8 attendees geeked out on Python. Lots of upcoming events. NEAR-fest is May 2nd and 3rd. Red Hat Summit is in Boston this year, June 18-20. Running concurrently with RH Summit FUDCon Boston, running over the weekend of June 19-21. Ted brought up PgCon, a PostgreSQL conference, May 20-23 2008 at the University of Ottawa. The next Global Python Sprint Weekend is May 10-11, 2008. Join in to squash some Python bugs. Ubuntu Open Week, April 28-May 3, is an event presenting a series of online workshops. There is a presentation on May 1st of interest to Pythonistas entitled “Python Packaging - Emilio Pozuelo Monfort”. Mailing list announcement David M. Beazley’s PyCon 2008 Presentation on generators, Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers, is a very accessible introduction to doing very cool things with Python generators. Ted pointed us to an interesting article, A conversation with Ray Ozzie about Live Mesh. Ted also told us about a Python RSS aggregator, Planet. He maintains a page of Foxpro related links using it, Planet Fox. And Python news can be had at Planet Python. Shawn kept telling Ted he could turn off syntax highlighting in vim quickly and easily. xkcd likes Python!

Ray mentioned Python Powered SpreadSheet (PPSS), a spreadsheet program based on the Python programming language. Ted countered by bringing up that OpenOffice is scriptable in Python with pyUNO. The Python Twisted network engine has a new version, 8.0. Various discussions of cryptography. pyCrypto. PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function). Linux Unified Key Setup or LUKS. TrueCrypt. Apple FileVault. eCryptfs. The various downloadable versions and variants of OpenSolaris came up. Also the fact that disk encryption for the ZFS filesystem is an OpenSolaris project. Ted reminded us that Todd Underwood presented to MerriLUG in the past on ZFS and his slides are available online. -Shawn