[ale] ITT Linux Festival!

[Charles Shapiro]

Another Day of Pizza has passed at ITT Tech.  I gave my talk on
WxPython ( first presented May 2009 at the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts).
 It was I fear over the heads of many of the kids there, since the
WxPython library makes heavy use of classes and inheritance in both
its interface and its internals. But heck, at least I could give them
a flavor of what actual working Python application code looks like, as
opposed to the toy academic exercises they're doing.  I remember what
a shock it was to hit datasets in the megabytes after working with
groups of records small enough to load into one page of an editor in
school.

There was one kid there who had some C background and seemed to at
least have hopes of becoming clueful. I wound up doing some wiki wiki
OO tutorial on the whiteboard in the back corner and recommending the
2 great books for transitioning from C to C++:
_C++:The_Core_Language_ ( Gregrory Satie, Doug Brown, O'Reilly Books,
1996), and _Effective_C++:50 ways to improve your Programs and Design
( Scott Meyers, Addison-Wesley, 1998).  I hope that the guy I talked
to works through them.

Wolf showed me the wonders of Puppy Linux 4.1, and I am quite
impressed.  It's got a much spiffier GUI than the Puppy which I'm
running my print server on.  I helped one of the guys there load the
Pup onto a memory stick, and we discovered that syslinux ("mbr.bin")
was really the way to go to make the stick properly bootable.  The
whole OS took only 100 mb of file space.  I dunno if you can install
Zope on it though.

-- CHS