Day 1 :
Started off by going to the Zope keynote talk. I have never been a big Zope fan, but I had not had a chance to look at Zope 3, so any cool things I could discover would be worthwhile. The immediate session after that was by Steve Alexander of Ubuntu, who looks after the Launchpad project.
The next talk I attended was the XML Information Extraction talk by Brian Quinlan, nothing amazing here either stuff I already knew. A gentle intro to SAX and basic XML parsing concepts all the way to expat. Well presented talk though.
The next talk had me high confused, it was titled ‘A Virtual Filesystem For Python’, however what was about was unified access to content for Zope. So every bit of content has a specific URL type and the content handler is just aware of how to get at the data. Again nothing amazing, but something that is hard to do well. This took us up right to lunch, which we had at the university canteen. After that we got a bit of time to mingle with other people.
The afternoon sessions seemed more interesting for me and I was right. The first afternoon talk I went to was about managing distributed teams, which was given by Steve Alexander. Another interesting talk, covered much of the things we did at APR.
A representative from the Chandler project gave a presentation on the state of Chandler, as well going over some of the new features being developed. I have to say I was quite disappointed with the 0.5 release since it was not really usable. With more that 2 years worth of development work you would expect something which was atleas functionally complete.Paul Everitt then presented a talk on Open Source businesses, basically talking about why and how., a bunch off one word slides, again a great talk.
Kevin, Remi, and Richard’s talk was after the afternoon break. The talk went very well, the room was fairly full. The presentation of the talk was first rate, and I think there was genuine interest in the subject matter. However the audience were already Python heads. I think the same presentation on a Python for Business Track at a more general conference would go down even better. A UNIX con or a Web Technologies type thing.
Next up was the talk by the lead guy from Nokia working on the Python for Series 60. Again this was relevant to me since I had already been playing with Python on my 6680. Some interesting things coming up in the 2.0 release of the SDK were talked about. There were a few people who like me had been playing with the SDK, most of the comments made were regarding the memory problems on the phones. Try to do anything too complicated and the memory on the phone is exhausted. This problem is not limited to Python applications, the phone’s builtin applications also do this.
After a short break we made our way to the main building for the Keynote, given by Guide Von Rossum – Mr Python himself. He spent some time talking about Python in general, as well as going over some of the PEP which have been accepted for 2.4.2 release. After the keynote we all made our way to the Student Union bar on the campus for drinks.
Day 2 :
Started with another talk about Python on Nokia Series 60 phones, this time given by a couple of academics from Helsinki Uni working on the PDIS oroject – which is aiming to develop a standard for personal information. I had been aware of this project because it get mentioned on the Series 60 Wiki quite often. Michael Sparks from the BBC spoke about the Kamaelia project which aims to produce a multicast networking library for Python. This got me quite interested because I can see an application for this technology to be used in a multi-site sync protocol. After the talk I spent some time talking with Michael.
The next talk was probably the highlight of the day given by Tommy Virtanen of the Twisted project. He covered the current drive of the Twisted project to break itself up into smaller modules, as well as adding some new modules. He spent some time talking about Nuovo which is twisted’s answer to a Python templating engine. As well as giving a general update on the twisted world. One thing that has to be said about Tommy is that is a funny guy. This took us up to lunch time.
After lunch I just went to one talk, which was about PyPy – the Python hosted Python compiler. At that point I decided to take a break from the con and went back to the hotel to drop of my bag before returning for the evening keynote and dinner.
The keynote was geiven by Steve Pembroke head of the W3C, excellent delivery and some interesting things about Guido were also talked about. He also demonstrated an XFORMS implementation of a map browser, which was quite impressive. After the talk we made our way back to the hotel to drop of laptops, then move on to the venue for the dinner. The dinner was great we made it on to a table full of other people from the UK, a bunch of Zope consultants so we were in for an interesting evening.
Day 3 :
Started the 3rd and final day by going to Michael Sahlib’s talk about using Xapian to search across the US Patent database. He detailed what XapWrap is, and how Divmod use it to index user’s e-mails in their web mail system. My interest in this project was because of Xapian ofcourse since APR owns the commercial and closed codebase, which I worked on. I had thought Xapian had died however it seems to have sprung back to life. In fact I’m contemplating using it myself for indexing e-mail in our archive system.
Guido did a talk on his new company Elemental Security which is developing a network security and compliance product. Guido has actually implemented a language specifically for the system called Fuel. Which is very Python like. What is interesting is that Elemental Security is getting cash from the DoD to get Python ports on to HPUX and AIX. After that talk Michael Salib gave another talk this time on using Twisted to do P2P networks or more correctly Q2Q networks as he pointed out. One question that was on many people’s mind was to ask Michael about StarKiller – the Python compiler Michael was working on whilst he was at MIT. He said he would get back on to completing it. The reason for the delay was because of him going to work at DivMod, and having his hands full of neat projects. That completed the morning session, leaving a big free block around lunch before the lightening talks.
The lightening talks were always going to be the highlight of the day. Some of the talks were quite quirky. I quite liked Michael Spark’s network visualisation tool was quite cool. He has used PyGame to visualise networks coded in Python using Kamaelia. Remi and Rich thought it was a good idea to plug Python Hosting, must ask them how that worked out. At about 4pm we decided it was time to wave goodbye to the con. I had a train to catch a 6.42 and the guys hada flight at 9pm. So we went back to the hotel, dropped off our laptops and headed to the theme park to check out some rides.
