Notes from MPUG, December 2013

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
Some other random notes:
  • 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.

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