PyGTA meeting was this evening. Greg Wilson gave a talk about his course at the University of Toronto and about his attempts to make Python more acceptable to the academic community (for which he got a PSF grant for this year).

Was interesting to hear his perspective, and I agree with the general principle that we need to get Python into academia, but I don't know that the Python-dev people are really the ones I want hacking on the standard library. After all, they're mostly C programmers (since they write the C implementation of Python) and do you really want C programmers writing your Python libraries (I'm only half-joking there)?

Greg's a non-XP-believer (like myself), so he and Peter were close to shouting at each other at one point :) . (Hopefully his message to PyGTA's mailing list has smoothed that over).

Apparently we have a pool of Python coding students from which to draw coming out... maybe some of them will choose our life of simple poverty and join Cain Gang :) .

I'm tempted to propose a graphics programming course similar to the one at the University of Waterloo for the University of Toronto [Correction: looks as though they've switched to using Lua now, instead of Python :( [Correction again: looking at the course notes they still reference Python, don't know why the resources now link to Lua]]. But I don't suppose I'm really qualified to teach a C course, and doing a raytracer in pure Python probably isn't practical (and I doubt the students would stand for doing it in Lisp or Prolog). Will try to get to some of their events, though.

Ian also mentioned a venture-capital breakfast that happens every month. I think I'll try getting to one of those to see if VC funding for Cinemon might be a workable option (we're self-funded at the moment).

Shannon is interested in starting work on a game server, likely starting as an interactive fiction project. I suggested he look at Twisted, as that was one of the original foci of the project.

Met Doug as well. IIRC he's the one who works for a company in Illinois that does Zope and WebWare stuff. He's a BSD user, though I didn't catch which variant.

We'll have at least 3 people going down to PyCon this year, myself, Chris and Ian. Hopefully we'll get another one or two wanting to carpool (beyond Chris and I) and drive the cost down to almost nothing.

I'm seriously overdosed on coffee at the moment. Hands are shaking and feet/legs are spasming. Too wired to get any coherent work done on Cinemon. Not sure what I want to do. Almost feel like diving into Jelle's project, but from what I can see that's going to take about 4 hours of concentration... and concentration is just what I don't have at the moment.

Suppose I could work on getting the Twisted patch reworked to the point where it's reasonable to submit it... even though it's apparently not solving all of the problems we're seeing.

Zing! Poof!