Want to showcase your skills as a Python Hacker? Want to have
hundreds of people see your talk on the subject of your choice? Have some
hot button issue you think the community needs to address, or have some
package, code or project you simply love talking about? Want to launch
your master plan to take over the world with python?

PyCon is your platform for getting the word out and teaching something
new to hundreds of people, face to face.

Previous PyCon conferences have had a broad range of presentations,
from reports on academic and commercial projects, tutorials on a broad
range of subjects and case studies. All conference speakers are volunteers
and come from a myriad of backgrounds. Some are new speakers, some
are old speakers. Everyone is welcome so bring your passion and your
code! We’re looking to you to help us top the previous years of success
PyCon has had.

PyCon 2010 is looking for proposals to fill the formal presentation tracks.
The PyCon conference days will be February 19-22, 2010 in Atlanta,
Georgia, preceded by the tutorial days (February 17-18), and followed
by four days of development sprints (February 22-25).

Online proposal submission is open now! Proposals will be accepted
through October 1st, with acceptance notifications coming out on
November 15th. For the detailed call for proposals, please see:

http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/proposals/

For videos of talks from previous years – check out:

http://pycon.blip.tv

We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!

Things I’m hoping to see this week:

• lots of attention paid to identi.ca, not just as an alternative to Twitter but as a first step towards truly open services,
• lots of discussion about how free software can enable user autonomy,
• corporate suit-types excoriated for not giving back (or for expecting us to build our “open” systems on theirs (I’m looking at you, Sourceforge 2.0 Atlassian).

So I’m probably just dreaming when it comes to the last one (maybe all of them, particularly with my qualifier of lots), but for the first time in a few years, there are actually talks I want to go to scheduled against one another. Maybe I’ll have to revise Yergler’s Theorem of Conference Value. But probably not.

OpenWeb Vancouver is a community run conference, much like PyCon. And much like PyCon it looks like it has a really great value proposition (unfortunately much like PyCon it also seems to have crappy wifi… sigh).

I’ll post slides soon (read: when I actually write them).

My goal is to blog the sessions I attend, but that’s been my goal every year and I usually end up doing about 25%. We’ll see just how well it works this time around.

fn1. “All-staff” including San Francisco, Berlin, South Africa, Boston, and (of course) Fort Wayne.

After the keynote I went to the “Python for Series 60″:http://us.pycon.org/zope/talks/2006/fri/track1/69/talkDetails2 “talk”:http://postneo.com/talks/pycon2006, given by Matt Croydon of “unoffical-series-60-python-wiki”:http://postneo.com/postwiki/moin.cgi/PythonForSeries60 fame. I didn’t realize that Nokia had pushed their Python implementation out as a “SourceForge project”:http://sf.net/projects/pys60, and I was also interested to hear about the existence of libraries for iCal, xpath traversal and jabber. Maybe I’ll finally get that sudoku for series 60 code bundled and shipped.

The second talk of the morning was “Python Can Survive In The Enterprise”:http://us.pycon.org/zope/talks/talkLocate?year=2006&id=36, given by Mike and Dave from AGI. I know Mike from a chance encounter at the Cleveland airport on the way to PyCon 2005, but didn’t know he was presenting until the talk started; glad I caught it. I’m still not sure what it means to be “an industry leading supplier of emoticons” (I paraphrase from their brochure, but not much), but the talk was well done and interesting. The bandwidth and page views they support during peak times (like VD(veneral diseaseValentine’s Day), etc) is incredible. For example, 11 _million_ visits per month on an average day, *35 million* during peak months, and 90 million page views on VD itself. And they do it with Python. Of course there was plenty of hand-waving and corporately required vagueness, but very interesting.

The “last talk I attended”:http://us.pycon.org/zope/talks/talkLocate?year=2006&id=04 before lunch on Friday was about using “PyParsing”:http://pyparsing.sf.net to build an interactive adventure game engine. Probably not something I’l be using in the near future, but PyParsing does look interesting. So hey, if you need a recursive descent parser…

During lunch Guido gave a history of Python talk, describing what influenced it (besides ABC, which we’ve all heard about). I was particularly interested to hear about the influence of “Modula 3″:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3 on Python’s method call semantics. Along with GvR’s “State of Python” keynote the following morning, these two talks provided nice bookends on the language’s evolution.

