The Mouse Vs. The Python

The last plenary session for PyCon 2010 was on Sunday. In it, Van Lindberg told us that if we included all the vendors, our conference had hit over 1100 people. What that meant is that for PyCon 2011, they would probably have to put an attendance cap of 1500 so that we wouldn’t run out of room at the current venue. Is this good? I don’t really know. Sometimes it felt like it was already too big. Time will tell. (more…)

The last morning Lightning talks were on Sunday. I wasn’t able to stay for the Lightning talks that were given in the afternoon. Here’s a quick run-down (note that I wasn’t able to get the presenter’s name on a lot of these because they would show their first slide for just a few scant seconds):

• Please Pirate – This one was given over half an hour BEFORE lightning talks were scheduled. I don’t know why. His talk’s website is www.pleasepirate.com. His premise was that people should encourage others to pirate their intellectual property. It was pretty confusing, actually. He doesn’t think Creative Commons goes far enough either.

• You can write stored procedures in postgres – This was like a 60 second advertisement.

• PyAr – Natalia from the Argentina Python Users group spoke on how their group started and its mission / vision. It has 650+ members with a mailing list of 11000+ messages per month. She also talked about what they do as a group, such as PyCamps and sprints (cocos2d, lalita, CDPedia)

• Python Spring Cleanup – go home, figure out how to contribute to python, demo your stuff at a Python Users Group, get others to do it too

• You got your Cython in my NumPy – by D. Huggins – Went through a bunch of iterations of k-means code to show how Cython could make Python code much faster. He messed up at the end, so we never got to see how fast it really was.

• PiCloud – inspiration was facebook photo-tagging assistant but it turned into some kind of cloud-computing program. I didn’t really follow this very well, but they seem to have created a “cloud” module/package that allows you to utilize Amazon’s resources (EC2?) to do calculations.

• Mox – Mobile web in Django, presented by Tim Fernando from Oxford, UK – Molly is a soon-to-be open source project that focuses on providing web content to mobile devices. Example (I think) is m.ox.ac.uk. It also does maps and it’s RESTful

• CCP Games guy – custom stackless or socket api (accent is hard to understand), used cherrypy’s thread test to compare against his program to show that his version was super fast. I couldn’t read the screen, so I don’t know if he proved anything or not.