http://python.mirocommunity.org/category/pyohio-2010

I’d like to thank the staff of this year’s conference for all their hard work, and thank the speakers for donating their time and talents toward the community’s betterment.

And yes, we’ve recorded our podcast’s review of the conference and it will be up this weekend.

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• In Episode 0036 of The Secret Lair, we discuss Iron Man 2, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, and a few other assorted bits and pieces.
• In Episode 004 of From Python Import Podcast we learn why Dave hates Decorators, and discuss whether the Standard Library is the place where code goes to die. Additionally, Mike Pirnat joins us for a revelation about the Zen of Python.

Note: Apologies for the sound quality on both of these shows. My studio equipment is packed for the move, so we had to us my Zoom H4.

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Possible titles include Dave Hates Decorators or The Standard Library: Graveyard of Code.

Look for it to drop this weekend.

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I want to thank Bridget Stewart, David Mead, Brad Colbow, Brad Dielman, Dave, and Joe Fiorini for being good sports when I turned them into my Living Web Application demonstration at the end of the talk.

Exploring Django, part 1 from Christopher T. Miller on Vimeo.

For part 2, I’m thinking about drafting some of the members of the Cleveland Python meetup to join me, and we’ll have the meeting break into groups and write a simple Django app from scratch.

(Note: Rewatching this, I realize a made a few errors. Oops. Boy, was I tired. I apologize to the Django team if I got anything horribly wrong.)

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1. I use Facebook to keep in touch with a number of my old friends.
2. Facebook keeps sharing more and more of my previously private data without my permission by making things public and then expecting me to find the place in the settings where I can make it private again.
3. If I leave Facebook, the chances are good that I will completely lose touch with many of my friends, but I am very uncomfortable with my data being sold off, piece by piece.

On Privacy

I joined Facebook when my updates were kept private between myself and my friends. Now, unless I hunt down and change the privacy settings with each “feature” that Facebook decides to add, everything I say or have ever said could be made public. There are things in those updates I would prefer stay between friends; not because they could be damaging to me, but because I do not want advetisers keying on the words and offering me services I do not want. I do not want to be datamined and marketed to¹ based on things I say to my friends. This may sound quaint, but I believe a person has a right not to be pestered constantly to buy things.

For those who want to get a simpler view of how Facebook privacy has changed over the last five years, Matt McKeon has put together an excellent graphical representation of that evolution. Check it out, and realize just how much the general public and marketers can know about you now, as opposed to five years ago.

I’m not beating the drum for a mass exodus from Facebook. I do believe that ordinary, non-tech-blog-reading folks should be aware of what’s happening. There is a slow bait-and-switch occuring, where we are allowing Facebook to define what privacy means.  From Mr. Singel’s article:

Facebook thinks that your notions of privacy — meaning your ability to control information about yourself — are just plain old-fashioned. Head honcho Zuckerberg told a live audience in January that Facebook is simply responding to changes in privacy mores, not changing them — a convenient, but frankly untrue, statement. In Facebook’s view, everything (save perhaps your e-mail address) should be public. Funny too about that e-mail address, for Facebook would prefer you to use its e-mail–like system that censors the messages sent between users. Ingram goes onto say, “And perhaps Facebook doesn’t make it as clear as it could what is involved, or how to fine-tune its privacy controls — but at the same time, some of the onus for doing these things has to fall to users.” What? How can it fall to users when most of the choices don’t’ actually exist? I’d like to make my friend list private. Cannot. I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot. I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.

I walked up to you and said that I would be happy to let you communicate with everyone you’ve every cared even the slighest bit about, but the only catch is that I can repeat what you said to whomever asks and I can sell what you are saying to businesses so they can come to your front door and try to sell you things, you would likely tell me to get the hell out of your face.

And yet, the vast majority of people seem to be willing to make this bargain with Facebook.

I am on the fence about this. The propostion of Facebook is compelling. There are a great number of past friends that I keep in touch with on the service. I do get value out of it. Additionally, my daughter just got her first account, because this is how her friends are communicating.  Is it reasonable to expect that I would lock out new features because they open up things which I would prefer stay private?  What responsibility does the the company have to keep my information private?

Sadly, I think the answer to that last question is “none at all.”  Perhaps someone with more insight into privacy law could educate me on this, but I’m fairly certain that, unlike doctors and lawyers, there is no expectation of privacy with an online service. Facebook could sell the entire corpus of their data and there is next to nothing a normal citizen could do about it other than getting the EFF and other such groups involved. I do not believe there’s any precedent for this, but again, I’m no lawyer.

