June 2011 Meet-up Notes
Lightning Talks:
Ben - Data destruction
- It looks like Ben had a good time experimenting with the best way to physically destroy a harddrive.
- Thermite is far more certain than even the most thorough of disk wipe utilities. It's a lot more fun too. :)
Gregg - Upstart:
- Upstart is an easy to use watchdog system for ensuring that your services keep running and restarting them if they go down.
- Currently the replacement for init on Ubuntu (and Fedora?) systems.
- It's easy to configure and easy to run.
- http://github.com/gregglind/upstart-pymntos-demo
Jay - Zookeeper:
- Distributed configuration and signalling tool.
- Can create configuration entries and set watches on those entries so that signals can be sent easily between distributed systems.
- Distributed directory structure, guaranteed consistency
- A great replacement for urllib2
- Makes HTTP authentication much easier
- Makes sending requests and handling responses much easier
Extra goodies:
- The shell Dan was using - which was unusually readable and had auto-complete features - was bpython
- Someone piped up during the talk to mention py.path (http://doc.pylib.org/en/latest/path.html) which does for file systems what requests did for HTTP requests.
Jason - Swift Linux
- Swift Linux is a project that Jason, a new member, is personally involved with
- Linux distro based on AntiX
- Designed for low-end systems (e.g. systems that aren't powerful enough to run Windows XP, or even Windows 98)
- Debian compatible - designed to be a replacement for Ubuntu on low-end boxes.
Announcements
- Amanda says: PyStar is having another meeting this Saturday.
- Tim says: gsa_admin.py needs coding love (Google Search Appliance Admin Toolkit)
- Gregg says: Come hang out in the ##python-friendly irc channel
- Renesys is hiring network-layer programmers an frontend devs.
- Clockwork is hiring a couple QA people and a software engineer; see their job board.
- Gregg also says: If you are still using screen, you are a dinosaur. Try tmux instead.
- Flask was brought up a few times as a neat light-weight web framework.