YGingras^.net

The word is already out but in case you don't know yet, I'm moving to San Francisco to join Facebook. This news will be a surprise to some of you, especially since I've never been a big Facebook fan. I've always willingly shared lots of personal information about myself on this Website; the lack of privacy has never been a show stopper to me. When I stopped using Facebook, it was not on moral grounds, it was because I did not see myself as a part of their target market.

But I have only a few days left in Montréal and I can write about my reasons for moving to California at a later time. At this point, I find it urgent to mention that I've had a great time with many of you here in Montréal and that I would not want to go without drinking one more beer with all of you.

Mark the date, on Wednesday, November 16th, I invite you to join me for a 5-à-7 at Benelux, a long-time sponsor of Montréal-Python and probably the hottest pub in the tech community these days. It gets even better because Benelux likes cool people and by definition, if you know me, you certainly are very cool. This is why Benelux will give you a free beer next Wednesday; just ask me for a coupon. See you there!

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Last week, we had the Mondial de la bière, Montréal's international beer festival. This is a great expo-like event with over 40 craft brewers coming in town to show their creations.

The new venue is a refreshing change. The old one was getting way too crowded and it was a major challenge to move from one kiosk to the other during peek hours. With the larger venue, you have very large hallways and you can get a sense of who's on the floor by walking between the booth while drinking and having a conversation. Unfortunately, the new venue feels like a bunker: you access it from the underground city by passing a maze of up and down staircases then you arrive in this enormous hall with bare concrete walls and not a window in sight. If you think of a grey yellow-lit hallway in Quake, you are not too far from the reality.

It's OK to do a event indoor, but if you do so, do it during the winter. When I drink a beer in June, I think of a terrace and if you are not after very exclusive beers, you will get a much nicer experience on the terrace of a craft brewerie, which were all featuring some guest beers anyway.

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Something is brewing it the developers community of Montréal. More specifically, ConFooBBQ spawned a renewed interest in home brewing among developers. Yesterday, I was at the ConFoo.ca organization meeting and I learned that Francis Bégin just bought his ingredients to start a new batch after several years of idleness, and that he is looking at buying kegs, Mathieu Chartier confirmed that he is willing to team up with me so can brew a W3Québec beer together for the next ConFooBrew, and that two Ruby developers want to come to my place next time that I brew so they can get a feel for what's involved and get started on their own.

I'm all for coaching people but if you are just going to watch some other guy brew, you might as well watch it on you tube. Brewing, like cooking, is nice in itself because it fills your kitchen with the aroma of fresh ingredients being transformed but the real motivation come from the end-product that you are looking forward to taste. For that reason, I'm going to invite these brewers to my place but what we are going to brew will be their Ruby Red with the explicit condition that they have to serve it at their next Montreal.rb monthly meeting. That, dear readers, is how you tie strong bonds between communities.

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I saw this bad-ass claw in front of UQAM on my way home. I'm not sure what it's used for but I really like it's you-won't-escape style.

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There is a Debian Meetup tomorrow at pub Ste-Elizabeth. I'll be there and I hope to meet other GNU/Linuxers.

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Don't forget, Montréal Python 8 is this Wednesday.

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Julien Desrosiers just wrote to let me know that he did put a new aggregator online. Montreal Hackers is a minimalist website where you can see what other hardcore geeks of Montréal are working on. Neet!

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I have the pleasure to announce that Montreal Python 5 will be on 2009-02-26 at La Banque.

The main presentation will be Alexandre Vassalotti on Porting your Code to Python 3: Python 3, also colloquially known as Python 3000, is now out for general use. Unfortunately, its usage is limited since only a few libraries are currently compatible with Python 3. In this presentation, you will learn a straightforward process for migrating Python code and the common difficulties related to the transition. In addition, an overview of the new features brought by Python 3 will be described with practical examples. Finally, upcoming changes and features in Python 2.7 and 3.1 will be presented.

Alexandre Vassalotti is a contributing Python core developer and a computer science student at McGill University. He was a successful participant of Google Summer of Code 2007, for which he worked on the different aspects of Python 3.0.

The main presentation should be from 45 to 60 minutes. Before the main presentation, there will be a few flash (5 mins) presentation. We still have open spots for the flash presentation so don't hesitate to send us your idea for a flash presentation.

La Banque is located at 175 Roy. See you there.

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Videos of Montreal Python 2 are finally ready. A big thank you to Pior for his hard work behind the camera and in the cutting room.

• Cyril Robert: Asterisk and Python
• Yannick Gingras: Practical intro to PyQt and PyOpenGL

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I just uploaded the code examples from my presentation at Montréal Python #2 on PyQt and PyOpenGL. I fixed the lighting and the positioning of the model but otherwise, the package contains exactly what was on the screen. You can also download the multiple alignment viewer that I presented from my bioinformatics section. Enjoy!

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The second Montréal Python user group meeting is on 2008-04-10. Two talks this time: one on scripting Asterisk with Python by Cyril Robert, the other on graphical programming by me. My shameless plug reads as follow:

Python is a great language for fast prototyping and iterative development. It has a broad standard library, a wide variety of add-on modules, and its clean C API fueled the creation of bindings for essentially all the popular C and C++ toolkits.

In this practical introduction, I will put the slides aside and hack a simple graphical application using PyQt and PyOpenGL. I will try to do as much code as possible in 35 minutes then answer questions for another 10 minutes. If time allows, I might delve into the land of database access with SQLAlchemy, plug-in architecture with Setuptools, and unit testing with Doctest.

