15 minute presentation on python?

[Ian Parker]

In article <3c7abd92_1 at corp.newsgroups.com>, Joshua Muskovitz 
<joshm at taconic.net> writes
>> > If you had to give a 15 minute introduction to Python, what would you
>cover?
>> > What is a good example of a simple, but useful, text-based app for a
>Wintel
>> > environment, that has good "wow" quality?
>>
>> Who is your audience? What is their background and what types of things
>> would they like want to do with a computer?
>
>They are the tech faculty for the local tech school.  It is meant to
>demonstrate my ability to teach (something).  I have some ideas, but was
>looking for a few suggestions.  I expect that I won't be able to determine
>the expertise of the audience until the last minute, so I'm trying to come
>up with a few different levels of topics, and I'll pick one when it happens.
>
>I think that something demonstrating lists, tuples, and dicts will impress
>people who are technical (can program in some language) but haven't seen
>python before.  Ideas which specifically show successively more complicated
>things by adding a few things to the (evolving) source is really the ticket.
>
>Maybe writing something like wc, then perhaps an indexer (using a dict to
>construct a list of references, then producing pretty output).  Hmm...  I
>think I answered my own question.
>
>Other suggestions are more than welcome.
>
>--
># Joshua Muskovitz
># joshm at taconic.net
>def lyyrs(sig): return '-'.join(sig.split()+["ly y'rs"])
>lyyrs('Hire me!  I need the work!')
>
>
>
>
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I wow'd my audience by using Python with the win32 extensions to show 
simple it was to load data (proxy server log files) into MS Excel.

I'd already written a small module to create Excel spreadsheets with 
neat formatting of column and titles, etc.  I simply called this to save 
a list of lists as a smartly-formatted excel spreadsheet.

So my example program developed in four stages:

a) read the file data into a list of lists
b) sort it
c) save it as a spreadsheet
d) filter the data to save only a subset of the original data.

This worked for my audience because (i)  prior to that
(i) unable to load proxy server log files into Excel in any reasonable 
format
(2) the data was too large to usefully inspect in its original format
(3) they liked the way the smart spreadsheet popped up on the screen - 
much more impact than just text scrolling up a cmd window.

Regards
-- 
Ian Parker