OpenCore Software

(written Sunday during the lightning talks; I couldn’t get a net connection at the time.)



Things are winding down at Pycon (barring sprints), we’re currently in the last session of lightning talks.

I’m writing this offline because the wireless in the big rooms has been pretty unusable for me.. I can usually connect fine, and then a minute or so later I have no bandwidth whatsoever and it never comes back. Much better out in the atrium.

Jeff is doing a lightning talk in a minute, if he can get display on the big screen (the plague of tech conferences… will the slides work? will you be able to see your own screen too? never know till you plug it in!

Oh crap, Jeff couldn’t get on the projector. Is he giving up? not sure.

Somebody from Slide.com just said that they serve 2 billion pictures, and 2 million uploads per day, on 100% python… they use Stackless somewhere in there.

Yay! Jeff haz projector. It went well. Bitsyblog got a nice round of applause.

Now a guy from Facebook is talking about a crazy project to rewrite facebook in python, using python embedded in PHP embedded in python, or something like that. I love lightning talks.

Lightning talks continue: TGPPL is an interesting license idea, if it’s at all legally viable.

Hey! It’s over!

Holy crap. Somebody just asked how many people were sticking around for sprints and about 300 hands just went up. (Wild guesstimate.)

Things that stood out for me this weekend:

- Lots of friendly people as always.

- Having a big TOPP posse. I’ve always gone alone before. Much more social experience this year (and very little sleep).

- the Writing Trac Plugins talk

- the What Zope Did Wrong talk

- the Turbogears/Pylons cooperation talk

- the Buildbot BOF session clarified a few things for me and it’s always cool to meet the guy that wrote something you rely on. (I originally planned on attending the Buildbot sprint, but Brian was unfindable for a while so I ended up in the core Python sprint with Doug.)

- The Pyglet talk was fun. Among other things, there was a demo of a simple 3D FPS written in about a week that may not look state of the art technologically, but it doesn’t look bad either.

- A long gab-gripe-beer fest in Chris McDonough’s room. Fun people. Hopefully most/all of them will also be at Ian’s party tonight. Note to self: Don’t forget to talk to Jackie about my conversation with the guys from Columbia.

- The Managing Complexity talk started slow but got more interesting as it went. I’d like to try getting some coverage and complexity metrics from our code. He mentioned some tools for that; must remember to look that up again.

- the “Keep writing crappy daemons” lightning talk was hilarious and rang true (although I’d add a gripe: always have an option to run in the foreground so you can play nice with other programs like daemontools or supervisord).

- Giant-size multitouch displays are fun to play with. Lots of obvious applications, eg. I expect audio engineers will be using them someday.

- My talk went pretty well! I got tongue-tied a couple times; but I got done on time, I mostly avoided reading my notes, and the slides worked well. I got a couple questions at the end that I was actually able to answer.

- I took a bit of a risk coming here with just a very tiny, awkward, unfamiliar computer (Eee). It worked out fine for my talk, looked good on the projector (though the resolution was different so my built-in screen was partly cut off; thankfully I remembered to print my damn notes.)

I’m getting the hang of this tiny thing. I can almost touch-type on it now. And I deleted the awful SCIM thing that was eating emacs keybindings. Still can’t install lxml though.

- The weather Friday was beautiful. Ate lunch outside.

Wish I had seen:



- All the 9 AM sessions. I slept through all the keynotes except half of Guido’s. I got up early enough for the Saturday keynotes, but after a solid week of sleep deprivation, I opted for gym and shower instead.

- The references talk got high marks from other TOPPers.

- the PyPy talk likewise

- I missed Ian’s talk. Hopefully the video will get online sometime before 2009.

- the Unicode Demystified talk. I went to the callback idioms talk instead, which wasn’t as interesting as it sounded. And I really need to learn the details of doing text right.

There were some not so great talks, but I’ll refrain from public disparagement, as I’m pretty sure I gave the very worst talk at Pycon Dallas 2006. I feel safe in saying that even though I missed half the

con hiding in my room trying desperately to get my act together. So I have a lot of sympathy for people having a rough time, especially first-timers.

Things that weren’t so great:



- I wish we were closer to downtown Chicago. Or at least something resembling civilization. At least Addision TX had lots of restaurants. We’re in a zone devoid of anything much aside from more airport hotels that charge twice what you’d expect for the food quality. Slim food pickings out here. The train to downtown took about an hour each way, plus much waiting and walking, when we went on a pizza expedition on Friday. Jeff and I went on a futile quest for veggie fare last night. Jeff on a futile quest is a lot like Marvin the Paranoid Android.

- Lunch at the con is the usual bleh fare. It’ll do.

Addendum: Ian’s party Sunday night was the bomb. Thanks Ian and Emily!