Pirnat.com

I spent the better part of today cooking up a nice little interface to the US Postal Service’s rate calculation APIs, and like a good little dev I’ve even been writing little py.test cases to poke at it. But once it came time to stop stubbing out the live IO and see if their […]

History Lesson (1997) Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.
At tonight’s (now yesterday’s) ClePy meeting, special guest presenter Brian Fitzpatrick, Engineer Manager for Google’s Chicago office, gave a talk entitled “Google, Bigtable, and Scalable Version Control.” I’d heard a bit about how GFS and Bigtable work before at a previous […]

I’m really excited by the amount of progress I’ve made over the last couple of weekends, hacking away at what for now is known as Shindig, a group management blog/calendar app written against TurboGears. Its primary purpose is to be something easier and faster for me to maintain than ClePy’s current Plone site. […]

We had a shorter and lighter ClePy meeting tonight, which ended up working out just fine. Dan Buch gave an entertaining talk on how he fell into and out of love with Grok, a frameworkish sort of thing for Zope 3. We had a pretty informal discussion of the state of things, in […]

While Liz took her exam today, I holed up in the hotel room (for the most part, I dislike NYC) and, freed from the distractions of house and work, busted out my inner geek and started getting traction on a TurboGears project I’d been meaning to start for the past year-and-a-bit.
I’m very pleased to say […]

The office sprung for a bunch of us to attend Jonathan Lewis’s “Writing Optimal SQL” seminar, put on by the nice folks at NEOOUG (that’d be the Northeast Ohio Oracle Users Group, for those playing acronym bingo at home), so I had a nice and brain-meltingly interesting Friday away from the office. Lewis really […]

At tonight’s ClePy meeting, Christian Wyglendowski gave us an introduction to the Bazaar version control system (which seems light and simple enough that I might not have to overcome the inertia that I seem to find with Subversion), and Gary Bernhardt did a fun presentation on REST and his RESTdb project.
Christian also gave away a […]

In a very special episode of ClePy, we were joined by guest star Drew Robbins, a “Developer Evangelist” from Microsoft. Drew gave us an overview of IronPython, did a number of live demos, and fielded a wide array of “interactivity” from the group. He also gave away a Zune using Python’s random.randint() […]

IMG_1678.JPG Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.
Many, many photos from PyCon are now online. I shot a bunch as did fellow ClePy member Dave Noyes. And thanks to the photo contest (which still doesn’t have a winner, grr…), there are a whole bunch of other photos too. […]

At tonight’s ClePy meeting, Ralph Heimburger presented an overview of ReportLab, which makes programmatic generation of PDF’s wicked easy, and Matt Gibberman gave us an introduction to Paramiko, which brings ssh2 into your Python toolkit. Both look like really great libraries, and I look forward to tinkering with them at some point.
We hope to […]