The PyCon US Blog

The PyCon schedule for 2006 was just posted. Three Googlers are giving talks this year. Guido is giving a keynote speech on Saturday. Brian Fitzpatrick is talking about cvs2svn . Jeremy Hylton (that's me) is talking about the C Python bytecode compiler. The discount registration rate is available for two more weeks: register for PyCon .

Five Googlers all in a row: Jeremy Hylton, Greg Stein, Alex Martelli (who started at Google the following Monday!), Chris DiBona, and Will Robinson. 

Daniel Chudnov 

Christian Theune reports on his sprint work on blob support in ZODB. 

Holger Krekel gave a lightning talk on rlcompleter2. The rule for its use is just keeping hitting tab. I asked if he hit tab often enough if it would bring up the source code. He hadn't planned to demo that, but he did it on the file. Very cool. 

Peter Kropf gave a lightning talk on his 7,000-mile motorcycle trip across North America . He packed a custom computer and video camera and programmed it with Python.

Tim Peters 

Greg Stein 

Jim Hugunin. 

Steve Holden. This was Steve's last year as PyCon chair after getting the whole thing started three years ago. 

Martin von Loewis, Armin Rigo, and Perry Greenfield 

Ian Bicking sips coffee. I finally got a chance to talk to Ian on the metro as we both headed home. 

Richard Jones (Roundup and PyPI), Barry Warsaw (Mailman), and Andrew Kuchling (Quixote). They are the members of the newly formed PSF infrastructure committee, which will manage python.org. 

After yesterday's great lightning talks, I was looking forward to today's talks as well. They didn't disappoint. Ka-Ping talked about creating antigravity in his dorm room . Awesome. Some really cool Python and hardware hacks from Peter Kropf as he went on a two-month motorcycle road trip across North America. Wai Yip Tung's MindRetrieve does cool personal web history search using PyLucene . Looked kind of like Google Desktop's search of your web history, except that it's cross-platform and focuses just on web history search. Someone whose name I didn't catch (sorry!) showed us the Canary Database, which does neat work for libraries and also uses PyLucene. Made me pretty sorry that I missed the PyLucene talk earlier today. And plenty more...

A group of us went to dinner at Logan Tavern last night. Guido van Rossum, David Ascher, Jeremy Hylton, Will Robinson, Chris DiBona, Barry Warsaw, Matt Blecker, and myself. We sat at a big round table which normally helps for discussion in a group, but the noise level was pretty high. The conversation was quite interesting. It started with a query about whether a well-known Python app should be hosted by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) or the Python Software Foundation (PSF). On one hand, the ASF is better structured and ready to accept new hunks of software. It has guidelines, procedures, and all the various "stuff" to process incoming software and to get the associated development group integrated with the rest of the ASF. It also provides version control and distribution points and all the other bits for running a project. The PSF doesn't have any of this. It only manages Python, and it does that on SourceForge rather than a PSF infrastructure. So what to do wi...

Although I'm admittedly biased, I really enjoyed Greg's talk this morning on "Python at Google." He covered the wide spectrum of Python use at Google and left plenty of time for questions at the end. Some of Greg's talk (and many of the questions) focused on Google's use of SWIG to Pythonize our C++ libraries in a fairly hands-free way. As Greg aptly put it, "SWIG is pretty underrated." Questions from the audience focused on SWIG performance and robustness, especially when confronted with heavily templatized C++. People also mentioned alternatives like Boost.Python and PyCXX . One audience member who had used all three systems commented that Boost had been great for supporting templates, but that its generated .so files were 10x bigger than equivalent ones from SWIG. Still, I'd like to learn more about these systems. Greg's actually standing in a small knot of people about 20 feet in front of me, still engaged in some heated, SWIG-related d...

Neal Norwitz, Raymond Hettinger, and Fred Drake. Raymond was one of the people I got to meet for the first time at PyCon -- a real treat. 

SchoolTool sprinters, including the Elkners and Mike McLay 

Bruce Eckel, Allen Short, and Andy Wright.

Final day of PyCon sprints. This room held sprints on Twisted, SchoolTool, Zope, and ZODB.