Richard Jones' Log

I gave my first Python lecture at RMIT University last night.

As I think I mentioned before this is my first time lecturing and I was brought in to revitalise an out-of-date lecture series. From the little feedback I've had I believe it went well :)

It was a strange experience. Firstly there was the challenge of talking for over an hour and a half (with a 10 minute break in the middle). Previously the longest presentation I'd given was 45 minutes. I managed to time things pretty well, but almost ran out of time at the end. I had a little bit of interaction with the students which indicated that they were following what was going on. There was even a few "ooh" moments from them, which was neat :)

No-one fell asleep, even though the lecture started at 5:30pm and I had the house lights down so the projector was easy to see.

5 more to go. I realised yesterday that none of the old lectures mentioned testing, so I'll have to insert at least doctesting but also hopefully unit testing. Shouldn't be too hard - one of the lectures spends a good 15-20 minutes introducing TCP/IP programming which I'll be very glad to remove.

Well, back to the day job now... OpenGL beckons :)

PyWeek theme voting has begun, so we're only a week away from the start now. Sign up, join the fun!

Seen on the PyWeek message board:

from socket import*;s=socket();s.connect(("pyweek.org",80));s.send("GET /5/entries/ HTTP/1.0\n\n");x=""
while True:
 try:i=s.recv(9);x+=[s.gettimeout(),i][bool(i)]
 except:True=0
False=sum([not True for a in x.split("<dt")[0:-1]])
print False or True

Code by neko.

By the way, the next challenge is a little over a week away. Have you signed up yet? Why not? :)

The fifth PyWeek is only a month away. Come along and join the fun: write a video game in a week!

There's some really interesting new libraries that have popped up recently. Have a gander on the pyweek message board for more info.