mon petit blogue sans importance...

pycon 2008, third day

This third day at PyCon 2008 (the conference's second day) had a few n00bie talks, but it still had good talks, and it may just be that i didn't choose my sessions wisely. Plus, we went to downtown Chicago were i managed to stop a train all by myself, and i found free wifi from my room.

After a workout in the very well-equipped (for a hotel, anyways) gym, the keynotes started (yes there was a shower in between those things, don't fret). Oh, this reminds me: the pycon breakfasts are basically fat+processed sugar. Muffins that really should be called cupcakes, pastries, and that's pretty much it. So we've been going to the 'Metro Grill' (the hotel restaurant), where the breakfast buffet feeds me some scrambled eggs and a huge pile of fresh fruit. Overall, i have to say that the pycon food is not as good as last year. I'm not sure why: on average they're probably getting more money per attendant in 2008 with this new optional 400$ "corporate rate". They did get professional recording equipment and other things that are probably costing more than last year, though, so maybe that's it.

So, the keynotes. First, Twisted announced they created a software foundation, which will help with relationships with corporate entities, and with collecting money to get some work items done faster. I also forgot to mention thursday that Jacob from Django also announced the same thing for Django, which is great news. Then, the best presentation i've seen so far this year was given by Brian Fitzpatrick from Google Chicago, Lessig-style. It was very well delivered, very funny, and simply very entertaining, and was basically about simple packages hiding hideously complex systems, such as the deceptively simple Google frontpage, or the iPod's minimalist exterior. Lastly, an IP lawyer gave a talk about IP and open source, Van Lindberg. I found it too long for the content he actually had to cover, but quite interesting and not badly delivered. He explained what is IP, what are licenses versus contracts, and tried to demonstrate why open source gets written. This was of course very US-centric. The argument wasn't super-strong, but the legal explanations were very interesting. One thing caught my attention, though, during the questions period. Here he was (and previous speakers as well), praising open source developers who do this for the love of open source software, often on top of their day jobs and responsibilities in life. Then they sometimes get sued, or need to sue someone else who's circumventing their license. What to do? His answer is that a fund needs to be setup, b/c this is expensive stuff, hiring a lawyer to go to court. But i'm thinking "look, we do this for the love of it, on our own time, and you say it's great we do this, but you need to get paid". Wouldn't part of the answer instead be "we need lawyers who also love what they do, and are willing to help OSS developers defend themselves, pro bono"? There just seemed to be this huge disconnect, like he really, really did not get OSS.

I thought i'd then like to hear about decorated state machines instead of a SQL Alchemy talk. I was wrong; the state machines talk bored me, not because it was too basic, but just because... well it was boring, that's all. Martin tells me the SQL Alchemy talk was very good, though. I'll have to look into that...

I then got to hear about doing data persistence sans RDBMS. Fairly nice talk, but to be honest i didn't quite understand the point; i guess i just like my DB... my point of view on these things is that the people who do DB servers are much better than most at storing and retrieving data, so let's just leverage that knowledge.

Not going to the " Developing reusable Django applications" would have been stupid, and it was a very nice talk. I must say, though maybe i'm biased b/c i think django will bring the technology that will revive the dodo bird population, that the django presentations given by their core developers were all very good, well done, informative, and pretty. I just love their attitude. We do a lot of what was said in this presentation, but we still need to compartimentalize and abstract our apps better at akoha.

Using Grok to Walk Like a Duck was an interesting beast. It talked about developing interfaces in python to make objects look like they are of another class (make your class quack like the duck another piece of code expects to get, such as faking an LDAP server result set). He outlined multiples ways of doing this, and his preferred method involved writing interface classes (really, just a normal python class with a "standard" 'I' prefix and unimplemented methods), wrapped in a zope adapter.

The day ended with 2 very basic presentations, one about using the django admin to wrap and manipulate existing data, and one about when to use regular expressions, and when not to (considering the wealth of string methods). They were both very, very beginner-level. I guess you need a good spread in the presentations at a conference like this, but i still think these were too basic. They weren't badly delivered or boring, just way too basic.

After a few lightning talks, Martin and i headed to downtown Chicago (pictures to come). There's a CTA train station about 10 minutes walk from the hotel, and the ride is about 40 minutes to downtown. Those trains sound and look like they'll fall apart at any moment, but i really love the industrial feel of it. We had Chicago-style pizza, of course, which was great. We walked a lot, and then visited the top few floors of the John Hancock Center. The top 2 floors are occupied by a gorgeous restaurant and lounge. Very nice, but way too packed: there was no way we'd get seats by the window, so we went back down, and back up to the observatory. That gave us a beautiful view of Chicago from 1000 feet up. The Sears Tower, slightly taller than this, was closed at that time. On our way back, i wanted to take a picture of the approaching train as it entered the station, so i was crouching right on the edge, holding the camera over the tracks, joking to Martin about how the cops question people who take pictures of airports or other infrastructure in the US. I wondered why the train was rapidly decelerating well ahead of reaching the station... sure enough, as it stopped completely a few feet from me, the female conductor giving me the look, a security officier approached us and asked what the hell we were doing. She was actually quite nice about it, and plainly said that we can take pictures all we want. But we looked fishy so they had to stop the train and see what was going on... apologies to those who were delayed by 45 seconds.

I didn't get a bad feeling from that very short stroll in Chicago, though; i wish the conferences were closer to downtown: PyCon 2007 was also way, way out of Dallas, in Addison. Maybe in 2009 :)

Oh yeah, wifi. As i mentionned before, in-room wifi is yet another way for this hotel to squeeze money out of its customers at 13$/day. It's not worth it for me as i'd be using it for an hour, but upon returning from downtown i noticed an unlocked, Managed SSID: "quequita". It was providing free bandwith! I don't know who to thank, but it has since disappeared....

by wiswaud on 16 March 2008
Tags: chicago, django, english, geeky, python