Mid-Spring Winter the pico-season, sesquivernal greens sodden upon sunrise

I'm always tickled by the near-May-Day snows we get here in the Boulder area, and in 2005 I even wrote a poem (a bagatelle, really) "May Day Flakes" when we got a good 8 inches at the end of April. This morning we got a dusting, making it the latest in the year I've seen snow in the backyard. Early last week we got a few inches.

Our winters are generally so mild (though this past one was rougher than most) that my Nigerian blood doesn't curdle over at such oddities. In fact, we always get so much sun that all the snow is usually gone by afternoon of the day. Pico-season. Peek-a-boo season.

Front Range Pythoneers 2009 Unconference

Had a good time at FRUncon09. More notes here and see also Twitter hashtag #fruncon09.  I gave a presentation on Akara and got a lot of very good discussion.  A few pics below.  In the first you can see Boulder's winter wonderland today, and Google's front door.  In the next few, the lunch generously provided by Google.  Thanks guys for the pizza and drinks, and overall for the nice setting, hospitality and the tour.  I'll say what many people have: that is one brilliant place to work.  Last pic is the rec area.  You can see the pool table, table tennis and maybe rock band set-up (which is pretty well worn ;) ).  What you can't see is the rock climbing wall, fussball, etc.  Anyway, good day meeting local Pythoneers and discovering some of the interesting things they're up to.  The Front Range never ceases to amaze me with how much talent and quite good work goes on in these here hills.

 

 

P.S. Ctypes have always been somethign I've wanted to check out, but haven't had time.  I was very glad of Greg Holling's ctypes talk. Following from his slides works like a charm on my Mac, and is super-cool. Fun with C stdlib.




>>> from ctypes import cdll, CDLL
>>> print CDLL.__doc__
An instance of this class represents a loaded dll/shared
    library, exporting functions using the standard C calling
    convention (named 'cdecl' on Windows).

    The exported functions can be accessed as attributes, or by
    indexing with the function name.  Examples:

    <obj>.qsort -> callable object
    <obj>['qsort'] -> callable object

    Calling the functions releases the Python GIL during the call and
    reacquires it afterwards.
    
>>> clib = CDLL('libc.dylib')
>>> len = clib.printf("The answer is %d\n", 42)
The answer is 42
>>> print len
17
>>>