April 30, 2009

Another Award for Python

With the month of May comes notification from Linux Journal that Python has won their 2009 Readers' Choice Award for Favorite Programming Language, narrowly beating C++ and Java. The favorite scripting language was bash.

Last year there were some fairly obscure rules about what constituted a programming language and a scripting language. This year the readers themselves decided, and Python also did quite well in the second category.

“In an industry conceived, created and driven by peers, an accolade from the community is the highest compliment you can get,” said Linux Journal publisher Carlie Fairchild. She's right, and it's nice to know that Python's mindshare continues to increase.

April 28, 2009

God Bless, Mum

You may remember that last year I entered (walked) the Race for Hope, a charity even in support of the attempt to find a cure for brain tumors. It was particularly appropriate as a family friend had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and we didn't at that time know what her prognosis was. Happily it looks as though she will survive, albeit with some attendant problems.

I am entering the walk again, but this year I will be making a personal contribution as I have another charity in mind for a more public appeal. Some readers may know that my mother died recently (on Saturday March 28, in fact, the middle day of PyCon). She'd been in failing health, so her death didn't come as a surprise, but if you'd been wondering why I wasn't my usual bubbly self at PyCon that was the reason why.

Rather than have people send flowers to the funeral the family decided we would look for a deserving charity, and ask people to make contributions to that instead. Mum was a midwife, with a healthy interest in the third world—she even took Urdu lessons at one point, and so the charity we chose was Safe Hands for Mothers. I hope that readers will support them through this page (for US donors the CAF link is easiest if you want to give money, just remember to click the "I don't live in the UK" button before entering your address).They are trying to help communities like those in sub-Saharan Africa, where mothers face a 1 in 16 chance of dying during pregnancy and childbirth.

Their web site doesn't have any way to record donations against a particular name, so I'd appreciate it if you would add a comment here should you decide to make a donation. We have so much in the way of material wealth in the United States and the rest of the Western world, and our gifts can make a huge difference to less fortunate individuals. Over 1,400 mothers die every day, many of them from avoidable complications. Please try and help them if you can. Thanks.

April 20, 2009

Sun to Become Part of Oracle

I'm not a great one for handing out stock tips, but when I said a month ago that Sun Microsystems was worth buying at $8 it looked like I was wrong when the IBM acquisition talks fell through. Just the same I held on, and now it looks like I'll be able to take a $1.50 profit when Oracle buy the company in the summer. Of course buying after the talks failed made even more sense, as Alex Martelli wisely pointed out in a comment. Thanks, Alex!

April 10, 2009

Django Hangovers

I think my spell checker is trying to tell me something!

April 9, 2009

Django Dash

Fancy you and a buddy writing the spiffiest Django application of all in 48 hours? Sounds like a great way to spend the weekend. Well, geek, Django Dash might just be for you. Teams of three (or less, but this is supposed to be fun) compete to do just that.

April 6, 2009

WTF, StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is a web service I use for occasional amusement - you register your "interests" and it shows you pseudo-random allegedly-related web pages. There's even a toolbar, which I was silly enough to install for those long evenings when there's nothing on the television and the clients aren't screaming loud enough to get my attention.

Unfortunately it just stopped being funny. I wanted to search my browser history for a specific page, and suddenly I see hundreds of entries, which I am absolutely sure are not a part of my browsing history (I would know if I had seen this page before), listed as "refer.php" whose content reads (typically) "One of our members added your page to the Humor topic on StumbleUpon." Here's a typical example.

So until I get an explanation telling me that either it's a Firefox bug (and we all know how rare those are) or StumbleUpon publicly grovel to get me back they are out, and the toolbar is history, and I won't be going back.

Twitter is currently down for unscheduled maintenance

Talk about being a victim of your own success. Twitter has become my social networking tool of choice, but I wish the service were more reliable. It's just flaked for what seems like the tenth time in the last month, and now only displays the above message when you try and access it. You might regard that as the "this page intentionally left blank" of the web 2.0 world.

