Back after a few months missing! Arrived late, which seems to be the standard for me lately… As I sat down, folks were discussing goings-on for Software Freedom Day. For some more multimedia Python related Internet content, you can check out the Python411 podcast at Python Learning Foundation and Python Tutorial Screencasts and Videos at ShowMeDo. A great news aggregator for Python news is Planet Python. Shawn mentioned a new Python conference, PyWorks, happening Nov 12-14 in Atlanta. They recently announced their conference schedule. It is organized by the folks that publish Python Magazine. Shawn also mentioned that he found out about this from Doug Hellmann’s blog, which has a great weekly feature, the Python Module of the Week. Kent took over for this month’s Kent’s Korner, where he showed us defaultdict objects in the collections module of the Python standard library. Ray then took over for the main presentation for the night, “A Glimpse at BOSS.” Yahoo! offers a web service called Yahoo! Search BOSS (where BOSS stands for Build your Own Search Service). Yahoo! is now providing BOSS Mashup Framework. To quote their website, “The BOSS Mashup Framework is an experimental Python library that provides developers with SQL-like constructs for mashing up the BOSS API with third-party data sources.” Some discussion of licensing came up. Yahoo! states that the BOSS Mashup Framework is covered by the Yahoo! Search BOSS Services Terms of Use. This discussion also brought up mention of the AGPL or GNU Affero General Public License. During his talk, Ray mentioned Aptana, a software company that provides an IDE for doing AJAX development. They recently hired the author of the Eclipse PyDev extension, and PyDev is now also available for their Aptana Studio.Bill mentioned a HAM Radio magazine article that he noticed involved some Python! The article, “D-RATS — an Application Suite for D-STAR”, is available as a PDF on-line. Software Freedom Day activities discussion resurged, and Bill mentioned OpenDisc. Quoting OpenDisc’s website, “OpenDisc is a high quality collection of open source software (OSS) for the Microsoft Windows operating system.” See you next month! -Shawn