If this is the case, the best we can do is raise a ruckus or leave the service. And as long as Facebook is making money from the sale of our data and as long as the courts do not stop them, they will ignore us. As long as people are willing to feed the beast, the beast will keep eating.

On Alternatives

Mr. Singel also puts out a call for an open alternative:

It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let people control what and how they’d like to share. Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish. Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking. You’d get to control what unknown people get to see, while the people you befriend see a different, more intimate page. They could be using a free service that’s ad-supported, which could be offered by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, a bevy of startups or web-hosting services like Dreamhost. “Like” buttons around the web could be configured to do exactly what you want them to — add them to a protected profile or get added to a wish list on your site or broadcast by your micro-blogging service of choice. You’d be able to control your presentation of self — and as in the real world, compartmentalize your life. People who just don’t want to leave Facebook could play along as well — so long as Facebook doesn’t continue creepy data practices like turning your info over to third parties, just because one of your contacts takes the “Which Gilligan Island character are you?” quiz? (Yes, that currently happens)

I would love to see this happen, but I do not think it would succeed.

Case in point: Identi.ca. Idenit.ca is an open alternative Twitter. In many ways, it is superior. Who is on Identi.ca?  Techies. That’s pretty much it. It has gained no strong following outside of the tech community because Twitter has the celebs, and Twitter is ubiquitous.  Yes, you can integrate them. Yes, you can syndicate from one to the other. And yet…if you want to only use the open alternative, say goodbye to the non-techie friends you have on Twitter…you’ll never see them on the open service.

An open alternative to Facebook is doomed to fail because it will only capture the imagination of techies. The vast majority of Facebook users simply will not care.  For the techies, this might be just fine. Identi.ca has become a little tech oasis, and most folks like it that way. But do not think that somehow an open alternative will frighten Facebook in any way or cause a significant change in behavior.

What’s the real alternative?

Facebook makes it so slick and so easy to keep in touch with people that going without would pose a significant challenge. How would you keep in touch with your friends? To those of us who remember a world without the Internet, the obvious answer is that some friends would inevitably drift away, and those we truly cared about would get phone calls or letters from us. In this modern age, we would read their blogs and comment, if they have them. We could send emails or instant messages. If nothing else, the time-honored Year End Holiday Letter has worked for years.

The truth of the matter is that few of these feed the real driver for updates in your social network; the powerful compulsion that causes your to refresh your email constantly, or monitor your Twitter stream to see who responded to the last clever thing you said. It’s the little shot of joy and ego you get when you finally have someone talking directly to you. It’s the attention. We all crave it, even in small doses. Since the dawn of social services, this drive has become the background hum of our lives. It takes effort not to check every minute or so to see who is paying attention to us now, or worse, to miss something “important” in the information stream. We do this in meetings on our iPhones and Droids, at our desks when we are between tasks, at home in the morning or before we go to bed.

Do we love the connection with our friends because they are our friends, or because we love the thrill of a new update? Do we really need to sell information about ourselves to keep in touch with friends, or is it simply too much effort and the ease of use makes the sale worth it? How would you function without Twitter and Facebook?

And, as a final question where is the tipping point for you? What would be the point where you would give up the ease of the connection and leave the service?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

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1. Yes. I’m aware that, for the most part, that ship has sailed. But that does not blunt my desire the thwart the bottomfeeders who pursue me for my money.

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than *right* now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

Click here to listen or download.

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Exploring Django Part One, or, I Made a Half-Monkey/Half-Pony To Please You

In this first part of a three-part talk, Evil Overlord Chris Miller will show all the budding Evil Masterminds who attend how to get started with the Python-based Django web application framework. Topics covered will include:

1. URL Mapping for Fun and Profit,
2. Templating Engines for the Faint of Heart, and
3. Girding Thy Loins With The Power of Data Models.

Souls of the innocent will not be provided — expect to bring your own and some to share with the class.

Seating is limited to 30 people for this event, so register early!

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The rules:

•   You have at most 20 minutes for your presentation, including questions
•   Code must be posted to BitBucket by May 3 to facilitate people following along during the presentation.
•   You’ve got to stick to the project requirements, in the spirit of keeping this a fair comparison there should not be any additional graphics, styles or javascript tricks that are not built-in functionality of your framework.

The project:  A simple blog.

•   Post list
•   Post details page, including comments per post
•   RSS feed of last 10 posts
•   Ability to create a post, this should be protected by user authentication
•   Ability to create comments, this should not be protected by authentication
•   A blog post contains: title, contents, author and post date

A wiki page will be posted in the next couple of days on the Clepy site to answer some of the questions we’ve received.  You can learn more about us and subscribe to the mailing list at http://clepy.org.

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Good night.

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• 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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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

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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?

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