PyCon 2006 will be held in Dallas, TX at the end of February (Feb. 24-26). See http://us.pycon.org for more information.

We've announced the conference program, as well as a day of tutorials.

Keynote speakers include Guido van Rossum on the state of Python development, Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi on Plone, and an interview with Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent. You can even suggest questions for Mr. Cohen!

Early-bird registration ends this Sunday, after which the cost increases by $65, so register as soon as you can.

The conference is followed by four days of development sprints on packages such as Zope, Django, Docutils, PyPy, and CPython. Sprints are free, and you can book a hotel room at the conference rate even if you're only attending the sprints.

dalke: DDJ ran a very funny review of Yourdon's "Time Bomb 2000". I agree with you about Yourdon; the few useful observations in his books can be found in more readable sources such as the XP books, and there's lots of uninteresting filler material. (In Rise/Resurrection, he draws an object/model diagram of the hiring process for programmers!)

mwh: if we were using BitKeeper, where people exchange patchsets, that wouldn't be too difficult; you'd have a mail alias that automatically applies patches from mwh and gvr, but holds patches from unknown people. With CVS or Subversion, though, I think all we could do is apply changes and make it easy to back them out if they get rejected.

Today the list of PyCon abstracts was posted, to go with the previously posted schedule.

Early-bird registration ends this Friday, after which the cost increases by $50, so if you're interested in Python, take a look at the abstracts and schedule, and register as soon as you can.

For interested readers: the PyCon conference has now posted a draft of the schedule for March 26-28. (No abstracts, though.) Paul Graham is giving the introductory keynote; there's a strong slate of numeric talks (as usual); I'll have another chance to try to come to grips with Twisted; and there's a scattering of promising-looking unclassifiable talks such as Prevayler, Satine, and Smoke.

PyCon is also taking a radical approach that's new for the Python conferences. Instead of scheduling every single minute, leaving only small breaks for coffee and lunch, there's a lot of empty space on the schedule. The intention is to let attendees self-organize, finding empty rooms and time slots for impromptu discussions or presentations. Someone named Bob Payne has proposed using OpenSpace methods to plan the free space, resulting in a conference that's more closely adjusted to the needs of the participants. It's a provocative new approach that I suspect will be an immense success if it works at all.

Oh, and did I mention it'll be much cheaper? ($150 if you register before Feb. 28, instead of the $1100 for previous conferences.) And that it'll be in downtown DC and not off in the suburban wastelands?

Cardinal/daniels: I don't have a problem with swearing in a mostly-private forum such as a changelog or check-in message. Having spent days debugging a problem that turned out to be someone else's fault, I certainly know the urge to vent one's spleen. However, I do have a problem with the message "The fuck-it-all release": it contains no useful information explaining why it's the "fuck-it-all" release? Looking at the changelog, it's not clear which is the problematic set of changes: changing the init sequence, dropping the non-blocking I/O, or changing the package priority.

Diaristic stuff: I'm finally almost done with the seemingly endless remote microscope work, meaning I can move onto something else, such as trying to build Web services for the Matisse project. I'm wavering between just using XML-RPC and attempting a REST-based design; maybe Quixote can be made a convenient framework for implementing REST-based systems.