Of course the original design inevitably meant that the service is faced with scalability problems, but Twitter hasn't helped matters by providing tools for "weblebrities" like auto-follow (automatically following someone who follows you). Us regular no-hopers, of course, wonder exactly what the point is: if you have 10,000+ followers on Twitter it's self evident that you couldn't give a bugger what any of them are tweeting, which makes the whole thing a rather vacuous exercise to those of us who prefer two-way communications to broadcasts.

I've actually been a member of the open source identi.ca site since OSCON, and while I think it's great that there's an alternative I haven't yet found it compelling enough to be more than an occasional visitor.

Like email spam it's becoming obvious that whenever a new phenomenon arises in the technical world, once it becomes public knowledge the traditional spoilers (marketdroids, celebrities and the like) will climb aboard and screw it up for everyone else. They just haven't realised yet that the rest of the world is just one short step away from telling them to get the hell out. There are a lot of dinosaurs walking around right now, wondering why they are feeling so warm.

April 2, 2009

PyCon Video: Even More Amazing!

I just learned from the PyCon Blog that all the video for the conference is expected to be available on-line at blip.tv by the end of Friday April 3, less than a week after the conference ended. This is indeed an awesome process, and the two videos already available via the PyCon web site shows that the quality problem that existed last year has been solved.

As I was one of the skeptics who thought we should maybe move to a professional video team I'd like to publicly take my hat off as chairman of the PSF to the dedicated team of volunteers under Carl Karsten who have made this possible.

Yet again I am compelled to say that PyCon rocks!

March 30, 2009

PyCon Proves Its Worth

Here's a great quote from Catherine Devlin's blog post Five Minutes at PyCon Changes Everything reporting the unexpected recruitment of a high-powered development team after giving a lightning talk:
If I'd had $1 million of startup funding to hire a staff to work on sqlpython, I couldn't have gotten a team that large or that talented. I figure that gives me better than a 1000-to-1 return on my PyCon investment. :)
It's also been extremely gratifying to discover that the dip in numbers (initial assessment says we were maybe 10% down on 2009) represents an amazing result. Apparently many conferences have seen attendance at 50% of last year's numbers, and some have simply canceled because the cancellation fees were a smaller that their expected loss.

This really vindicates the low-cost community-based approach that PyCon has always used. Several people told me that they booked to attend the conference without knowing whether they could get company approval, because they knew the conference was great value and they could afford to attend on their own dime. PyCon is a very special conference indeed, and the Python community makes remarkable things happen there every year.

PyCon 2010: Hyatt Regency Atlanta

I would like to thank everybody who came to this year's conference. In discussions with the banqueting and other staff it's become clear that as far as conferences go PyCon is a delight to cater for! We aren't too demanding, we don't mess the place up too badly and we have brought a large chunk of much-needed business to the local hotel industry.

With that said, and before the sprints are more than just starting, I thought I would try to whet your appetite for next year's conference, which will be at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta. In October of last year I added an extra day to the beginning of a business trip to Atlanta to meet Ewa Jadlowska of CTE (the conference organizers who help the PyCon organizers to organize) in Atlanta and inspect four possible venues. I sent in a report to David Goodger, and CTE continued to negotiate with the venues. Ultimately the Hyatt bid was successful, and so I thought these snapshots I took at the time of my visit might be of interest to those who like to see where they are going in advance.

The 22-story lobby greets you at ground level and draws you in. The general flavor is somewhat similar to that in the Hyatt Regency O'Hare we just occupied, but the extra height and larger area makes it even more impressive, though the elevators don't have fancy colored lights underneath them. The view of this space from about halfway up gives you an impression of its size.

There's a purpose-built registration office that should come in useful, and the audio-visual guys will be interested to hear that the main ballroom area has a balcony (from whence I shot this picture) for their use so that they can view the session without intruding on it. The height of the ballroom leaves nobody feeling claustrophobic.

The room I stayed in (which might have been rather up-market because I wasn't a secret shopper and they wanted to impress me) was large, clean and comfortable. Rather than show that I photographed a regular room, which is likely to give you a better idea of how comfortable you will be.

