Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.

A very special thank you to Speaker DiMasi, Chairman DeLeo, Chairman Smizik and Representative Mike Rush of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. They have passed the new budget which includes ~$10Mil for the Department of Conservation and Recreation; fulfilling Governor Duval Patrick’s campaign promise. The representatives mentioned sponsored the additional monies for the parks department. This proves once again that while it is the big offices which make the big promises, it is the representatives who get the work done. I do not agree with all the decisions made in the budget (link coming later once it’s up on the site), but I was not elected to take part in it. It will effect my voting behavior next session however (this is a note to you Fresolo). But I digress.

Last week the House heeded your call and stood up for Revere Beach, Middlesex Fells, Nickerson State Park, Balance Rock State Park, Walden Pond and other great places across the Commonwealth by including an additional $9.6 million for the Department of Conservation and Recreation in the final version of their budget. Thanks to all of your emails, phone calls and petition signatures, we won this critical first step in the Legislature’s budget process.

This additional funding, championed by Speaker DiMasi, Chairman DeLeo, Chairman Smizik and Representative Rush, means more rangers, cleaner and safer parks, more public access, more educational programs and more recreational opportunities. These lawmakers, as well as all the legislators who supported additional funding for forests and parks, deserve our thanks.

Please email your state representative and thank them for standing up for our treasured public places.

To email your state representative, click on the link below or copy and paste it into your web browser.

https://www.environmentmassachusetts.org/action/preserving-massachusetts/thank-rep?id4=ES

Background

Massachusetts has a strong legacy of preserving our special places. Unfortunately, this legacy, like our state forests and parks, is deteriorating. Many of our public treasures are suffering from chronic neglect, mismanagement and understaffing that in some cases have led to visible decay, safety issues and environmental damage. Our state forests and parks system currently has a deferred maintenance backlog of estimated between $1.2 and $1.7 billion.

Our state forests and parks support dozens of rare species, natural communities, old growth forests and champion tree sites. They provide recreational opportunities for millions of visitors who walk, play, camp, bike, hike, and otherwise enjoy these natural resources. And, they contribute significantly to our economic prosperity in the Commonwealth, supporting robust tourism and recreation economies and even, according to recent studies, drawing young people to settle here.

Unfortunately, Governor Patrick missed a crucial step toward restoring our world class forests and parks a few weeks ago when failed to fulfill his campaign promise to provide an additional $10 million for our forests and parks. By ignoring our forests, parks and beaches, we turn our backs on the places that make Massachusetts such a great place to live and work.

The legislature is writing its budget between now and the end of June, so we are working to build as much support as possible to convince our legislators to deliver the additional resources our public treasures need and deserve. We are working closely with the Parks Caucus in the Legislature, other environmental groups, and you to make this happen. As the first step in that process, the House of Representatives passed the final version of the House budget last Friday. We are happy to report that their final budget includes an additional $9.6 million for the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

Please email your state representative and thank them for standing up for our treasured public places.

Sincerely,

Frank Gorke
Environment Massachusetts Director
FrankG@environmentmassachusetts.org
http://www.environmentmassachusetts.org

P.S. Thanks again for your support. Please feel free to share this e-mail with your family and friends.

Please take the time to thank your representatives for passing this budget and the additional funding for our parks in particular. Don’t know who they are? Here is the list by town and here are their e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Now it is up to the Senate to accept the budget. I will post information on that process later.

And on a personal note….

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All the cool people are doing it, so here are all those silly quiz results I have taken in the past but have never had a blog to post the results on
(At least the ones I kept).

Which Programming Language are You?

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Well it finally happened. 30 Days of Spam (the limit in GMail), and I have surpassed 10,000 spam e-mails! And its a palindrome to boot (fellow Dragonites may realize why that is special). Currently this is just for one account on one site, so I would not be surprised if others have much larger spam counts, but it’s a milestone for me. I am celebrating by playing the Monty Python ‘Spam’ song on repeat while solving the palindrome problem as many ways I can in just 1 line of python (generators rock!)

[Then I will get back to that django sponsorship app thingie...]

