I gave a talk at ChiPy, the Chicago Python usergroup, tonight; my work, Imaginary Landscape, hosted. It was a really good meeting. Ian Bicking gave a talk on how to write a web app without a framework (which was also kind of a peek into how to build your own python web framework), Peter Fein gave a talk on his Factory module (a really neat approach to simplifying redundant code), and I gave a talk on the OpenMoko phone. We always advertise the current ChiPy meeting as going to be "our best meeting ever", but I really do think this was one of the best ones. That's not just me being conceited (although I might be a little bit, it's hard for me to tell), I thought all the talks went well.

I did think this was the best talk I've given though. Honestly, I wasn't going to do it this month because I didn't think I was prepared enough... I was going to wait until I had thrown together some example applications. But instead it was a bit more ad-hoc... I just described the phone and the history of it, and then gave a brief tutorial of how to make a phone call by entering lines into the interpreter one by one. I promised that it would be less than ten lines of code, and it was (it was seven), but I noted that if we hadn't already turned on the antenna (and it was turned on before I opened the interpreter), I would have needed an additional four, bringing the number to eleven. Well anyway, when I finally entered the last line (with the phone number of an audience member as an argument) there was silence for a moment... and then when his phone rang, well that's when the room started buzzing with excitement.

I've been meaning to write about the OpenMoko phone on here for a while, and why I think it matters, but maybe I can just post the talk... Carl Karsten was kind enough to record it, and we might try to upload it to blip.tv next week. I've been talking about how it would be kind of nice to start a ChiPy videocast, a channel one could watch with Miro and stuff. Sounds like that might happen.