All in all I think PyCon will have a great time in Atlanta, and I am already looking forward to it. See you there?

March 28, 2009

PyCon 2009 Day 1

Way too much stuff going on to fully describe it. I should already be in bed, as tomorrow I want to be up early enough to see Jesse Noller's lightning talk: he had me do some graphics for him (so for Heaven's sake don't expect anything classy - we haz gimp but do not really know how to use it :)

Finally got to read Kirby Urner's instantaneous blog of my tutorial session yesterday. Great verisimilitude, lends an authentic flavor to his description.

PSF Members' meeting at lunchtime gave very good results: all members and sponsor members elected/ratified, board now expanded to 10, new bylaws adopted (thanks, Stephan Deibel) and motion to discard logo trademark protection defeated.

My presentation The State of the Python Community: Leading the Python Tribe took too long to present as I didn't have time to shorten the slide presentation, so I only had ten minutes to exchange ideas, but discussions afterwards made it obvious that some people with valuable information are intimidated by the level of research and/or determination it takes to get through to someone who can update the web site. Also there is a lot of enthusiasm to help the PSF. Apparently Jacob Kaplan-Moss is at least toying with the idea of stepping up to help the PSF volunteer web team. That would rock.

Brief hiatus followed by a short Board meeting. I am chairman for another year, and we decided on a couple of Python Community Awards. I was stunned (in the most pleasant way) to be able to view a recording of my session in the Green Room two hours after I had started presenting it! Way to go, audio-visual guys. When this stuff hits the met it will make tech news. They really *are* good.

On to dinner with my Board colleagues plus Allison Randal of the Parrot Foundation, Liew Beng Keat from the Singapore user group and Luciano Ramahlo of Brazil. The Board's only chance to socialize through the face, so an important occasion even if the table was a little long and narrow to allow round-table communication.

Then back to the hotel for a quick drink, a look at today's tweets and a bout of email responding before finally capsizing into bed after finishing this post. Always busy at PyCon. Time flies when you are enjoying yourself. More tomorrow ...

March 27, 2009

Chairman's Challenge for PyCon Delegates

I was originally hoping to offer an enormous prize for the best delegate video of PyCon, so I could put it up on python.tv, (sorry about the currently-parked domain status - I am at a conference!) but I didn't get my stuff together despite good advice from Leslie Hawthorn. The better the advice the worse it's wasted, I guess. Sorry, Leslie.

Anyway, absent any clear probability of video appearing (and if video does appear then I will judge it and award a prize) I have decided to issue a challenge to those delegates with electronics knowledge and a practical bent. I have brought to the conference a (working) Arduino duemilanove board, an assembled but untested motor driver board, a prototyping breadboard, two power supplies, a butane powered soldering iron with solder and a shitload of electronic components.

I will award whichever delegate who (in my sole opinion) produces the best gadget by noon on Sunday a gift certificate for Elegant Stitches, the vendor who produces wearable Python regalia.

The first person to find me or the stash of components should find a corner of an Open Space room somewhere that can be used by anyone wishing to take up the challenge. Extra points for proving the motor driver board as either good or bad (but convincing evidence will be required).

Delegates working in teams will be given extra credit and will receive more generous consideration in the event of a win. Entries to me in person or via the registration desk team.

Even if you don't want to seek a prize, feel free to play with the bits and pieces if you have any electronics knowledge. The Arduino is an interesting little device, and it would be great to have Python support for it.

PyCon Tutorial Slides

My PyCon tutorial attendance was closed at 60 students, but there were a few spare seats still due to dropouts and such. Next year some way of allowing wait-listed students the flexibility of a last-minute change would be a small improvement.

Extremely happy that this is the most negative thing I can imagine saying about the way Greg Lindstrom and his team ran the tutorials. As a presenter I have nothing but praise for the way the organization supported me: all I had to do was follow the line of least resistance. That always makes it easy for a presenter.

Please post any questions or corrections about the slides as comments.

Thanks to everyone who supported PyCon by coming to the tutorial. What should I do next year (when I think I will limit myself to one)?

