Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.

PyCon is now just a memory. I am still recovering from it, and there is an IRC meeting tomorrow to deal with all those little pieces left over and kick off PyCon 2009 work (YIKES!).  Originally I was going to blog each day of the conference, but of course, that didn’t happen once the sprints started.

The numbers for the people sprinting are all over the place. It was impossible to get an exact count as people swapped projects, arrived at odd hours, and didn’t all eat the free lunch. I will never forget the image of standing up after the sunday lightning talks when Brett asked ‘How many of you are staying for the sprints?’, and every hand in the room went up. More people stayed for the sprints than saw my lightning talk on saturday (using my memory and the view of the audience as an accurate scientific measure). David yelled out something like ‘we need more food’ and ran to tell the hotel to set more plates. We were expecting about 150 at most given the normal ~15% of attendance. The hotel count of people fed lunch on Monday was 270+. I know of 5 people who did not eat that lunch and instead went out for food. As it was corn beef and cabbage, I believe there were a number of vegetarians who were also unsatisfied and went elsewhere, but I do not have a count. Muddying the count is the fact that peoplefrom the hote, and not part of the conference, were also fed. I was in shock at how many people stuck around for multiple days.

The sprints were a huge success overall. I did not get to spend as much time as I would have like on teh PyCon-Tech stuff as I kept having to deal with a personal issue.  I apologize to those who took part in the PyCon-Tech sprint for not spending enough time with you guys. I had the opportunity to work with a great bunch of people, but between burnout, machine problems, and police reports my mind was sadly not 100% on the sprint. I will blog about the PyCon-Tech stuff later.

I have to say the best part of the conference as a whole was talking with all the amazing people. I got a chance to talk at length to James Tauber, which was a shear delight. It is amazing that it took going to chicago for us to spend so much time talking together, as we work about 3 miles apart. Talking with David Goodger, Steve Holden, Jeff Rush, Mary Rush, Brad Allen, and others was like coming home. I could name about 50 other people, but then things would get crazy. I can’t wait for Phil to come back to the east, and hopefully I will get a chance to program with him. His work blows my mind. I got to sit and talk with people I consider hero’s and anti-hero’s. I learned equally from both, and on a whole my life has been greatly enriched from the experience.

Finally I need to mention the people of ChiPy. These guys are fantastic! Carl, Ted, Steve, and everyone else are amazing amazing people! I am looking forward to working with them again; in 13 hours it would appear.

I should mention that the PyCon 2008 videos are now popping up on YouTube. I guess its time to add some more of my own.

First up is a quick peek at the now famous ‘Teach me Twisted’ talk that I shot when I realized I was witnessing something special.

Next up is a shot of lunch on Monday… in the word of Gossamer, ‘People!’

Finally, here is a peek into the Django sprint room Tuesday before lunch.

*For those interested in modern mono no aware literature I highly recommend the works of Hiroyuki Morioka; especially his Seikai (stars) series. The anime is supurb, but the novels are even better. I am still awaiting translations of his latest work. If not for PyCon I would have been going out of my mind looking for someone to translate it for me. If you are a Japanese translator, please contact me!!!

Ok, that title is alarmist and a straw man. Just chock it up to my catching up on slashdot articles. I guess its time for a rant of my own.

In the past week I have been told a three times that I am the ‘voice of PyCon’, and others have viewed me as speaking from some position of authority (their exact word). This frightens me, as I really see myself as just another python user and like any other PyCon attendee; I just happen to have volunteered my time, like many, many, others. I still use perl regularly, program primarily in C++ on Windows, and lack minions of any kind (though I am taking applications). So before we get into this mess any further, I would like to make it clear that I am not speaking on the behalf of the ‘PyCon’ (as if it had somehow become a thing incarnate), the other organizers, or the PSF. I am speaking for myself as a sponsor, a volunteer, and most importantly as an attendee. These opinions are my own.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well the Python lab seemed to go ell last night, and I had a lot of fun doing it again, even if the turnout was… well not what I had hoped. I think the people who did attend enjoyed it enough. Most people have come back to talk to me about it today. One person asked if I would be doing it again tonight, but alas, not.

