The ssize_t fix for 64-bit machines will let me read the entire human genome (3 gb) into memory in one string!

The AST checkin for the Python branch looks very interesting. There was some discussion about what kind of Python interface to offer in the AST BoF which was mostly (AFAIK) off-topic, but very interesting. Naively I suggested providing a C-only interface to it in advance of the Python interface, to which I think the response was that duh, the argument really was about what the publicly supported interface should be, because once they had such a C interface the Python interface would probably be obvious.

Thanks, bazcamp

Whichever pythonista brought along their wifi hub and opened up 'bazcamp' near my hotel room -- thanks! I owe you a beer...

Lightning Talk Coolness

Apologies for things I missed; I know that I forgot to write some stuff down.

Ben Collins-Sussman-Google gave a great talk on replacing himself with an IRC bot. (Ironically, google fails to find valid URLs for his stuff...)

py.execnet is an evil way to control remote machines to which you have SSH access. (Holger Krakenmaster is the name I remember for the author ;))

Two guys from Columbia presented Tasty, "a full featured, efficient tagging engine accessible entirely through a REST interface."

The spec module, presented by David Binger, looks pretty cool. Unfortunately google has failed me... links?

Lightning Talk feedback

Some people type too fast.

I'll post more about the lightning talk stuff when I get a chance to do a proper screencast.

Quotable Bram

From Bram Cohen's PyCon '06 keynote on Sunday:

"The first rule of networking is ""don't reimplement TCP, badly"" ." (my paraphrase)

"Python faithfully reproduces all of the Posix API's crapitude."

"I spend very little time haggling with the language." (on Python)

"Advanced continuation usage breaks my brain. So does try/finally, actually."

"rsync is the morning-after pill of file transfer protocols."

"The funny thing about introductory rates is that you can keep them up for a while." (Yes, he's speaking about credit cards...)

"So, you see, credit companies count it against you if you apply for lots of credit. So what you do is you stack up all of the credit offers that come in, and you send them all out on the same day. Then they don't see the other credit applications." (my paraphrase)

"The only platform Avalanche runs on is PowerPoint." (Steve Holden, discussing Bram's opinions on Avalanche.)

"Programmers in San Francisco don't really take vacations. They just wait for their current employer to implode, and then take some time off before finding a new job."

"If you try to bring a bunch of lead-filled balls on a plane in America, you often end up juggling for the security people. 'Yes, these hand grenades are for juggling!'" (my paraphrase)

--titus