Subscribe in a readerPictures and Video from PyCon 2006
Some cool PyCon pics were made available by various amateur photographers. A co-worker captured a video of our presentation, Python Can Survive In The Enterprise. The video itself is not the greatest quality, but the audio is ok. The audio recorded by the PyCon folks will eventually find it’s way up to their website.
Feedback on “Python Can Survive In The Enterprise”
All of the feedback from PyCon 2006 is now available. I was rather surprised to see our presentation, Python Can Survive In The Enterprise, near the top of the favorites list. This is definitely encouraging.
Someone did have some negative feedback about us. The basic issue was the fact that we couldn’t go into detail:
The talk by AG Interactive, Python in the Enterprise was embarassingly bad. Essentially, they said “Python is great. We used python, but we can’t tell you anything else because it’s proprietary.”
While this is entirely true, it was not our intent to show how to build an enterprise system. We simply wanted to show the fact that it can be done. We do intend to present more detailed topics next year. The key is for us to find something that is not a competitive advantage and that the community would fine useful or interesting.
I am still getting positive feedback from our presentation in my email. Google is also yielding some blog entries when searching for the title:
- The Thiers
- pyjesse.blogspot.com
- the law of averages
- MickBlog - nothing direct, but it seems we were of the “usual high standards”
Connect to me
When you have some free time you may want to check out the O’Reilly Connection site. It is basically a tech version of LinkedIn. If you sign up feel free to link to me! I have been know to waste time searching for people in my local area.
Thoughts on Kid
In the last few months I have spent a lot of time patching and extending Kid. During this time I have had to field lots of questions and complaints thrown at me.
The two things that seem to appear the most are concerns about Kid’s speed and it’s lack of good error messaging. I have given a lot of thought to the speed problems in the last few weeks and at PyCon 2006 I had the opportunity, along with Mike Pirnat, to start working on it.
We decided to focus on the speed issue, because that seems to be the thing that turns most people away. Kevin Dangoor also brought up the fact that changes to Kid’s internals may change the solution for the error reporting anyway.
I created a new branch where we could break stuff and not anger any users. Although there is still lots of work two do there were two big wins:
- Another developer understands some of Kid’s internals (which is not entirely easy!)
- Scripts and tests to help in determine the effect of changes
I have some other more interesting changes in my working copy of the pycon-sprint-2006 branch. After looking at the number of function calls and nested generators it is a pretty good assumption that this can be made faster. I am experimenting with unstreaming parts of Kid. Now since a rewrite Kid’s internals would take a long time and the changes may not help, I wanted to identify things that can be done quickly.
The first step is to eliminate the use of TEXT in the streaming
process. Instead I am attaching the text nodes to the text and tail attributes of elements. This is essentially what ElementTree does. Ideally this will lower the number of times that data will need to go through all of the generators thus speeding up the template.
I am planning on committing code more frequently that I am doing right now. This means that there will be times when the branch is broken. So use it at your own risk!
Linux on a Dell XPS m140
A few weeks ago I received my new Dell XPS m140 and like every other machine in my house it had to run Linux. I followed the Gentoo installation guide and that got me to the point where the machine was bootable. I deviated a little bit from the partitioning scheme by only removing the NTFS Windows partitions and leaving the two Dell recovery partitions. I created a /boot, swap and one big / partition.
I am able to use just about all of the hardware at this point. The things I can’t use are not because they don’t work, but rather that I have not yet tried them. I will be posting more about specific features under the dellm140 tag.
PyCon 2006 Was A Blast
PyCon is definitely an experience worth having if you are a Python programmer. There are so many interesting talks that you’ll find yourself having to decide what is most important to you. Most (all?) of the talks have the audio recorded and posted on the PyCon website. So you probably won’t miss anything. This is the second year that I have attended and I intend on returning for as long as they have it.
The Python community is very open and welcoming. This is one of its greatest assets. The Python celebrities and book authors are walking around in the crowd and are friendly and helpful. I remember attending Java conferences where certain people felt that they were some sort of royalty and that all the attendees where just commoners. This is the exact opposite of the PyCon vibe.
I met a lot of interesting people. Since I am terrible at keeping track of names and email addresses I having a hard time getting back to everyone. If we talked at PyCon feel free to email me to say hi.
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