On Saturday (May 10th) the Cape Town Python User Group held a Python Sprint meeting as part of the Global Python Sprint weekend.  8 or so of us got together on and off from 10:30am until about 9:30pm at the SynthaSite offices around a table and worked through 10 or so issues in the Python issue database.

Thanks to The Other Neil and Simon for most of the organisation effort, and to them and Adrianna, Russell, Jonathan, Jeremy, Brad, and David for coming through and taking part.

And thanks to SynthaSite for coffee, coke, crisps, chocolates, and other goodies.

According to The Other Neil, we worked on:

• http://bugs.python.org/issue2736
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2809
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2742
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1491
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1343
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2776
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1777412
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2768
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2722
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1153769
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2746

The GeekDinner Cape Town first birthday dinner is upon us - Garrulous Grape is our seventh GeekDinner (one year and three days after the first one), happening on Monday, 31st March from 7pm at Greens in Plattekloof.  Yes, we've finally headed north!

Before that, the Cape Town Python User Group meeting (aka CTPUG 9) at the Bandwidth Barn on Saturday, 29th March, from 2pm.

There's quite a bit happening for geeks in Cape Town this month. 

On Saturday 6th from 14:00 to about 16:00, the Cape Town Python User Group will be holding its sixth meeting at the Bandwidth Barn, where you can hear me talking about Pylons and Graeme Glass talking about Python on the S60 mobile/smartphone platform.

On Tuesday 9th from 18:30 onwards, the Western Cape Linux User Group will be holding a meeting at the UCT Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre (as usual), with Jonathan Hitchcock talking about the Gentoo Portage package management system.

On Wednesday 17th, Moodia is hosting the first Facebook Developer Garage Cape Town (Facebook required), at the Waverley business park from 18:30 to 22:30.  This should be an interesting event, and hopefully we'll see some Facebook development talks, tutorials, or projects at *Camp.

On Saturday 20th, the first PodCampCapeTown is happening (although I think I might have to give it a miss, given my schedule) from 9am to 5pm at The Wild Fig (you might remember that they were the venue for the May Cape Town GeekDinner).

On Saturday 27th, slightly less geeky, there's the 27-13 27dinner from 18:30 onwards at the Deer Park Cafe (you might remember that this was where the "1 of 50" open content party was held last month).

Also by CLUG, on Tuesday 30th, UCT Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre from 18:30, Jeremy Thurgood will be talking about the DARCS version control system.

I like that we're discovering some good venues - the Bandwidth Barn, the Wild Fig, and the Deer Park Cafe all seem quite friendly to being used as venues for the kind of events we're organising.

While there are probably hundreds of people employed as Linux systems administrators, and hundreds more people using Linux at home for fun, in Cape Town alone, our Linux User Group, CLUG, isn't growing along with these numbers.  It should, though.  It provides two talks a month, on weekday nights, by some of the best people to talk about them, on both beginner and advanced topics, on programming to administration.  And it also has a dinner afterwards for people to meet and learn more about each other and help each other.  CLUG meets on the second and last Tuesday every month, with roughly 20 people attending the talks and about 10 people going to the dinner afterwards.

Growing the pool is making new connections, bringing new people into the community, providing new people to learn from and new opportunities for work or play.  It isn't necessarily about bringing new people into the field (but it is a by-product) so much as it is about making everyone in the field more aware of each other.

The next Cape Town Python User Group Meeting will be meeting tomorrow 2pm to 4pm at The Bandwidth Barn in the centre of Cape Town.  The main talk will be on Plone by Roche Compaan, CEO of Stellenbosch-based Plone gurus Upfront Systems.  I'll be giving a short talk on SQLAlchemy and Elixir.  Also, Simon Cross says he'll head a discussion on func_closure.

On Saturday, the Cape Town Python User Group had its second shorter and smaller meeting, again at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (aka AIMS) in Muizenburg.

Simon Cross gave the "main" talk on Genshi, the XML markup based templating system.  Simon explained the evolution of XML-based templating systems from TAL, via Kid, to Genshi, and also gave a pretty good look at how Genshi is organised internally and how one would write a filter and convert from Genshi streams to ElementTree XML objects and back.

Jeremy Thurgood gave one of the two shorter talks, on Python decorators.  Neil Muller spoke about the Python Imaging Library, from simple stuff I could understand to more complicated things like using the excellect NumPy with PIL in the latest version, allowing for much more powerful image manipulation.

We set a date for the next meeting - except I've forgotten what it is.  Somewhere mid-May.  I'm sure Neil (Muller) will post it to the CTPUG list soon - sign up to keep updated.