March 19, 2009

Sun Microsystems in Play

For a couple of days now Sun's stock has been the subject of speculation due to IBM's wish to acquire the company. Strangely enough the company would have been worth more a month ago, since IBM's interest is unlikely to be in Sun's hardware range (which IBM would be well advised to spin off as no longer a part of their core competency).

No. IBM's interest in Sun is its software, which in turn means its people. So the price would have been higher before Sun's recent round of layoffs. If the deal goes ahead it's an unfortunate fact that many remaining Sun employees will lose their jobs because there will be duplication of administrative functions. I doubt, though, that many of those with higher-level technical skills will find themselves redundant, as they are the basis of the $7bn valuation of Sun.

I should have bought Sun stock at $4 a year ago (but didn't, for reasons I won't bother to go into here). But I think even at $8 I'll manage to make a modest profit on them.

March 18, 2009

PyCon Web Registration Closes Today

If you are planning to register for PyCon before you arrive at the venue, save yourself some money and do it on the web before web registration closes.

March 14, 2009

New Training Policy

OK, from now on every public Holden Web Python class is going to have at least two free places available for open source programmers. We are running a quarterly schedule right now. The next Introduction to Python class runs on yet-to-be-announced dates in September: the June class was canceled due to bereavement.

If you know someone who might benefit, please ask them to contact me to get themselves on the waiting list.

March 12, 2009

United Gets Lost Luggage Right

Earlier this week I flew back to Washington Dulles from Memphis via Chicago. Familiar story: short change, airplanes right next to each other, luggage transferred via central routing came on a later 'plane. The courteous assistant looked up my baggage details and led me to an entry terminal. He asked me to select the "OK to deliver by overnight service", which I did.

9:30 I get a call asking if it's OK to leave it tonight. I say "sure" and attach a signed note to the door asking the delivery service to leave the bag on the stoop.

Next morning I wake up and the bag is on the stoop. I've complained in the past when they've got it wrong.

So, this time, United, well done.

March 11, 2009

Lest We Doubt ...

You know your software is popular when people send you bacon in the mail. Jacob Kaplan Moss of the Django team certainly knew, because the people from bacn.com built a web business and said they "couldn't have done it without Django" in a note to Jacob ... with bacon enclosed.

Jacob captioned the image on Flickr "Do you have any idea how awesome it is receiving unsolicited bacon in the mail!?", which certainly winds up top of my list of questions most likely to receive the answer 'No'. He tweeted:
jacobian [...]! Just got BACON IN THE MAIL from the amazing people at bacn.com!
So, through those long dark nights as you try to stay awake long enough to compile your extension module, instead of wondering why you work on open source softwar, comfort yourself with the thought that someone may, one day, send ... bacon.

March 10, 2009

Microsoft Shoots Self in Foot in Iceland

Since Holden Web has a modest interest in the Icelandic economy it's nice to see a major competitor's decision to unleash their draconian rapacious capitalist instincts has met with a swift kick in the gonads by way of a prompt reply.

Making design decisions about Icelandic markets in Redmond is like making design decisions about Europe in Detroit, say. Now major resellers in Iceland are realizing that the local market trusts them far more than Microsoft to say what's best for the Icelandic markets. And why wouldn't it? Unsurprisingly the vendors now prefer open source, so more revenue stays in Iceland.

Hey, Icelandic guys, welcome to the open source community. What's more you an train a generation of open source programmers who understand Icelandic. This could even help the long-term survival of the Icelandic language itself.

Congrats to Simon Willison

Simon tweeted recently to announce that the launch of the Guardian Open Platform appeared to have gone well. Clearly this is a newspaper management that "gets it", and the service looks fascinating from a technical point of view.

I am hoping to find out how easily information services can be built on this content.

The Guardian is one of the things I miss from back home. During my time back in Scotland it became a real pleasure to drop in at the newsagents near the station for a copy of The Guardian. So now I can at least get the content.

Congratulations, Simon! I am really looking forward to hearing about this development project at PyCon in a couple of weeks. Or at EuroPython later this summer