Please Publicize PyCon

If you have a blog, now would be a good time to use it to start encouraging people to attend PyCon. In Atlanta, from February 19-21, with two days for tutorials before and up to four days of sprinting afterwards, it's likely to be the best and biggest PyCon to date.

I would be especially grateful if you would make sure that word gets out to people who might otherwise not think about coming to PyCon. The conference thrives on new blood - typically at least fifty percent of delegates will be attending their first PyCon. There are badges you can use to give your posts a graphical flavor, too.

I'm using the badge above because I am speaking early on the first morning about Building the Python Community. There are others you can use if you are attending, or giving a tutorial. So please, do everything you can to make this the best PyCon ever (which won't be easy, given the event's history). And have a very Happy Christmas!

Damn Those AdWords!

OK, this is a guilt trip. You have been warned.

One of the things about being an AdWords user is that you realize the cost of a click-through.

So just now, trying to find out exactly how far the proposed $102,000,000,000 (that's an obscene waste of taxpayer dollars) spend on the Iraq war would go towards making sure everyone in the world had potable water to drink, I clicked on a sponsored link. As soon as the page came up I realized that I had just cost these people money.

So, I could have sent them a couple of bucks to salve my conscience. Instead I decided I would give them something scarcer, so I am taking a few minutes of my time to ask you to visit their Web site, and understand (or at least struggle to understand) why one sixth of the world's population is unable to take clean drinking water for granted, and think about what that must be like for them. I figure that if only ten of you click the link then I have probably contributed the equivalent of at least $10. If you bother to post a comment here saying you have clicked, I will also send PlayPumps $6 per person, thereby providing someone with clean water for ten years—I doubt I have so many readers, but prudence cautions me to limit the total to $480.

Then go to my other blog and look at the mounting cost of the Iraqi suppression at the top right hand corner. If the USA spent one-tenth as much providing drinking water to the world as it does spilling blood it would be hailed as a benefactor, and welcomed throughout international society. Wouldn't it be nice to have a few other countries on our side for a change? How about a "coalition of the grateful"?

How come lame duck presidents never seem to grapple with this as they piss away their few remaining months in power? God forbid it should get in the way of the plans for yet another self-congratulatory presidential library. Don't they realize these kids will be programming in Python once they get their OLPCs?

[Final update, April 7: Not as ruinous as feared, but I have
just send PlayPumps a check for $120. Thanks for participating! Steve]

SCO's Fate Is Sealed

A preliminary ruling in SCO's battle against users of the Linux operating system has decreed that the rights SCO was licensing actually belonged to Novell. There is along way still to go before all issues are resolved, but it's my belief that this judgment sounds SCO's death-knell. It is now a company with no prospects and precious few products, and a completely discredited CEO.

If SCO survives long enough to see all legal questions resolved I will be surprised. Novell can now choose to force SCO to waive its claims against IBM and Sequent, and the war chest that SCO had hoped to use to fund legal actions is likely to be needed to pay Novell fees that SCO have received for licenses it had no legal power to levy.

I wonder what Darl McBride's next job will be?

Misunderstandings

Here's a quote from an article about agile programming which is otherwise quite well-informed:

But because of their simplicity, languages such as Python and Ruby are better-suited to writing small applications.

This is the kind of myth that really needs to be squashed at the source. Unfortunately the source in this case is a journalist who has written an article and moved on with her misunderstanding of the issues and the facts completely untouched.

It's difficult to know how to attack this problem, because even the Python Software Foundation's advocacy coordinator were to contact the journalist in question and correct the mis-impression the damage is already done, and another opportunity to gain the wrong idea about dynamic languages is out there to be used as "evidence" by those looking to press the advantage of some other technique. It must have annoyed David Goodger (one of the Foundation's directors) to be quoted shortly after that misstatement.

In this particular case the author of the article did manage to get a lot right - technologies should come second to business needs, agile methods can save money by delivering business value faster and avoiding large amount of rework, and so on. So the content wasn't all bad, but the misunderstanding of Python's suitability for large projects spoiled it for me.

But then, I (and, I presume, most of thios blog's readers) already know that Python can be used successfully to build very large systems indeed.

Python Slithers into Systems

Nice to see ITA, a PyCon sponsor, getting publicity for themselves and Python in eWeek: Python Slithers into Systems. ITA aren't exclusively programming in Python, I happen to know they use Lisp and at least one compiled language as well. This demonstrates yet again that Python is a pragmatist's language, and it's definitely rising in visibility.

Other People's Time

Would you rather work with a contractor who gives you a due date and sticks to it or one you could never be entirely certain of? If the project slips, how good will communications be?

Seth Godin here relates why it's important to keep public events to a schedule. Conferences aren't about the muckety-mucks, they're about the hard-working stiffs who've forked over their cash. Well, the conferences I organize are, anyway.

If a meeting's not about the participants, why are they there?