David Lyon gave an introduction to Python on the Raspberry Pi. He mentioned wiringpi2 for general purpose I/O in the same vein as Wiring. I thought he spent gave too much credence to the suitability of general purpose uses of the Raspberry Pi when it’s the ability to hook it up to hardware that’s truly interesting.

Announcements: some startup wants a new co-founder; a new site based on Zope has launched: swimmingpoolregister.nsw.gov.au.

Eugene Van den Bulke gave a talk about using the pandas library for statistical analysis and, in the process, demonstrated the awesomeness of iPython Notebook (see the notebook at goo.gl/c84WQ). Particularly interesting were the I/O libraries for dealing with data in Google Analytics. Alas, he also used “data scientist” without scare quotes.

Someone else, whose name I missed, gave a brief introduction to R as a lightening talk so that we’d all have a basis for comparison. He used RStudio which looked pretty interesting. He also described RPy2, a Python library which provides an interface to R. After the break someone else (was it Jiří Baum?) mentioned gnumpy, which is like Numpy but ships stuff to the GPU for processing.

Tim Ansell spoke about playing with gstreamer pipelines in Python. He gave a quick rundown on gstreamer pipelines, the gst-launch command and the gst Python module. I’ve been meaning to play with gstreamer since an LCA talk a few years ago; perhaps it’s time?