All posts by jackie

[0x08] March 2019

Notes

We met on Tuesday, 12th March at the Code Factory.

For the first half hour we all slowly dropped in and had several chats in smaller groups. One notable discussion was about the current attempt of enforcing upload filters at the EU level and digital and analogue protests against it. If you also want to save our internet, take a look at pledge2019.eu, botbrief.eu and savetheinternet.info.

Then we had two talks:

In “Cryptographic hash functions and a PBKDF2 usage example” Jackie tried to briefly explain how (cryptographic) hash functions and key-derivation functions work, and what we have to keep in mind, when we want to use them securely. One practical example was the usage of the pbkdf2 python library by Darsey Litzenberger. The title of the talk links to the slides.

After that Zoé talked about “Home Automation with Python and Home Assistant” and gave some stunning example of what you can do to interact with your flat and how you can use the Python-based Home Assistant to increase fun and comfort. She also explained how to use a little bit of hardware to build a HODOR (Holds Open the DOor (foR you)) and never be bothered again by being to slow for early morning package delivery. The title of the talk links to the slides.

For the next meetup we are still looking for talks or other forms of input. If you want to present something, or if you know someone who you would like to present something, let us know.

[0x03] August 2018

Notes

We met on Wednesday, 8th August at the Planet 10.

We had a small python beginners workshop in the first hour. Then we continued with a talk on “Introduction to Pandas” in the second hour. Afterwards we socialized and discussed about organizational staff. There was plans to start a meetup page and prepare a basic website using flask. Also there should be a public channel and a closed organization channel for our meetups on the Python Austria Slack.

We also talked about trying out a new format for the first hour (welcome & learning space) next time. We want to have at least three people who act as mentors so we can form smaller groups who want to learn something. Nothing has to be prepared in advance, but that way we could have e.g. a group who works on setting up python and getting to know the interactive mode, executing scripts and using Jupyter notebooks, while another group already works on basic language concepts and still another group already goes into detail about a more advanced topic.

The data sets used in the “Introduction to Pandas” talk are from kaggle.com:

[0x01] June 2018

Notes

This meetup took place from 17.00 to 20.00 on Friday 8th June 2018 @ Planet 10 in Pernerstorfergasse 12, 1100 Wien

This was our first meetup. Ivana Kellyerova gave a great talk about some often unknown but very useful (or funny) python modules: import batteries – The modules you never knew you needed.

Before the talk we had some space to get to know each other and talk about our backgrounds and relations with Python. The general structure of the meetup was:

  • 17:00 – 18:00 : arriving & getting to know each other
  • 18:00 – 19:00 : talk/input/presentation
  • 19:00 – 20:00 : ideas for the next meetups, chillout & socializing

So in the end we gathered some ideas for future meetups and also collected some helpful resources to get started with Python:

  • “Data school” channel on Youtube
  • Pyladies Tutorial
  • Django Girls Tutorial
  • SciKitLearn Website
  • Coursera
  • Codecademy
  • edx

What happened so far?

Notes

We started the meetup in summer 2018. Since then already more than 6 meetups took place. And we initially started to use a CryptPad hosted by C3W to organise and also write down notes and share links to presentations.

Now that we have a blog, hopefully new notes and links and stuff will arrive here with the upcoming meetups. Also within the next weeks we’ll put notes we already have from past meetups here too.

Blog theme modifications

Meta

Looking for a dark theme I stumbled across the R2D2 theme by Robert Dall, which I liked quite a lot for several reasons:

  • There are not a lot of good dark themes in the official WordPress theme repos.
  • It is a child theme of Twenty Thirteen, which is one of the standard themes maintained by WordPress.org. This means that is probably gets good security updates in case something comes up, which is not what we can rely on with many themes that are just written once but often not thoroughly maintained.
  • It does not introduce a lot of fancy stuff that we don’t need but focuses on providing a simple and clean theme for those standard requirements we have.
  • And, undeniably, R2D2 is awesome!