After lunch I went to two back-to-back web framework talks, first on Django, then Turbo Gears. So both contiune to impress, but I’m not certain if its their technical acumen I’m impressed with, or their rapid uptake. What will be interesting, I think, will be to see not only where the frameworks are in a year or 18 months, but where applications written with them today are. I mean, are these tools for long-lived, growing applications, or one-off, deadline driven projects? Not that one of those is necessarily better than the other, they just seem like two different constituencies.

The last talk I attended on the first day of PyCon was on “Zanshin”:http://us.pycon.org/zope/talks/2006/fri/track4/54/talkDetails2, another project being developed at “OSAF”:http://osafoundation.org as part of Chandler. Zanshin is a CalDAV library built on Twisted and used for calendar syncronization in Chandler. I have to admit that I don’t understand the difference between CalDAV and WebDAV, but I really enjoyed this talk. Mostly, I think, because the presenter, Grant Baillie, spent time talking about why some design decisions were made (ie, abstracting the actual connection the way they did) and about the “zen” portion of zanshin. In my notes I have “the temporariness of connectivity” written down and underlined. I know that ccPublisher does _not_ handle disconnects well. It should.

EXPR1 if COND else EXPR2

Unlike some others, I don’t care about the syntax — it’s clearer than the ternary operator in C, and it reads “right”. And it was only after Guido pointed out a potential bug in the “classic” way to simulate this in Python that I realized how important this is. The classic way to simulate the conditional expression is

(COND and EXPR1) or EXPR2

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier — probably because I haven’t been knowingly been bitten by it yet — but if EXPR1 is False, this falls apart. So it’ll be good to get real support for conditional expressions into the language.

The other interesting bits going with the language are absolute and relative imports and a new with statement. I initially thought this was like Pascal’s with statement — simply a way to reduce the amount of typing you have to do and a way to make your code a little easier to read. Instead it’s much cooler — the object passed to with can have special methods, __enter__ and __exit__ which are called before and after the block, respectively, regardless of any exceptions thrown. So things like lock acquisition/release, atomic transactions and signaling just got a lot easier.

After Guido’s keynote I attended Jeremy Hylton’s talk on the Python Bytecode Compiler. I really regret that I won’t be able to get compiler construction under by belt before graduating in May, so the Python AST(Abstract Syntax Tree) stuff holds a certain fascination for me. I’m not sure I follow it all right now, but this is yet another instance where I appreciate my assembly language course work. Weird, I know.

One of the talks done by “OSAF”:http://osafoundation.org staffers at this year’s PyCon was on performing internationalization on Chandler. During this talk Brian Kirsch discussed their “PyICU”:http://pyicu.osafoundation.org/ project which wraps the “Internation Components for Unicode”:http://www.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/ in a Python SWIG wrapper. It was mentioned that they looked at the zope.i18n library before deciding to go with ICU, and during the Q&A session I asked what it was that zope.i18n didn’t do. It seems like ICU has a much broader scope than just string translation, so it’ll be interesting to see how the Python bindings mature and are integrated into Chandler. In addition to traditional i18n services, Kirsch also touched on converting to and from Unicode in Python. It’s definitely a royal pain in the ass that all strings are not unicode strings, but Kirsch made the point that you should just convert everything to Unicode when it enters your application (decode) and convert back to Bytes when information exists (encode).

After lunch on Saturday I went to a talk about an implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol for Zope 3. I’m pretty agnostic when it comes to the whole RSS v. Atom thing, but a standard protocol for publishing information does strike me as useful. Unfortunately the system is still under heavy development. On the up side, the presenter was working on it during the Zope Sprint and in talking to him later in the conference, it sounds like he’s made enough progress to finish the initial implementation (there were some problems distinguishing different types of HTTP requests, if I understood correctly).

