The last meeting of the Melbourne Python User Group for 2013 was held in early December. It has been a good year for the group, with lots of people attending a variety of interesting talks throughout the year, and we owe a big thanks to Inspire 9 for hosting the MPUG meetings.
Talk #1: “My big gay adventure” by Luke Miller
Luke gave a reprise of his talk from PyCon AU about a 2-D point & click sci-fi game that he has developed: My ex-boyfriend the space tyrant
Some random notes:
- The game has been doing well enough to pay the rent
- Uses pyvida, a cross-platform point and click adventure game engine, which is on github
- Accessibility is an important, but oft-forgotten issue
- The game is sold on bmtmicro store, with no DRM
- Next: a second game and pyvida v2
Talk #2: “Python and Supercomputers: Celery, Redis, Mongo” by Nathan Faggian
- A talk about managing distributed task queues
- Lots of ways of doing this, Nathan is using Celery
- Has Python wrappers to push around functions
- Broker pushs tasks to Worker Nodes, which push results back to the Broker
- Broker then sends results on to a database or filesystem
- Broker could be Redis, Mongo DB, RabbitMQ
- Worker nodes are Python processes, defined by a decorator
- htop – useful utility for monitoring processes (I keep forgetting about it)
- The NCI has the Raijin super computer, the fastest in Australia
- An alternative to celery is disco
- ipython -> ipcluster and ipengine
2014 meetings
Meetings are still on the first Monday of the month, except in January, so the next meeting will be on Monday, Feb 3, 2014, at Inspire 9.
We are always looking for speakers and we are very flexible on the nature of the topic (as long as it has some connection to Python) and the length of the talk. If you are interested in giving a talk at MPUG, or helping us with something different, such as a “hack” night, please get in contact with Javier, Ed or myself.