After some issues with the US Post Office, I received the PyCon Video data in the mail today from LD ‘Gus’ Landis. He and Bill Chipman took on the task of video taping as much of the PyCon 2007 conference as they could. They worked with Jeff Rush (Co-Chair and in charge of the audio feed recordings), and the entire audio team co-ordinated by Carl Karsten, to provide the world with this information; using their personal video equipment. Gus has already ripped all the video into a common format and generated a preliminary index of the data denoting the date and first talk on the file, each file ~1GB in size (THANK YOU!!!!). Over the next 4 days I will get a full index made and flesh out the preliminary production schedule. (Yes this includes multiple open source, linux friendly formats.)

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Bibliophile (bĭb’lē-ə-fīl’) n.

1. a person who loves or collects books, esp. as examples of fine or unusual printing, binding, or the like.
2. A lover of books.
3. A collector of books.

NOTE: The adj. form is bookworm. While ‘bibliophilia’ has recently entered the common vernacular, it is not an accepted form.

I am a self professed bibliophile. It is a trait which appears to be hereditary. As proof I grabbed my cell phone, snapped some pictures, created a new tabblo account for the site, and in under a minute I had something which looks like it took hours. I do love tabblo! I was planning on adding a ‘books’ page to the site this week in celebration of National Library Week. Unfortunately a stomach virus threw all schedules out the window as childhood ailments often do. The Worcester Public Library has a fantastic children’s reading program with music and local artists every Friday morning from 10:30am until noon with a playtime afterwards. Our son picks out ten to twelve books and we end up reading each at least three times over the week. This week is special in that all activities will be accessible to the deaf and hearing impaired.

10:30am Just Drop In Sing-a-long & Storytime
Kids of all ages are invited to. The program will take place in the Children’s Room ‘Ellipse’. Enjoy picture book stories, nursery rhymes, poetry and live music with instruments provided for children. Each week’s program is followed by an optional playtime for which the library provides coloring sheets, book displays library and literacy information for parents and children, toys for play and ambient music. The program is free, for ALL AGES and is open to the public, no registration required, just drop in ! Come early for best seats! Kids can bring their own instruments to help mr. frank play songs! Call the Main Library at 508.799.1671 for details. If the Worcester Public Schools are delayed or cancelled ‘Just Drop In’ our program will be cancelled for that morning.

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Well the taxes are done, the gas leak has been plugged, the water heater is fixed, ‘Green Eggs and Ham‘ and ‘Curious George goes to School‘ have been read. With that my emergency laundry list is reduced to… well… laundry. Time to get back to all those things I have had to put on hold. My work todo list is rather stable if overly full and my home todo list is growing like the crab grass I need to deal with. Following in Brett Cannon and Jack Diederich’s footsteps (not that I feel my efforts come close to theirs in scope or impact) here is my Python todo list. It is not exhaustive and I know I will not get to everything. There are a number of outside forces which will be influencing what gets done when, and what things I will have to give up on. I don’t expect anyone to care enough to tell me what I should be working on (well besides my wife), but I welcome any and all input. The list isn’t in any particular order except maybe anxiety.