So I quickly found a theme, without a lot of effort. Yet, it did not really fit our nerdy context out of the box. So I just played around with the theme modification, and change the following things

  • the header picture to a modification of a green tree python that I found on pexels.com, which was under a CC0 license
  • some colors and fonts with CSS code added in the theme customizer
  • and the picture of the search icon to a color-inverted one

That’s basically everything. We’ll probably be changing around things still, as this is just a first draft. So far, I’d say R2D2 is a great theme if you know how to play around with CSS. And if you are interested in the nitty-gritty details, here’s the CSS code I put in the Additional CSS section in the theme customizer:

.site-title {
     font-size: 42px;
     font-family: monospace;
 }
 .site-description {
     font-size: 1.23rem;
     font-family: monospace; 
 }
 .navbar {
     background-color: black;
     border-bottom: 1px dotted lightgray;
 }
 .nav-menu li a {
     color: green;
     font-family: monospace;
     font-weight: bold;
     font-size: 1.1rem;
 }
 .nav-menu li a:hover {
     color: lightgreen;
     background-color: #303;
 }
 .nav-menu .current_page_item > a {
     color: magenta;
 }
 .site-header .search-field,
 .menu-toggle .site-header .search-field
 {
     background-image: url(/wp-content/themes/r2d2/images/search-icon.png);
 }
 .menu-toggle,
 .menu-toggle:hover,
 .menu-toggle:focus,
 .menu-toggle:active {
   color: green;    
 }
 article.format-standard .entry-meta a {
     color: magenta;
 }
 .entry-content a {
     color: magenta; 
 }
 .entry-content a:hover {
     color: turquoise;   
 }
 .site,
 .site-footer,
 .site-footer .sidebar-container,
 .site-content .archive-header,
 nav.post-navigation,
 comments #respond
 {
     background-color: black;
     color: #fff;
 }
 .site-footer .sidebar-container {
     border-top: 1px dotted lightgray;
     border-bottom: 1px dotted lightgray;
 }
 nav.post-navigation,
 comments #respond
 {
     border-top: 1px dotted lightgray;
 }
 .entry-title a {
     color: green;
 }
 .entry-title a:hover {
     color: lightgreen;
 }
 .navigation a {
     color: green;
   font-weight: bold;    
 }

Update 2019-03-03:

as code is usually much easier to read and we’ll probably add some more code snippets from time to time, I thought I’ll try out some syntax highlighting plugins for WordPress which surely have to be out there. And yes, there are many of them, but I only tried one, which seems quite fine: Enlighter – Customizable Syntax Highlighter by Andi Dittrich, which seems well maintained, has the best reviews and a large user base. And it does all and more of what I was currently looking for.

With this plugin you can also choose among many different syntax highlighting themes, and there are also at least two dark themes, which integrate nicely here. If you want to see how the different available themes look like, check out the Enlighter Theme Demo. Although the standard theme is a light theme (not a dark theme) it still looks good and I nearly opted for that. But then again, it can be really awful to sensitive eyes when you suddenly have a huge code block emitting much more light then the rest of the page. So I chose the Atomic theme. Only the font was a little too big compared to the rest of the site, so I added the following CSS to the theme customizer:

.atomicEnlighterJS span {
    font-size: 0.8rem;
}

March 2019

Dates

Update: the doodle results are in and we also already have a space. The next meetup will take place

  • 12th March 2019, from 17:30 to 20:30
  • @ CodeFactory , Kettenbrückengasse 23/2/12, 1050 Vienna

And we will again have some great inputs and talks, besides some socializing and sharing python skills. If you want to get to know others or get some help with basic python stuff, try to be there from the start. Also if you want to get help on advanced stuff, but chances are good that you could give a talk then yourself ;).

The talks will start at 18:30 and this time it will be about:

  • Jackie gives a (very) brief intro on cryptographic hashing functions and how we can easily create PBKDF2 hashes in Python
  • Zoé will talk about how you can use Python for home automation

If you are new and want to join, check our invitation policy. In case you are not sure if this meetup is for you, just drop us a line at fempymom@diebin.at or just ask anyone who shared this info with you.