Recent blog entries for amk

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.

deekayen: a popular Web site carries the seeds of its own destruction. Everyone wants to be Yahoo or EBay, but the problem is that bandwidth and hardware make that really expensive. I don't think the solution is to find ways of sustaining a few high-traffic centralized sites, because it doesn't seem to be currently possible to make this work. Instead we should have very many low-traffic sites. I just wrote a conceit about this, arguing that personal weblogs are more sustainable and, as a bonus, more interesting.

I just posted my account of Necronomicon 2001 to my Web site; H.P. Lovecraft fans will be interested. If you're a Lovecraft fan, you so want to go to this convention. Trust me. Put it on your schedule for 2003. (Less interesting day-to-day things are in my regular diary, of course.)

I've written a guide to helping develop Python, which argues that Python is a good project to apprentice on and then discusses how its development is organized. Comments on the document would be greatly appreciated. Does it give you a reasonable picture of how the process works? Are there any other topics that need to be covered?

dmerrill, regarding your job hunt: would you be interested in working with us at the MEMS Exchange? Please get in touch with me, and we can discuss this further via e-mail or phone.

(I couldn't find an e-mail address for you on your Web page, so I'm resorting to this rather public method.)

At work, finished setting up the new Cornell computer (I think) and started figuring out how to set things up so everyone can run a ZEO server on their development machines, instead of directly using FileStorage. As an amusement, I reformatted my /data partition to use Reiserfs instead of ext2, since I'd like to get some experience with it. My /data partition holds various large source trees that are mostly external, and that I just CVS update, compile, and perhaps install: Mozilla, KDE, Linux, and the Python 2.0 CVS tree. As an experiment, I started up a KDE compilation with "make -j 2" and then turned the computer off, since Reiserfs is supposed to handle such crashes better than ext2 does. The results weren't encouraging; the machine rebooted OK, and the kernel logged a "Replaying 5 transactions" message when the partition was mounted, but then some files, such as the "configure" script, "config.cache", and "Makefile" were replaced with binary junk, perhaps from one of the object files being produced at the time of the crash. Maybe there's something I don't understand about setting up Reiserfs, perhaps some startup script or fsck invocation needed to reconcile matters.

splork: The un-SWIGged BerkeleyDB module is here. I'm still not very confident in it because I don't have a comprehensive test suite for it. Jim Fulton also pointed out a few missing API functions that need to be added, so I hope to hack on the module again before too long.

My previous Advogato diary entry was on August 31; it's much easier for me to maintain my personal diary pages, since I can let an entry slip for a few days and still get the date right, so readers interested in my diary should follow those pages.