• PyCon 2007 Media This is going to take up the majority of my time for the next few months. I have mailed off the hard drive to be filled with all the raw video and started the video templates. I need to revive my old python video encoding toolchain from my anime fansub days (has it really been 4 years?) I still don’t have a DVD duplication house selected yet. I am waiting to see the quality of the raw video before deciding on exactly what DVD’s will be produced from the material. I do have some friends on the hook to help me out at a home studio off the union clock, so the ISO masters should not be a problem. I also have a graphic designer lined up to do the liner art for almost free (Hint: Laundry is on my emergency laundry list). I might need more help with this, but I will not know until I start ripping into the data.
• Learn Roundup The PyCon-Tech work desperately needs a bug track system. Other groups are looking to use the code, so this is going from a low short term priority to high. The roundup folks are are willing to host a vanilla instance for free, which is fantastic. I started looking into this and made 3 pages of notes and questions about the software. This was about the time the python tracker group was ramping up plans to convert python-dev over to roundup. Needless to say I was not going to bother anyone with my questions, which I can answer myself by reading the documentation and learning the system myself. I am quite familiar with Trac, and the basics all seem to be the same, and this is not exactly a large project.
• PyCon Sponsorship Application Integration Lots of big words that mean I need to take the very clean and and elegant code of Steve Holden and stuff in into the somewhat organic and undocumented PyCon-Tech code. The sponsorship application is wxPython, db module based with a postgresql backend. The goal is to have a django web interface into the data and have both working against the same network database. I already did a proof of concept which worked well, but I need to go back and flesh out all the views and web forms needed. My hope is to have have a nice system for people wanting to be sponsors to sign up online; this is the one area lacking in the existing application. I don’t see a way to improve on any of the stuff Steve did, and I plan on replicating the xwPython interface as closely as I can in web form. Some of it will not be as good.
• Python Jobs Board I took part in the sprint at PyCon and after three days we had all of the existing functionality implemented, plus a web admin interface, google sitemaps, rss and atom feeds, auto expiration of 31day old jobs, a workflow and more. I wish I could take credit for this, but I played mostly an advisory role while working on PyCon-Tech stuff. The team did a fantastic job zoning out my incoherent ramblings about Django and hammering out 90% of a very complex site in only a few days. Peter Kropf is running this project but has been very buisy on other things and the effort has been put on hold. There is a private svn/trac site he is hosting and a timeline for a demo. I really want to help out on this and I think there is enough overlap between this and other projects that I can make that happen.
• Satchmo This is a storefront and shopping cart framework written in Django. I need to get my wifes buisness site up and running and I want it to be in Django. I have tried many, many, many other packages, and there is nothing out there for the type of merchandise she sells in the way she wants to sell it. It is one of the rare occasions where I feel I can do better than other packaged solutions and that it is worth my effort to do so (but I am not stupid enough to start from a blank slate).
• OLPC Sadly I fear I will not get to this one. Most of the other items have people waiting on them and a local development environment in place. Not sense I started working on speech recognition have I been this excited about a project. Not sense starting on speech recognition have I felt so overwhelmed by the complexities and immense problems which need to be solved. This is my reward for getting other work done.
• importlib/Python 3.0 It seems I might have over estimated my abilities to help here. This one is unique in that it is directly impacts work. We do some nasty hacks in our custom version of Python at Py_Initialize() time to bootstrap things and get imports to work the way we want. We have our own print function and handle python print output. The features being implemented in Python 3.0 will help us remove the majority of our special purpose code. The new annotation system in particular will help out in a major way. Due to details I wont bore people with, I need not worry about NDA and copyright issues as we are talking about are very different implementations. Still, this is a good two years out for us and I have many other projects to work on.
• bitvector/frozenbitvector Over two years ago I wrote a python module bitvector.py under the Python2.0 license. It solved many problems I had for doing compute intensive graph theory. At the time sets were implemented in pure python and not yet part of the standard library. The bitvector.py code still operates two orders of magnitude faster than builtin C sets for large amounts of data. I would like to get this implementation done in C as well as python.
• PyCon-Tech 2008 Lots to do here. Social networking, registration, schedule design, bio’s, etc., etc., etc. Moving to Django 1.0pre with newforms, django-values, content-types, and hopefully a new app Ardien demoed at PyCon. Package up SiteFeatures and the ReStructuredText extensions. Documentation. Testing. Getting help, getting help, getting help.
  

Looking over the list, one thing concerns me. It is very Django heavy. I am not a web developer or web frameworks person. I got into Django by accident. My main python work has been C/C++ embedding and extension work and doing crazy things like adding strong type safety and automated C++ integration. The break was nice, but I would like to get back to that.

Advocacy (ād’və-kə-sē) n.

1. the profession or work of an advocate
2. the action of advocating, pleading for, or supporting a cause or proposal

Jeff Rush recently took on the mantel of ‘Python Advocacy Coordinator’. Some members of the PSF and the Python community at large feel that there is no need for this position and no need for Python Advocacy in general. At first my knee jerk reaction was one of surprise, ‘Why would we not want to advocate Python Isn’t that part of the PSF mission statement?’

