I was using MEPIS Linux for the past 4 days after a high recommendation by Pradeep and I was remarkably surprised by the ease of install.

First of all, it acts as a LiveCD so you can test out everything before you do any install and then you then click on the Install section in the menu and it’ll install on the hard disk. Uber-cool!

However, I hit a roadblock on two things – sound wasn’t working and the Sify dialer wasn’t working. Regarding sound, I tried everything but couldn’t get it working at all…

Disappointed, I just had to switch back to Fedora since I needed a working system fast… so I installed FC3 again and now I’m back in business.. The Fedora Installation Guide was of immense help – especially the part about removing unused services at startup and using the KDE Display Manager instead of gdm. Everything looks so much better now!

Also, I have started to rewrite chapters of my book, so that I can get back in the writing groove and also improve the wordings of many parts of the book. I’m taking into consideration the huge list of corrections sent by readers that I haven’t been able to incorporate till now. You can look forward to some good improvements in the book

I tried to get some work done yesterday but after a long day and me being the lazy guy that I am, I just went to sleep after getting back… I woke up today morning and started working on the slide and had a few more practical examples comparing some Perl vs Python code and so on… I finally complete some changes, although quite not satisfied but I thought the slides, as they are, will have to just do.

Then, suddenly, there’s a power cut!! The horror! I had enough sense to mail the ppt to myself but didn’t have enough UPS backup to burn the presentation and programs to a CD ..

So, I got ready and was hoping that some cyber cafes would be open at 9 am, so that I could take my presentation on a floppy … my talk’s at 10 am! And just then, the power came back. Relieved, I burnt the stuff to a CD and rushed to the IISc campus.

I arrived at 9.50 am (traffic was heavy, as usual) and found out that my talk (and other talks in the same track) were shifted to the 60-seater Hall C for reasons unknown .. Vinay had brought his cool laptop so that I could do my presentation with it.. he was kind enough to get all the Python, wxPython and other stuff installed on it yesterday. Thanks, Vinay. There were some initial problems connecting the laptop to the projector but it was solved quickly. So, the talk started at 10.10 am… I just started, introduced myself, mentioned my book and got the Python talk going …. I explained the whole deal- What is Python? Why Python? Who uses it? What’s so special about it? How does it look like? and so on…. 20 min later, people are still listening to me!

I went on and gave lots of examples on the basic syntax and stuff of what you would learn in any new language … I continued giving some examples on how Python code looks like and what makes it so ‘readable’. Then, I gave demos on wxPython and explained the Twisted and Jython and IronPython software and how it is useful. Twisted wasn’t installed on the system, so I couldn’t demo but I did talk about it and showed the screenshot along with code. Jython didn’t have Swing installed but again I managed with the screenshot along with code.

This was followed by a Q & A session… the audience asked many questions… always a good sign… I think I was able to answer them appropriately.

Some people met me outside the hall (Kenneth started talking on web programming using Python) and some even mentioned that they have read my book and they liked it

All in all, things did finally go well. I knew I had spoken quite well but I had a feeling I spoke a bit fast. I got feedback later from lots of people that I maintained a reasonable pace and kept the audience involved throughout the whole session and they did show signs of interest in trying out Python after they went back home… which was the whole point of the session! So, I was happy things turned out well

Update

Talk details are put up at the LB site.

Slides available

Download the slides in case you were not able to attend my talk!

I thought I’d take some time out and read up on Python metaclasses, so I entered "python metaclasses" in the google (yeah, google) search bar in Firefox and pressed go and guess what I was looking at – my own blog post! :-O

It’s such a gloomy weather here in Bangalore… sigh. It’s been raining cats and dogs and as a result I got cold, cough and fever… and I’m just recovering now.

However, I did manage to read ‘Ignited Minds’ by Abdul Kalam over the weekend. All I can say is wow. I’ve been inspired by Kalam. He puts things across in such a simple yet remarkable manner. He does get into preach mode many times but I do agree with him that most Indians have a defeatist attitude and is exactly one of the reasons that India is not already a developed country.

I think we should make ‘Ignited Minds’ as compulsory reading for anyone who stands for election. Well, aah, I can dream….!

On the Bytes side, I got good news. Ibiblio has agreed to host my book on their servers and will help reduce the load on my website

Another ‘Byte of Python’ related news is that I’ll be shortly announcing a mailing list exclusively for the book. Readers are encouraged to join in to discuss the book and help me make the book even better!

Here’s a paragraph from an article in the Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine Online:

"To learn Python, I’d start with Core Python Programming by Wesley Chun. The online documentation and tutorial is also terrific. A great free tutorial called “A Byte of Python” is available at http://www.python.g2swaroop.net."

I came across Mark Mayo’s blog and he had some nice comments about my book.

‘A Byte of Python’ is being distributed on CDs accompanying the german ‘Linux Enterprise’ magazine!

Gregory (coulix-at-ozforces-dot-com-dot-au) is planning to translate my book to French during his upcoming semester break. He is from New Caledonia (a small French island in the pacific) and is now studying Computer science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He says that translating the book will allow him to get more skills and be useful at the same time!

There have been more than 3273 pageviews in the last 5 days (02/06/2004-06/06/2004). The majority of readers are, in order, from net, com and edu domains, Australia, Germany, India, Italy, United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, Finland, France, Netherlands, Austria, Japan, Brazil, Czech Republic, USA Military, Denmark, Poland, Israel, Switzerland, USA Government, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Mexico, Slovak Republic, Chile, Bermuda, Belgium, China, United States, Iceland, Romania, Turkey, Malta, Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa, Greece, Malaysia, Thailand, Phillippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Croatia, United Arab Emirates, ….!

For more such updates, always check the home page.

My book is the top Tech Tip in the ComputerWorld.com AppDev Center today!

You can also access the story directly.