"social skills track"

NNNt  Host
NNNk  Hostname,ip,os
NNN_hostname  fred

Lightning Talks

Anna to-be-Martelli track lead. 5 minutes to talk, she even has a hooked pole...

Stefan Schwarzer - ftputil: a high level FTP client library

• started out as an exercise in "Workshop Python" book
• convenience without exposing protocol like ftplib does, more like shutil and os (listdir, path.isfile)
• http://www.sschwarzer.net/python/python_software.html#ftputil
• can use ftplib extensions, like sftp support

Side track: Pet Peeves survey:

1. Spelling
2. Projectors don't work
3. Talking to the Wall
4. Reading Slides
5. Mumbling
6. Small text
7. Speaking too quietly
8. Broken Python Code
9. Typing code in really slowly in front of the audience
10. Deleting source code before running the demo
11. Launching *.py with JAVA
12. Showing URLs for 2 seconds

Tommi Virtanen tv@havoc.fi: Eunuchs - Missing manly parts of UNIX API for Python

• C/Pyrex bits, cover stdlib missing things
• have them now, not wait for new release: tuntab, fchdir, sendmsg
• low level, dirty, absolutely necessary, "real systems programming"
• Guido: "There's a 2 year old PEP on how to add new libraries, I don't know what's up with it either"
• send me other small ones as patches.

13. Not knowing where the lights are
14. Poor timekeeping
15. Contrast
16. Transitions
17. Repetition
18. No audience participation
19. Excess audience participation
20. Avoiding questions
21. Not Knowing subject
22. Door slamming
23. Relying on connectivity

? Astrazenica(?) (one of the sponsors): CLAB

• pharmaceutical company, 60k employees, R&D is 11k, Global R&D IS is 600...
• science teams have university culture which is python friendly
• CLAB is 20k lines of python, 200 unit tests, 175 acceptance tests
• (general success story)

24. Track Chairs who don't know how to work the equipment 24. Missing Track Chairs (moshe?)

Tommi Virtanen tv@havoc.fi: Grok LDAP fast

• using DNS domain as a root is "modern"
• LDIF - lines broken as long as they're indented ("stupid idea" - GvR)

Martijn Faassen, Infrae: lxml - a sane Python wrapper for libxml

• libxml is fast and good, xpath, relaxng, etc.
• current python bindings not pythonic - c-ish, utf-8 not python-unicode, manual memory management, only documented in C
• currently only has refcounting and ElementTree API
• moving into svn on codespeak.net. All in pyrex

Holger Krekel: SHPY

• pygame-based cell-based editor, gives you a python-interactive "pad"...
• multiple cursors for multiple clients... "latency-free"?
• sending code over the wire.
• "SHARE" server, "execution" server (roughly, python -c "exec input()"
• rough hack done in 4 days by Holger Krekel and Armin Rigo
• can use ssh, other authentication
• in codespeak svn -- but talk to them, it's rough.
• not quite a subethaedit replacement, because it uses a server, but...
• finally, the got it working, and scribble a lot...

Steve Alexander: yagni, whui & don

• You aren't gonna need it - get moving faster
• We haven't used it - means you should have yagni'd more
• Don: Knuth's quote of Hoare about "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" -- or, Don't Optimize Now
• question: "How to tactfully handle your open source community" (doesn't have an acronym yet)

Benjamin ?: Pyano

• Python Archive NetwOrk
• CPAN-like for Python
• what about PyPI? It doesn't do dependencies (audience comment, I think from GvR, was to "work with PyPI instead")

(Jacob distributes prizes from feedback forms - bottle of wine, and Apress-donated "Practical Python")

Aroldo Souza-Leite: Sonnets from Pythia

• a collection of poems, "by, around and about" the Python Community.
• experiment in (post) modern literature
• not compilable (that's perl)
• not about bad jokes in bad poems
• sonnets
• recited Steve Alexander's painful "A common gateway" sonnet

Michael Hudson: "The Bub's Brothers"

• n-multiplayer Bubble Bobble clone...
• http://bub-n-bros.sourceforge.net/
• 2-player game with Armin

Michael Salib: Insecticide: the ultimate Python debugger

• interviewed with Green Hills, looked at embedded chip trace port idea
• time travel support - 1G on traceboard == 1 minute of execution
• so, just an idea: so add a traceport to the python VM...
• or integrate cleverness in the VM directly
• record complete state
• show me all state-snapshots when a condition is true
• perform execution-diffs!
• object-level history

Michel Marquez:

• actually works on Amaretto Venture project (ooooh)
• massive overhead to write normal programs, even short ones (.pkg, .SIS)
• python packaging could be much simpler
• Hello World is 46 lines of code - but with OK/Cancel buttons, and a wizard, about 200 lines of code...
• Python 2.2.2, last stable when project started
• 60% of GUI wrapped
• "Not released until Friday" - customer edition available then?
• "under 800k" target - which was easy.
• currently needs the SDK, for the emulator, but it should just work on the phone

-- break --

Talked to Marquez; talked to Michael Salib

Side track: Good things

1. Repeating the question
2. Not using the projector
3. Speaking to the audience
4. Involving the audience
5. Using pygame for demos -- "making it fun"
6. Maintaining eye contact with audience
7. Smiling
8. Talking about interesting stuff
9. Staying on topic
10. AV assistance

greg? - Highlighting python in slides

• tokenize in cookbook
• idle
• SilverCity - built on top of Scintilla
• doesn't need valid code
• has a cgi script, but doesn't need to be

Jim Fulton: ZPackage (Zope Packaging System)

• Zope is an application, not a library, different needs from distutils
• Zope applications themselves are more like modules, but expect to be installed into a Zope software area, not site-packages
• Want to reuse distutils
• Wants to be good, like CPAN or apt-get or yum - dependency modeling, install and download, update
• needed for Zope 3 release
• setup.py written by packaging tool
• this uses packman/pimp

11. Modulating your voice
12. Making slides readable
13. Using graphics on slides, not text
14. Showing live demos
15. Making people laugh (Harald was giving out chocolate?)
16. Explain the target audience
17. Give context, clear structure
18. Putting stuff in the Wiki

bad side:

24. Using proportional fonts to show python interactive sessions

Michael Sparks (BBC R&D): Kamaelia's Component System

• streaming server infrastructure replacement
• open standards: quicktime/real/windows are all proprietary
• scale to millions of concurrent viewers, not thousands (entire UK population)
• Concurrency is the big hit: process/threads too expensive, event based systems are "obfuscating goto" systems :-)
• but real-world things work concurrently, so it can't be that hard
• Generators with IPC - modeled after pipelines, but multi-dimensional
• things don't know where their inputs/outputs are, just that they have dataflow from/to them.
• postman, "coordination and tracking"
• service is (component, inbox) tuple
• basic DCT transform component done
• trivial inherit-from-Component and add yield mechanism
• Not released yet, working on open source
• makes maintenance simpler, because it is much more readable
• try/except to warn about threads dying, but keep it running
• started a couple of years ago, stackless not really ready then.
• plan to use it on the front end for streaming, it is the most expensive part of the system. (questioner mentions a Norwegian equivalent)

Amir Bakhtiar: open source work at Divmod (divmod.org)

• atop, lupy, etc.
• demo of reverend, lupy, quotient
• [later correction: he's at divmod, which employs key members of the Twisted team, but he's not himself on it]
• quotient does spam filtering, integrates pictures into galleries, fully searchable, auto-files lists, does an address book...
• $9.95/mo for the service, or just install it
• and it's his (and the team's) primary email server...

[eichin:20040609T1621+02]

Finally - multiplayer run of Bub's Brothers!