The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of the international community of Python programmers.
…

• Publicizes, promotes the adoption of, and facilitates the ongoing development of Python-related technology and educational resources. This includes, but is not limited to, maintaining a public web site, planning Python conferences, and offering grants to Python-related open source projects.

I had always assumed Python advocacy was a worthwhile and critical effort (critical as derived from the word critique). This is a dangerous assumption and one I based solely on my own personal experiences with Python in corporate and educational environments. Python as a language and a community is growing at an alarming rate. PyCon saw a 44% increase in size this past year, and there are 3 more Python conferences in mainland Europe this year (Euro Python, PyCon Italy, and one other to be announced soon). There are numerous other conferences, unconferences and events where Python will be prominent or are centered around Python based technology (OSCon, RuPy, Plone, BarCamp, SciPy, PyWeek, etc, etc). MIT now uses Python as the language to teach programming. Corporate uptake and endorsement of Python in the past three years has been staggering; Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Nasdaq, Nasa, Sony, DreamWorks, RedHat, Apple. The current most popular change management systems (Subversion+Trac) are Python based. The bane of the RIAA and MPAA, bittorrent is Python Financial institutions, whom are very conservative when it comes to their in-house technology, are turning to Python. A quick look at the Python jobs board and a more detailed look at it’s history shows a huge demand for skilled Python developers in just about every field of business. There was a running joke at PyCon where speakers would get up and say ‘Hello, my name is <your name> and I am not hiring’. It was a running joke because out of over 100 speakers, 3 said it. Guess what the other ~100 said? I mean, when you have Mark Shuttleworth and Tim O’Reilly on your side, what more do you need?

Python is Python’s best advocate. Should it be the only advocate? The language and the communities behind and on top of the language speak softly, but with a combined power that is simply overwhelming. In that sense Python has it’s advocates all over the world. So why isn’t Python being mentioned on CNN like Java, Ruby on Rails and PHP are? Is that a good thing? The truth is, Python is not all that well known and largely misunderstood. It does not get write-ups in CIO Magazine; it does not show up on mid-sized corporate radar. On some level I feel this is a good thing. I don’t like the idea of Python being a bullet item on some marketing slide or CIO’s ‘vision’. The problem is what this does for the real Python advocates; the programmers, developers, and engineers out there who want to use the right tool to solve their problem. If they feel that right tool is Python, they need the information, the numbers, the facts to back up that decision. No one ever gets fired for choosing J2EE (to turn a phrase).

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Chris Curvey has been running the Boston Python Interest Group for a few years now and done a fantastic job. Work and other commitments will be keeping him from keeping this up, and for a while now he has been asking for someone else to step forward. No one person can manage everything, and a number of people have stepped forward to help out. Sally Kleinfieldt of the The Nature Conservatory will continue to host the semi-monthly formal presentations. I will deal with announcements and scheduling. Will Guaraldi offered to pay for a year of meetup.com, but we will try to get some corporate sponsorship first.

This evening was the second informal meet up of the year, held at Trident Booksellers on Newbury Street. In total there were five of us, which is about average for informal sessions rescheduled with one day notice (oops). This allowed for some intense discussion with a fair amount of depth, on a wide range of topics. I originally planned a seed discussion on a number of open source projects which are in need of more volunteer (and paid) support. We were so busy talking about education, engineering, Python 3000, and the differences between object and functional programming that we never really got to any projects besides OLPC; which is good as I left the materials on the printer at work. I love informal gatherings like this because it allows for some amazing free association and everyone comes away learning something. Hearing how others are using python and other technologies to solve real world problems or just for fun; it never gets old. Here are the highlights (as much as I can remember………)

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Well I have been rather busy post-PyCon, but its time to finally catch up with the year 2000 and get me one of these here blog thingies. It has been a crazy, manic and rewarding six months. I can’t think of a better way to start off my blog, than to go over this years PyCon. (Well that is a little disingenuous but, hey, it’s a blog, how would you know any different? wait…)

It was a rather large conference this year so I will cover it in multiple posts. There are many other topics I would like to cover in the next few weeks, and I fear having all the information on one page would cause any useful information to be lost in the deluge of words.

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