Just before my talk Ian Bicking gave a standing-room-only talk on “Building Pluggable Software with Eggs”:http://us.pycon.org/zope/talks/talkLocate?year=2006&id=66. Ian managed to provide a good overview of what Eggs are, although most of what he said only really came into focus during the sprint. Or maybe I was just nervous about my talk so I wasn’t really paying attention — either one is possible. Anyway, it was standing room only, the talk scheduled against mine was cancelled, so they scheduled a repeat of it against me at the last minute. Oh well, its not like my talk was particularly spectacular.

So my talk fell during the last slot of the day. I was really proud of myself this year — I actually wrote the paper before doing the slides, and felt like I had put together a compelling “story”. Additionally, I watched some video of myself doing a class presentation the week before the conference in an attempt to figure out how I could improve. It was all in vain. I mean, I don’t think I crashed and burned, but I did rush the material, and as such ran out of steam early. A side effect of rushing through was that I don’t think I ever really made the necessary connection with the audience. Sigh. Hopefully the slides and paper will be useful for others to read through, form their own opinions and ask questions electronically. We’ll see.

After the conference day ended on Saturday Shawn and I went to Fry’s. I heart Fry’s. It’s massive [yes, I know that I sound like a size queen]. I bought a “Nokia 770″:http://nokia770.com. It’s pretty.

After the keynote, Shawn and I went to Ian Bicking’s talk entitled, “The Rest of the Web Stack”:http://us.pycon.org/zope/talks/2006/sun/track1/39/talkDetails2. I’m not exactly sure what I expected, but in the end Ian provided an interesting discussion of the inherent conflict between developers and sys admins: developers want to do cool new things, sys admins want to do the same thing again and again — it’s stable. And of course, the conflict really comes up in smaller organizations where to some extent, the developer _is_ the sysadmin. I’m not sure there were any conclusions — at least none that made it into my notes — but it definitely was interesting to hear someone talking about finding that balance in development efforts.

After Ian’s talk I indulged my current “algorithmic obsession”:http://yergler.net/blog/2006/02/26/kruskal-v-prim-to-the-death/ and went to “Simplying Red-Black Trees”:http://us.pycon.org/zope/talks/2006/sun/track4/70/talkDetails2. Once the presenter found the room (seriously, there were 3 to choose from), he presented a metaclass he’s used to simplify the implementation of “red-black trees”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_black_trees at a small performance cost. The basic approach involves identifying attributes which have symmetric behavior, and can therefore be “swapped”. In the case of rb trees, this is the left and right child nodes.

The talk of the morning on Sunday was simply entitled “Django How-To”:http://toys.jacobian.org/presentations/2006/pycon2006/, which as it’s title implies was a very straight forward how-to. During the presentation Jacob Kaplan-Moss demonstrated how to build an interactive “sudoku web app”:http://www.jacobian.org/sudoku using “Django”:http://djangoproject.com. Overall I was really impressed with Django — I’m still not sure I love the magic naming of admin classes and such, but its hard to argue with some of the compelling demos. Its definitely something I want to explore further.

After lunch I did the “Docutils”:http://docutils.sf.net double-bill, first attending the “Docutils Developers Tutorial”:http://us.pycon.org/zope/talks/talkLocate?year=2006&id=62 and then the cryptically titled “What is Nabu?”:http://us.pycon.org/zope/talks/talkLocate?year=2006&id=24. The Docutils Developers Tutorial was less of a tutorial than an overview of the systems available to developers. I’ve been slightly infatuated with docutils lately — rst2s5 is killer — but I’m not sure how I want to extend it (if at all). So it was interesting, but I think like distutils it won’t really gel until I need to extend it somehow.

“Nabu”:http://furius.ca/nabu/, it turns out, is a way of using “reStructuredText”:http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html syntax to semantically (sort of) mark up bits of information. For example, you might have a contact file that identifies how each line relates to the contact itelf. The interesting part of Nabu is that it supports lots of different kinds of information — in fact, I think you extend it in pretty much any way you want, and that it provides a way to collect these bits of information into a common database. This isn’t a system for the “middle class user” but I like seeing people working on marking up information in a way that makes it easier for programs to consume. And maybe Nabu has a future as middle ware — another program for the user interface, presenting an easy to use UI for creation of Nabu-formatted information, and the Nabu server collecting it and making it available for other users.