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:
