Good night.

• We had three excellent keynotes, but the one that stood out was Mark Shuttleworth’s discussion of Cadence, Quality, and Design, in which he discussed the discipline of development on a timed schedule, and how it has helped the Ubuntu teams.
• David Beazley’s Understanding the Python GIL was as crunchy as I’d hoped. He did a series of tests on how the Global Interpreter Lock acts when dealing with threads on a single or and then on multicore machines. It was outstanding.
• Catherine Devlin gave a talk about how to build command-line interpreters using cmd and cmd2, then as a bonus explained how SQLPython can make your life better. A commandline shell that allows you to interface with Oracle, MySQL, or PostGRes as if you were in a Unix shell?  Yes please!¹
• C. Titus Brown’s discussion of implementing different continuous integration packages was as entertaining as could be, and brought home several good points (mostly, just use Hudson. Really.).
• Finally, Ned Batchelder demystified several layers of confusion during his talk on Tests and Testability.  I’m looking forward to playing around with his ideas at work this week.

I’m beat. There’s one more day of talks, then I’m on my way back home. Not sure when I’ll be able to get my Day Five post up, but I’ll try to do it before I fly out.

Thanks for reading!

1. This talk completely blew me away, and I’m wondering if she accepts sacrifices or tribute.

1. Van Lindberg formally opened the convention.
2. Steve Holden¹ gave an overview of what’s new at the Python Software Foundation, and what’s coming down the pike. THere was a strong emphasis on diversity as a key goal for the next year. These was also discussion about the possible creation of an Associate membership in the PSF wheere people could donate money and become a member. Nothing definitive on the latter yet, but it is under consideration.
3. Finally, Guido van Rossum put the twitterstream of #pycon tweets on the screen behind him and took questions from the stream for about 40 minutes. Of special note was his comment on Django vs. Turbogears (“Django. Sorry, Turbogears guys.”), Django in general (“Django sucks. But they all suck.”) and vim vs. emacs. (“I use emacs. I also use vim. I’m not very good at either.”)  In all fairness, it was hard to delve deeply into any one topic, so discussion was light and all in good fun.

After a short coffee break the various tracks started up. While everyone seemed to be getting something out the talks they attended, my personal experience was that it was rather it and miss. The single outstanding talk was an exploration of the Python Dictionary, explaining how it allocates memory, resizes itself, and assigns addresses in RAM. It sounds dry but Brandon Craig Rhodes did an excellent job, and was easily the best speaker of the my day. A close second was Grig Gheorghiu’s discussion of RESTful web services and how to construct them using restish.

The day finished off with a set of lightning talks, the highlights of which were Greg Wilson’s request for articles for his next book entitled Beautiful Software Architecture, Ned Batchelder’s report on recent changes to coverage.py, and David Huggins-Daines’s demonstration of PocketSphinx, a speech recognition engine which will transcribe .wav formatted audio to text.

By then end of the day, most of the folks I was hanging with were beat, so we split up and grabbed dinner. Some of us walked back to my hotel and hacked on code for two or three hours, which was fun. I haven’t been able to hack with a team since I left Mahalo, and I do miss it.

Tomorrow looks to be another full day. Check in late in the evening for a recap of Day 4.

1. Chairman of the Python Software Foundation

1. The talk started 30 minutes late.
2. We spent the first hour configuring our computers, something we could have done before the talk if there had been any notes circulated.
3. Even once we got there, there were no notes. The speaker would add the commands he was running to a notes.txt file, then we would go download it from his computer via HTTP.
4. When asked how to configure Firefox profiles on Windows, the answer was “I don’t know.” The Windows folks banded together to solve the issue, but…I mean…come on. You’re presenting to a multi-OS room. It’s your responsibility to understand the material.

<snip…>

Rather than get all frothy and unkind, I will only say that an ounce of preparation goes a long way. I did learn a few things, but the talk was so much less informative than yesterday’s tutorial that I left feeling that I would have done better just reading the docs on my own.

Now, that being said, this is not a problem with PyCon, just this one tutorial. I still have very high hopes for PyCon in general. Tomorrow is the first day of the formal conference, and I look forward to seeing what it holds.

Stay tuned for Day Three.

You’re not at DragonCon anymore, Mr. Miller.

The Regency is a very different place when not festooned with cosplaying geekazoids¹. That’s not to say there are no geeks, just that colorful superhero and anime costumes have switched to black shirts/hoodies and blue jeans. It’s not full the full-on stereotype, mind you: there are enough hipster-coders in the mix to break up the monotony.

