Sydney traffic chaos disrupts SyPy meeting

Yesterday I hosted the July SyPy meetup at my work. Since the office is North Sydney based, many pythoneers would need to travel to the meeting using Sydney's rail network. It doesn't have the best record for reliability, and yesterday was a classic example. A panel was ripped off a CityRail train as it crossed the Harbour Bridge resulting to commuter chaos for many hours. The good news is that python programmers are a hardy bunch and ten overcame the chaos so we still managed to have a great meeting. Tim Churches gave a talk on the NetEpi Project which is open-source, network-enabled tools for epidemiology and public health practice. It is consists of two components:

1. NetEpi Collection, a Web-based outbreak data management tool, written in Python and using open-source components and infrastructure, including the PostgreSQL database.
2. NetEpi Analysis, a tool for interactive exploratory data analysis of large (10-100 million rows) population health/clinical data sets. It is mainly written in Python, uses Numeric Python (NumPy) and the R statistical environment.

It is good to see that at least one NSW government department is making an investment in open source. Nigel Tao talked about the Gnome Deskbar Applet, which is written in Python and can be extended using python scripts. He also introduced us to YubNub, the commandline for the web. Something else to distract me, thanks Nigel. Dyan Jay, web designer, and entrepreneur did a lightning talk about AGX which is a code-generator for CMF/Plone Products based on the Archetypes framework. The design is done in UML, saved in XMI-Format, and AGX parses the saved model, producing the python code.