I saw some of the most fantastic talks today. I could talk about those, but that is not what I will do.

Read the rest of this entry »

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…)

Read the rest of this entry »

Well the Tutorial day is over and I am still alive, which I guess is a good sign. I woke up a bit latter than expected but made it down to the atrium for 7am to set up the on-site registration. Karl found an ancient beat-up laptop with no screws (literally!) which we hooked up a usb keyboard and mouse (because the keyboard and trackpad were not in the best of shape), and plugged into the wall as the wireless was still ‘flaky’ in the atrium. Oddly enough this plucky little beat up silver PII running unbuntu was working faster and doing heavy javascript live search on 1500 entries faster than my P4 800 laptop running XP! Things went smoothly and I handled about 10 people in long order. Long order in that most people who needed problems resolved were not of the easy kind, which was the story of reg in general this year. Many, many, many people wanted to change tutorials, or add tutorials. Everyone wanted to get into the most popular ones which were already over booked by 2-6 people (no suprize). There were some people whom I could accomidate and over the day I was able to fill up the PyGame tutorial and the other two that had open slots. Due to a no-show and a mutual swap I was able to get two people on the waiting list into tutorials they wanted as well. Originally I was going to flat out reject any tutorial changing, but that isn’t very ‘Python’…. Every break I had between tutorials, I would head back to the reg desk, and invariably there would be people waiting for me or looking for me to deal with reg issues. Mary got cross with me on a number of occasions for staying well past the end of the break, and missing parts of my tutorials. She also made sure I got some food in me, pretty much by force.

So I was a bit late to the OLPC tutorial, and by the time I got there, wireless down stairs was gone. It was PyCon2006 all over again. Wwhen I did a scan of the network I saw 12! adhock machines broadcasting the pycon SSID. They basicly took out the real access points. Some access points stopped broadcasting their SSID’s and people typed in the SSID on the sheets taped to the walls. the only problem is that windows will broadcast if they cant connect to an access point with that SSID. At one point the OLPC machines were blamed, but that seems like a cheap scape goat given some of the other information. in the end, wireless came back around 6pm…

The tutorials were a lot of fun. The scientific computing tutorial was good but it covered things at too high a level for my liking. I am regretting not going to the numpy tutorial after all. I have a feeling the level I was looking for was a bit more hands on than could be done for 50 people. I will try to catch up with the enthought guys later and dive into parallel differential equations and linear regression in the solver (there was one other thing that I was supposed to go over for work but now I forget what it was >.<). The testing tutorial was a blast, and it it always nice to see people talk about testing the same way we do in the MREC group. My focus was split in that tutorial as some of the topics made me thing of a javascript problem I was having with the schedule app. The end result is we now have reddit support directly in the app, and a reddit group ‘pycon2008‘. One problem with the app is the Dojo Toolkit. We are using an ancient version that has problems with subscripts in the tooltip iframes which do injection. The end result is I used selenium to grab the iframe that was being generated and stuck that in instead! Talk about direct application! (Someone in the PyCon IRC channel pointed me to the subgroup thing… thanks!)

I have some tabblo’s in the works from the pictures I took. They are uploaded to the site, but tabblo over the hotel wireless is less than functional. So instead I will just mention one very interesting piece of swag we received for the tote bags. I should mention that the tote bags are perfect for slinging your laptop in. Its easier than carrying around your laptop bag and swag and program guide, etc. Well we got 2000 little boxes that weighed a TON:

Lets take a look at the warning label for the item in these little boxes:

Well it has been a very long day, so lets begin.