At the time I write this, it’s 8:42 am and I’m waiting to filter in for the first tutorial I signed up for: Faster Python Through Optimization. This is after my first choice, Test Driven Web Development, was canceled due to the speaker’s business life stomping down on his lecturing life.

I’ve just been asked where the registration desk is again. Again, unlike DragonCon, there’s more than one convention in the hotel this weekend. People are confusing one with the other. It’s easy to tell the between the participants: khakis and colored oxford shirt? Manufacturing conference. Black Tee with laptop bag? PyCon.

So far, the wifi is…minimal. This is disappointing, but it’s still very early: I’m willing to bet they just haven’t gotten there yet.² The staff peoples are working hard this morning…I’m watching them lay powerstrips and set up cameras. It looks like there will be an archive of all the talks. This is great: I can use them for review later if my own notes are lacking.

Time to go. More later.

* * *

I must steal a line from my friend Kris Johnson to describe the Optimization talk. It was like a toasted wheat bagel: good for me, but very dry.

The speaker was well prepared: sample code was burned to CDs and a fifty-three page handout that contained all the information for the course. Any worries I had about not having complete notes are now gone.

(This is where the non-programmers can skip to the end. The rest of you, read on.)

The information was excellent. We started off looking at how to use cProfile and Guppy to benchmark and profile code. From there we wrote several tests for comparing operations on various data structures: finding the intersection of two lists vs. two sets, Slicing off pieces of a large list vs. using a deque. From there, looked at how to speed up various math functions with NumPy, using psyco for JIT optimization, then finally moved on to using the multiprocessing module to make the best use of multicore systems.  Finally, we looked at how to combine strategies to get the most bang for your buck.

While I was pleased with the content, the presentation was a little lackluster only for the reason that most programming presentations are challenged: the instructor mostly read from his notes. To be fair, he seemed a little nervous, and the fact that some of his examples failed because of configuration issues did not help the poor guy. I felt for him.  The interesting that happened was that people paired up when things went awry to solve the issues. I worked with a woman named Ada³ to figure out the problem with some of the timing functions in the code. The pair programming enhanced the talk, and I feel like I got more out of it.

(Welcome back, non-programmers.)

All in all, I’m pleased. I’ve already learned some new concepts and they are spawning new ideas that I’ll probably play with over the weekend. Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Testing Websites With Python and Selenium, which looks promising.

See you tomorrow for Day Two.

1. This is a term of endearment. I count some of those cosplayers as friends.
2. This was, in fact, the case. The hardworking staff fired up the internet connection, and everyone logged on at once, flooding it. About 15 minutes into the tutorial, the internet returned, and several gasping programmers logged in to Twitter. Myself included.
3. This flipped my geek bit a little.

When DVD Jon was arrested after breaking the CSS encryption algorithm, he was charged with “unauthorized computer trespassing.” That led his lawyers to ask the obvious question, “On whose computer did he trespass?” The prosecutor’s answer: “his own.”

If that doesn’t make your heart skip a beat, you can stop reading now.

And on the roadblocks which new “appliance” devices impose on would-be tinkerers:

The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine. As Tim Bray and Peter Kirn have pointed out, it’s a device that does little to enable creativity…

The tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people — perhaps the majority of people. Gone are the confusing concepts and metaphors of the last thirty years of computing. Gone is the ability to endlessly tweak and twiddle towards no particular gain. The iPad is simple, straightforward, maintenance-free…

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents.

Now, I am aware that you will be able to develop your own programs for the iPad, the same way you can develop for the iPhone today. Anyone can develop! All you need is a Mac, XCode, an iPhone “simulator,” and $99 for an auto-expiring developer certificate. The “developer certificate” is really a cryptographic key that (temporarily) allows you (slightly) elevated access to… your own computer. And that’s fine — or at least workable — for the developers of today, because they already know that they’re developers. But the developers of tomorrow don’t know it yet. And without the freedom to tinker, some of them never will.

If you’re like him or like me…one of the guys who got his start tinkering around with a computer in your basement, finding your way by intuition and discovery, please read his full post and pass it on.

I cannot deny that it’s pretty. It’s very pretty. Shiny, too. Maybe I’m just getting old, but pretty doesn’t impress me much anymore.  From what I can see, it’s not terribly useful and at the price point of $500…ahem…$499 for a measly 16G of space, it’s just not worth the money.

