Today I am going to start blogging much earlier while I still have some brain cells left, and maybe I can include some links this time.

Right now the Lightning talks just started so this post might end up being just as scatter brained.

This morning I got up late (because the hotel alarm is quieter than Sarah when she sleeps), and rushed down stairs. I felt bad leaving AMK alone at the registration desk during the initial rush, especially as I had not shown him how to print badges or even where the badge equipment was. It turned out that we really didn’t ave any wireless network (again) so printing badges and doing registration was out of the question anyway. We have seen a HUGE spike in on-site registrations over past year. Last year we had something like 5-6 on-site registrations. I handled 12 yesterday and AMK handled another 10 (at least) today. This doesn’t even scale with the increase in attendance. It also does not include the additional vendor passes (which I have completely lost count of). The end result is we have approximately 1040 attendees on site. That is a 74% increase over last year. (more…)

Tabblo looks like it is back up and working. I saw Ned this morning and the first words out of my mouth were something like ‘whats up with tabblo?’. Not a nice thing to do to a jet lagged person, and it turns out I was the second person to complain to him. I felt bad about that. The entire Tabblo engineering team are here at PyCon, and their site started having problems while they were on a plane. Not a fun morning for them. The short of it is, I will try to get yesterday’s pictures up. Unfortunately I have yet to take a picture today.

I went to my first PSF meeting, and it was not what I expected given some of the descriptions of the past. Some of you are laughing, if you are not, consider yourselves lucky I guess… There are going to be some interesting discussions going on in the coming year. Python is growing up in many ways, and the foundation is starting to react to those changes. As Guido quoted in his keynote: “Open source changes or it dies.” Corporate entities are becoming more and more influential in the python community, and the PSF will need to take on a more visible role going forward in response. This is not a preventative, protective, or even ’sell out’ response, but a supporting function for the community as a whole so that the core developers and users of python have the information and support they need to keep doing what they do; in keeping with the mandate of the PSF charter. A lot of words that say nothing… I think I have been hanging around VanL a bit too much…

The morning talks were quite good. David Goodgers opening remarks were quite moving. I can’t wait until we have the video up for that. (um.. yea, we are recording everything this year… did I forget to mention that?) We have 300 video tapes (worst case backup), 30 or so external hard drives (for video and slide capture), and professional sound and video people recording everything. Someone needs to work on a proposal to the PSF to pay for this stuff to be produced, because even an army of volunteers will not get it done in time. We want it online ASAP. So speakers sign your release forms!!!

Brett Cannons ‘How import does its thing‘ was fantastic. You can judge the success of a talk by the interesting deeply involved questions asked, and Brett had to field some doosies. I ended up back at the reg desk and also peeked in at a number of talks, hitting most of what I was interested in, and then back to ‘Reference problems‘, which I really regret missing the first half of. The PSF meeting was during lunch and it was a catered hot lunch separate from the regular conference lunch. It did not agree with me for some reason, and as a result I skipped the next talk and went to the exhibit room instead. My brain was not up for thinking, and I figured getting some more t-shirts was a better use of my nauseated time. There was a snag in my master plan in that our vendors are not the normal vendors you see (well except Google which was exactly what one would expect.) I ended up having to think AND communicate.

I dragged myself back for the ‘State of Django‘ talk. There were some announcements made during the first one, but I will let the Django folks do the web version. I had prodded MartyAlchin to make a proposal long ago. It was his first talk anywhere, and a very very good. This is what I love about PyCon. Here is someone who has contributed extensively to a project and has a wealth of knowledge, but is relatively unknown. He creates a fantastic proposal, and comes to PyCon and talks in front of 300 people sharing what he knows and spawns other discussions. I expect we will be seeing more from him in the future.

Stop reading now. Seriously, you dont want to read the rest unless you want to fall asleep (if you have not already).

Something weird is going on over at reddit. The schedule app has it directly integrated under a sub pycon2008 reddit, but now none of the pycon2008 reddits are showing up anywhere, or pinging back to the widgets. Searching for ‘pycon’ on reddit is showing nothin, which yesterday it showed 20 items going back 3 years! Not pleased!

The talk interest counts seem to be panning out even thought there is a huge bug that is showing up. On the schedule app we track what talks people select. We do not do this with your normal AJAX javascript garbage. That’s right, your web2.0 is crap ;-) The schedule HTML is cached (though dynamically generated from database data in Django), and the schedule selection data is overlayed using javascript. This is not done via a request to the server. Instead the data is gotten out of a cookie. When you select a talk, the cookie is updated. We get the selections when you reload the page (or load some of the other pages). We track selections and deselections to sync the data with the database. This means that there is almost no load on the server. Imagine 1000 people clicking causing connections to the server over our crappy network and you see the rationale for the design. When I came up with the design I did it that way not expecting network problems, but from a dislike of all these behind the scenes network requests that most of web2.0 seems to be built on. Cookies also have some nice side effects. If you have a login then the data is stored in the database keyed off your login. This way your data is persistent across machines, etc. For anonymous people, we force those people (who select things) to have a session id and cookie as well to track those changes, and provide ical feeds. If you delete the cookies, your data is gone, but not big loss for you or us. Unless you are running in anti-cookie mode. Browsers in this mode will allow the cookie sent back to the server to be parsed, and will send back to the server cookies that are created on the client by javascript, but will delete them just after those operations. What this means is that each reload gets a brand new session id. This means that each page load by these people ends up being counted as a separate person. Thus we have more people using the scheduling app than there are attendees (as far as we know). Oddly the numbers are still holding.