If you plan to show up, please help the organizers with the logistics by mentioning it on the wiki. Yes, there will be refreshments.

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Right on time to object recent taser abuses, there was a police brutality protest this afternoon in Montréal. Unfortunately, after a few friendly snowballs, the police decided to charge.

After a hard day of running after protesters, policemen enjoyed pizza while the crowd was shivering.

Of course, Pior was right there with me testing his new camera.

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Thanks to Savoir-faire Linux, I was able to film the first Montréal Python User Group meeting. After lots of curses and struggle, I finally completed the editing and the encoding of the Montréal Python #1 video. Pior Bastida deserves a very special mention for finding the magic spell for mencoder.

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After many passionate conversations about photography with Pascal, I decided to upgrade my digital camera. I didn't feel quite ready, technically and financially, for the full power of DSLR but I definitely wanted to try my hands on the expressiveness of manual mode. I retired my Nikon L10 and I'm now the proud owner of a Sony H9.

It features a huge LCD and given it's zooming power, it's quite lite. It also has a bunch of manual controls. One thing that I really wanted was bracketing. I had tried to do HDR with my L10 but you need to fiddle with the control dial to change the exposure. There is no way you can to that without moving the camera and the slightest movement will ruin a HDR image; all my previous attempts where just a bunch of splotchy messes. Now, at last, I can do it. I mean, it just works, and the result is... Wow!

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This guide was originally developed on the Gazest demo site with the help of the MSLUG hackers. I'm about to push a new version of Gazest on the demo site that changes internal storage and the current content will probably be nuked rather than upgraded. This guide, unlike the rest of the demo site, is quite good so I repost it here in hope that it can help local dwellers and future visitors enjoy our fascinating city.

First of all, DON'T PANIC. OOPSLA starts in just a few days and we await a lot of famous Lisp hackers so I thought that it would be nice to give them a list of decent things to do in Montréal. One might think that I'm trying to coerce people into beta testing Gazest and he would be right.

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Back from the Slashdot anniversary party in Montréal. In Montréal, we have great beer and great brew pubs and when we say it's going to be a geek party, we really mean it.

I forgot everyone's name so feel free to point yourself out in the comments. If it doesn't look that wild, it's just because people were too lazy to take pictures while I was jumping on tables during my demonstration of rising on a surfboard.

We even had someone with a 2 digit Slashdot UID, that's quite something!

The other attendees have started to post their pictures on the Slashdot party page. We left with many questions unanswered. As an example, what could Stéphane's belt buckle stand for?

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Montréal is full of relics of the industrial revolution. Back in the old days, the Old Port was the heart of the city. Right next to it was a trading and economic district, just outside of the this district were factories and other industrial buildings. The Old Port is little more than a tourist trap these days. The economic center moved further inland and the factories are derelicts being slowly transformed in condos.

I went exploring those relics with an adventurous friend. The key to urban exploration is to keep an open mind; to look for places that people see but forget to visit; to find your way without breaking-in. Just as the hiker, the urban explorer should leave no trace. You get to see the city from many angles, the angles of the men and women who many years ago worked hard to turn Montréal into a city where people like to live in. Montréal is beautiful when seen through a truss bridge.

We ended up in a squat under a railway overpass. They managed to arrange a reasonably comfortable dwelling with couches and improvised room separations. I could live there if it wasn't for the lack of sanitation. And the lack of heating. No way to learn how they managed to heat their place; our hosts could only speak non-sense. There must be a fuse in our brain that blows to shield us from reality when it becomes to hard to bear.

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I'm back in Montréal. I've had a poutine as soon as I was back from the airport and I bought fresh bread from the baker the following morning. With a piece of blue cheese from the market next to my apartment, it was a delightful breakfast. My fridge currently contains nothing but mustard, Jager Meister and tonic water; that's the way I like it. Why would I do the grocery when I can buy anything withing five minutes of walk?

Montréal is walkable. I missed that part far more than poutine. But, the fact that among the things that you can walk to is the pouting should not be overlooked. Withing ten minutes of walk I have tree bread bakeries, two cheese shops, four Irish pubs, ten convenience stores with a decent selections of beer, four liquor stores, two Greek restaurants, four sushi bars, two Lebanese restaurants, one Indian restaurant, two coffee roasters, at least twenty cafés, and a lot more. There is a decent mass transit in Montréal but what is really charming is that you don't need to use it. And there are so many bike racks.

Montréal is alive at night. Not that it's dead during the day, far from it. But, it keeps moving during the night and this is something that I like. If I can't sleep, and this is something that might happen when you suffer from six hours of jet lag, I know that something quite entertaining must be happening within a few minutes of walk.

I like to walk on paving stones, to walk among tightly packed Victorian houses. Don't get me wrong, Hawaii was great; I already miss the ocean. It's just that I love Montréal.

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In Montréal, bagel shops never close. Don't get me wrong, I could wait until sunrise to get a snack. I would not mind. And there are alternatives. But, when dawn barely shows, when birds start to sing, it seems that I'm hardwired for bagels, fresh from a wood-fired oven.

It might be that I'm skeptical. Do they ever close? Some say that they can't even lock their door. Indeed, Fairmont Bagel's door has no handle, knob, or anything that vaguely resemble a locking mechanism. This is hardly conclusive, they could install another door when they close. But no mater when I go there, at night, at noon, on Labor Day, or on Yom Kippur, they are open and there are other people shopping. Always, wood burning and bagels tightly packed, roasting in plain view for everyone to admire while the delightful smell makes their mouth water. One must have a really twisted schedule if he doesn't hit a lineup at Fairmont Bagel.

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