I also object to the inability use the device in any manner I choose. Apple’s need to control MY hardware and software is intrusive and offensive.

From Thomas Gideon’s iPad is Yet Another DRM Crippled Device:

I have vastly different expectations of a tablet, even one as stripped down as the iPad appears to be. How does Apple justify hobbling the device? Wireless carriers have begun offering comparably stripped down computers, netbooks, that are still open to the end user installing whatever they like. I might concede that a single distribution channel makes the experience better. And Apple is clearly more about experience these days than substance.

But why does the experience of some have to preclude the ability to exercise owner override? Would the App Store be any less used if power users could still install their own bundles? If the arguments Apple makes about their captive channel really hold water, why not open the device to both and see if the market agrees? Allowing users to install simple application bundles like on a regular old Mac would be the shortest way to turn around much of the negative PR the approval process for the App Store has generated almost since day one.

I have no doubt that people will buy it. There’s a market out there for it, and people will line up for the New Shiny. It’s sad that people will give up freedom and hard-earned cash for something so…vapid.

I found the following article interesting and, frankly, accurate.

Protestors: iPad is nothing more than a golden calf of DRM

Steve Jobs may have descended from the mountaintop today with Moses Tablet in hand, but a group of protesters were waiting in the foothills with a simple message: the iPad isn’t a divine revelation, but a golden calf.

Members of the Free Software Foundation staged a small protest outside today’s Apple event in San Francisco, making the case against Apple’s use of DRM. The group’s four-foot signs were headed with the message “Entering Apple Restriction Zone” and laid out the tablet’s detriments:

As I’ve explained, selling OSes for money is a basically untenable position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft can get away with it is by pursuing technological advancements as aggressively as they can, and by getting people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular image: in the case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker, and in the case of Microsoft, that of the respectable techno-bourgeois. Just like Disney, they’re making money from selling an interface, a magic mirror. It has to be polished and seamless or else the whole illusion is ruined and the business plan vanishes like a mirage.

– Neal Stephenson, In The Beginnging Was The Command Line (written in 1999)

Early last Saturday, my sites were hacked. I cleaned them all up, changed the passwords, did the usual things that you do when this sort of thing happens. But by the time I was done, Google had already reported me to StopBadWare.org,
and then it was all over.

If you tried to get to this site via Google, you were out of luck. They put up a page completely blocking access to my site. You could, of course, go around it by entering the full url in the address bar of your browser, but at that
point, the special nanny-like features of the browser took over. In Firefox and Safari, you would get a red screen screaming that, OH NOES, you were going to an attack site! Don’t go there! Don’t stray from the path!

You could disable the warning if you knew where in the preference panels to do so. But really…how many average users look at the security settings on their browser? (Not enough, which is exactly why this sort of hand-holding exists.)

On top of this, sites like Twitter and Facebook, deleted my URL from my profile, based on the report from Google.

I have mixed feelings about this. Part of me thinks it’s good that companies are trying to block malicious site for average users. Part of me thinks that average users might need to learn a little bit about the medium they are using, so they can protect themselves. I think it’s a slippery slope, having block lists that work on such a broad level. It seems dangerous to me in a Big Brother sort of way.

It took five days to clear the mess up, but I’m back, and I have some content for you. Have a seat, and I’ll give you a helping.

Update: I just tried to tweet this entry using my domain, and I was told that Twitter still thinks that my site is a Known Malware Site. How many places do I need to clear my name?

• Easy/fast to parse and implement
• Make it so feeds and items are location aware
• a proper tagging system for feeds/items/attachments
• multiple attachments
• Able to be used cross-site/domain
  • Uses JSONP
• Incorporate some of the RSS extension elements that were used in common implementations

It is currently in an alpha state, but I see a lot of potential in this format. RSS is badly in need of an update — it has served us well, but the needs of developers and content providers are changing. A lightweight JSON-based information format will allow for a lot of flexibility in implementation as well as allow for ease of adoption – jQuery and other JavaScript frameworks can readily handle this format. I can see how working in this sort of format into Podiobooks 2.0 could aid in the creation of sharable widgets for displaying user data, title listings, and other data people want to include on their blogs or iPhone apps.

I’m curious to see how it develops. I’ve joined the Google Group for discussing the specification.

1. Ray created the base code for what would later become iPodderX, one of the first podcatching clients and certainly the one with the most features. I still miss it, and would give an awful lot to replace my iTunes with it.