I woke up at 4:30am (a time I am more know for going to bed at), and got ready to be picked up by the airport limo. Because I planned for every eventuality, there turned out to be no need for such planning. There was no traffic. I got my bags checked immediately, and proceeded to the book store where I picked up Terry Pratchets latest book ‘Making Money’.  I have a trdition of reading Prattchet every time I fly. I will continue this tradition even after he stops witting, which may have unfortunately already be the case. But I digress. The flight was a short hop and I managed to sleep for about an hour of it (thank you DJ Tiesto - In Search of Sunrise 7). Landed, got my bag, and hopped on the free shuttle. Got to the hotel, and at 10:20am I was standing in my hotel room!

Then I made the mistake of trying to get the wireless working. Two calls to customer support, a wireless bridge, and secondary wireless card later, I was successfully connected to the wireless app, and crashing their servers (I have a habit of doing that).  And I am paying $13 a day for this privilege (more on this later). I am up and running, so I start dealing with the PyCon registrations. Nothing spectacular. There are some more vendor and press passes to be made up that didn’t make the press run, but no big deal over all. I connect up with David Goodger, Steve Holden, and Peter Kropf in the atrium and have a decent enough late lunch. To me its 3pm and I am starved.

Things seem to be going way too smoothly. The base network is in place, the power drops are in, and the pallets of printed materials are on the dock. I figure I will have time to get a hair cut after all. I have about 4 hours before I need to be back, so I promptly go up to my room and fall asleep for those 4 hours. Then some more reg work (up to 1005 pre-paid in full registrants!), and a peek at the schedule app. 680 people using the application!!! DAMN! Brett Cannons talk is at the top of the attendance list. By the app numbers we expect over 350 people to attend that talk. That is more attendance than all of Python 2004. That wakes me up enough to head down for what I expect to be an all night bag stuffing event. An event I have been greatly looking forward to.

It’s done. The bags (all 1000+) were stuffed in less than an hour. this is insane. Well it turns out that NONE of the sponsor materials are arriving at the hotel until tomorrow after noon. Yikes. So what as stuffed? 5 items. A far cry from the 21 we had last year, and the 8 shirts. Well we are not stuffing shirts this year. The solution is that we will try to have a separate packet to go with the shirts and hand those out Thursday evening and Friday. We might end up re-stuffing or something. Not really sure what the end decision is, and it will greatly depend on the amount of materials we have from the sponsors.

Things are a blur after that. People decided to merge the tutorial and non-tutorial badges into one poorly alphabetized pile. They did not know that the badges were broken into two sets on purpose, not that they were pre-sorted in a special way (due to being printed in sheets). Steve took this in stride and with some help we re-re sorted everything in short order.  The network is not 100% functional yet, but that will be fixed at 5:30 when the network guys get in and complete the job. We have a great group of people running the networking and Jaffo seems to like their work; thus I am quite impressed and have 0 concerns. The hotel room wireless is a different issue, and they are playing some dirty pool, which I will talk about another time.

There were some other small issues of little note. Meeting up with people I haven’t seen in a year or only know online. It will be good to see James Tauber again tomorrow, and I am looking forward to the tutorials. One issue is the registration desk which I will be running the on-site portion of at lest during the crunch.  We still don’t have a printer/computer pair which work together properly (my laptop does not like the generated PDF’s for some unknown reason), and there are ~40 unpaid registrations which we will have to deal with. The job of getting ~440 people through registration before 9am! That is going to be fun. I still have not seen Jeff or Mary to talk logistics, so we will see what happens 4 hours from now.

With that I am off for another 4 hour nap before registration setup starts!!!

And visa, versa.

I had a wonderful talk with Michael Trier and Brian Rosner who do the ‘This Week in Django‘ podcast. Lots of useful information, check it out. (And you get to hear my voice….)

UPDATE: Here is the image I mentioned in the podcast about [name withheld] watching a presentation Guido gave at google, on google video, at PyCon 2007, while Guido was giving a talk. Thanks again to Sean of Tummy.com for doing the networking last year, and making so that people could do things like this and not have it effect the network!