Michael's Unofficial Guide to OSDC Day 1

Notes from the first day of conference paper presentations:

Keynote - Randal Schwartz - "Free software - a look back, a look ahead". Good to hear an industry legend speak. Interesting point shared - release your software and make money on the magazine articles.

Anthony Baxter - "What's New in Python: 2006 edition". Project overview basically, lots of good things here - ctypes should be good for interacting with native code and more importantly (IMHO) getting try...catch...finally is a wonderful addition - one thing that C# brings to the table.

Alan Green/Ben Askins - "Rails/Django Comparison". Building the same webapp in both environments leads to the following conclusion: the Django version took slightly less time to implement and took less code than Rails. But only just - no silver bullet here. Both appear to be useful, with more momentum behind Rails right now e.g. books, jobs etc. The talk was good, but with more time I would have liked more detail - you'd have to know both Django and Rails already to really benefit from this talk - and then you wouldn't need to hear it.

Alex Holkner - "Ctypes. ctypes run!". Very fast talker - did cool stuff via Google's SoC with pygame-ctypes and SDL-ctypes. So ctypes is all about having a very nice way of interfacing to native libraries directly from Python - on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Looks like it makes life easier - in Java it was painful, C# made it easier, and Python is now even easier. Performance is still something that I'd like to know more about.

Richard Jones - "What's Old is New Again". Good presentation, all about remembering what features went into previous Python releases when writing code that needs to work on older installs (remembering that new features appear in each new release of which a new one happens every 18 months). Trivia - import __hello__ :-) Things covered: sub-classing, __slots__, property(), __new__ vs __init__, static & class methods, enumeration, sets, union_update, symmetric_difference, issubset, issuperset, generators, random.sample(population, k), math.radians, math.degrees, bz2. Could've used a longer timeslot to do justice to a good topic.

Adam Kennedy - "Nothing can possibly go wrong". Very entertaining talk about decisions you make now that you regret later. Some discussion of open vs closed problems. If developing for self, choose closed problems. If you have a happy customer with deep pockets, choose an open problem to solve :-) Auto-emailing bug reports covered. Also discussion on ease of install vs functionality/level of bugs in product - easy installation is much more important than you think. Excellent talk that makes you think.

Burgess, Chris - "Web Application Security - Tools, Techniques, Tips and Tricks". Introductory talk on web application security - introduced OWASP which was new to me. Also talked about the security risks of reusing code - may lead to class breaks.

Mark Hammond - "Python in Mozilla". Mozilla is a complete application framework - and is now language agnostic, so Python can now be used (but probably won't be bundled). What for? New applications using the framework and also for writing extensions for Firefox (but right now that means compiling your own version that includes Python). All the heavy lifting of XUL, XPCOM + all of Pythons libraries etc all available in Python on Mozilla. Cool. Looks like there will be a "blessed" Python version that can be installed as a plug-in in the Firefox 3 time-frame. Some questions remain on how you get your non-technical audience to setup their Mozilla-product to support your Python code.

Mary Gardiner - "The Planet Feed Reader: Better Living Through Gravity". Discussion of what what a planet aggregator web site is, moving onto what the planet software is and how it started - as well as some interesting anecdotes on various things. Quite a good talk - would have been better if there was more time to further discuss some of the project's challenges and future direction.

My vote for Talk of the day is Adam Kennedy's "Nothing can possibly go wrong"

Best talk I missed today was probably "Wile Coyote's Toolbox: The Acme Namespace - 20 minutes, 90 modules" by Jose Castro. (I did get to see it at LUV last night though :-)

BOFs - talked Planet with Mary, Russell, and a few others continuing on from Mary's talk - including a quick chat on Venus.

Conference Dinner - At the Gryph Hotel on-site. #include <std-buffet>. Damian Conway's After Dinner Talk was very entertaining - an adaption of The Da Vinci code. He suggested that it was a 100 hours in the making and I can believe it, given the line-noise^WPerl he incorporated ;-P He also suggested that what he presented will eventually make it's way onto the web, so watch out for that - it'll be worth the download!

After dinner caught the last train back to Melbourne city, made plans for breakfast and got back to coding. Afterall, there's plenty of time - there's no need to be at the conference until 9am tomorrow :-)

Note taking thanks to the power of Beagle...

| 07 Dec 2006 | #