) as our
speaker for June is not available on Tuesdays.  Linux Caffe is at the
corner of Grace and Harbord streets, 1 block South of Christie subway
station.

Tuesday, May 19th:

    Software Liability Round Table (Open Discussion)

    Proposals are afoot in the EU to make companies liable for the
    software they write.  What would you need to accept liability for
    the software you write?  Would you be willing to contribute software
    to an Open Source project if you could be sued when someone else
    broke it?  What level of warranty would you be willing to give for
    your software ("Money Back" or "Damages" or "Damages and Loss of
    Bussiness")?  Is liability even a good idea?  Would it stifle
    innovation?  Would it be workable for your business?

    What benefits would you get out of warranties?  Is there a service
    or testing methodology you feel would let you provide warranties
    better/cheaper/faster than others?  Would an exception raised to the
    user constitute a "money back" event?  Or would you have to fail to
    repair the software?  Does "repairing" include making your software
    work with changing dependencies?  What contracts or requirements
    would you need to be comfortable being a contract software developer?

Wednesday, June 17th:

    Behdad Esfahbod will be presenting on how to use the Cairo rendering
    library from Python.  Cairo is a vector graphics library that allows
    for targetting multiple graphical back-ends  including OpenGL,
    X-windows, OSX Quartz, Win32, PDF, PNG etceteras.  It is used in the
    Firefox and WebKit engines as well as the GTK library.

    Note the change in day-of-week!

Tuesday, July 21st (tentative):

    Robert Jackiewicz of the Toronto Plone User's group will be
    presenting the zc.buildout package.  Buildout is a tool for creating
    redistributable Python applications which is used extensively by the
    Zope and Plone communities.  It is a "recipe" based engine for
    reproducing a set of modules and application code onto a number of
    machines.

http://www.pygta.org/

Enjoy yourselves,
Mike

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com