As might know, I recently completed the Couch-to-5K running plan and used a Garmin Forerunner 205 to track my progress. The Garmin Training Center software for the device isn’t too bad, but it would be nice to not have to rely on it.

Well as it turns out, Bob Rudis wrote a Python script to read the gtc database files:

If you’ve got python and it’s sqlite library installed, then this script will be a half-decent example of how to pull data from “.gtc” database for each entry in the stored history. If not, have no fear, I hope to release a small app to let you extract the data on your own and I’m still thinking about that widget.

The cool part is that, as Bob pointed out earlier, the Training Center database files are nothing more than SQLite files! How awesome is that?

Urwid is a “console user interface library” for Python, and it looks pretty darn cool. If you check out the examples, you can get an idea of what you can do with it.

Quoth Twitter:

When your downtime is measured in days (not minutes or hours), I question how “quickly” they are working on it.

Oh well, you get what you pay for I guess.

At the last CPLUG meeting, Patrick mentioned that he was hoping to plan a capture the flag (CTF) event sometime in the near future. Although this time there will be no DoS attacks allowed and there will only be one target box, so you shouldn’t have to worry about player vs. player attacks… hopefully. :)

Well, it looks like things are starting to take shape! After an initial post on the mailing list, he has about 13-15 people signed up. The date/time are still TBD, but I know that I’ll be there no matter when it is.

Sounds like fun!

The Python wiki has some tips for starting your user group. It’s certainly not the most helpful document in the world (at least in its current form), but there are some decent tips in there.

Update: The Recipe for a Successful Linux User Group is (obviously) LUG focused, but I think all of the tips apply for a PUG as well.

Matthew Huntbach talks about what’s wrong with Ruby.

Update: Wow.

I have to admit that I only skimmed the article before posting it. Now that I’ve taken the time to read Nate’s comments below, and the actual article… I almost regret posting it.

I’m not sure if Matthew is actively just trying to troll for hits, or if he’s really that confused/shallow in his review. He ranges from downright cheap shots (e.g. his comments re: Why’s Guide) to a very odd complaint about lists. For some reason, in his mind if you have a list of ["apple", "banana", "grape"] and add that to a list of ["pork", "beans", "rice"], the language should perform operations based on pairings of the items… rather than sensibly just yielding a list of all the elements combined.

In the end, he claims to say what’s wrong with Ruby, but mostly he just complains about the free tutorials he came across or that he found the marketing materials for a specific book to be hyperbolic (you don’t say!). The article is, in essence, no more than one complaint about how lists are handled and then a few more complaints that basically come down to personal preference.

A weak article indeed. Blah.

In case you missed it… Pylons 0.9.4.1 was released back in January. Never used Pylons? Here’s the blurb:

Pylons combines the very best ideas from the worlds of Ruby, Python and Perl, providing a structured but extremely flexible Python web framework. It’s also one of the first projects to leverage the emerging WSGI standard, which allows extensive re-use and flexibility — but only if you need it.

I have yet to use it in any significant way, but Pylons does some really cool stuff. Check it out.

Today is 3/14… Pi Day! And in honor of this great day, James Tauber wrote a Python script to generate the hex digits of pi. Nice!

If you are so inclined, Wikipedia has a nice article on the various methods of computing pi. Here’s my favorite method:

#!/usr/bin/env python from math import pi print pi
Heh.

I’m not going to quote the whole thing, but you should really check out Jeremy Jones’ PyCon 2007 Wrapup over at ONLamp. He gives a list of Python “projects to watch” with a small blurb/paragraph about each one. Django is included, as well as some other interesting projects.

There’s a Django Tagging application over at Google Code that looks interesting:

A generic tagging application for Django projects, which allows association of a number of tags with any Model instance and makes retrieval of tags simple.

Might come in handy.