CodeMash

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CodeMash


Bruce Eckel will be in charge of Open Space this time, which means it should be something else. Come with ideas for what you want to do with Open Space.

I promise not to make a habit of posting about xkcd

OK, I lied. But how could I have known this was coming?

TurboGears and Oracle on OTN

Once, using TurboGears with Oracle was the kind of kooky idea you could only read about in the blog posts of obscure crackpots.

No more! The current top story at Oracle Technology Network is Daniel Rubio's article on using TurboGears with Oracle. Read, use, and enjoy! It's also got a permanent home at the OTN Scripting Language Technology Center.

Thanks to Oracle for all the great press lately, and to Daniel and Przemek for writing it!

PyCon: 141 submissions!

We weren't very good about getting word out for the PyCon call for proposals, and as the deadline approached, there weren't a lot of submissions in the queue. We worried about whether we'd messed up.

Oh, we of little faith! The last couple days before the deadline, the floodgates opened. We got 141 talks submitted! (And about 40 tutorials!)

And they're great submissions! If I had my way, I'd attend about 3/4 of them personally. Unfortunately, for a 3-day conference, we'll be lucky if we can fit half of them into the schedule. Well, I did suggest running PyCon on a 24-hour basis, but for some reason that wasn't accepted.

So now we've got to somehow narrow down the field to what we can fit in the con, and that's a painful process. Quite a few excellent talks won't go on the schedule simply because there's no room.

The good news is that we've got lots of space set aside for multiple tracks of Open Space sessions, which don't require any approval. So, in essence, we may get two PyCons running side-by-side - a traditional one with scheduled talks, and an unconference-like bunch of Open Space activity.

Too much good stuff... I'm definitely going to have to spawn some processes to see all I want to see.

New Python articles at OTN

There's a new series of articles on Oracle & Python over at the OTN Scripting Language Technology Center. Przemyslaw Piotrowski presents a detailed investigation of cx_Oracle, covering very nicely some aspects I'd glossed over in all my introductory articles. Great job, Przemek!

Microformat slides

Anybody who saw my Microformats talk, whether at the Dayton Web Standards Meetup or the DMA Linux SIG, can see my slides here or get a tarball here.

If you weren't at my talk, and are looking for a microformats presentation that will stand on its own, you're better off looking through the talk archives at the Microformats wiki. My talk isn't very self-explanatory without me standing there to talk about it.

CodeMash 2008

CodeMash is a great, multi-language agile programming conference here in Ohio. I had a great time last year, and next year looks even better.

CodeMash v2.0.0.8

Jan. 9 - 11, 2008

Kalahari Waterpark Resort

7000 Kalahari Drive

Sandusky, OH 44870USA

877-525-2427

The speaker committee has announced two sets of accepted abstracts for CodeMash 2008, with more still to come. Already, there's a lot for a Python fan to be excited about!

=============
Bruce Eckel: "Why I Love Python"
=============
Bruce Eckel has given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences. He provides public and private seminars & design consulting in OO Design, Python, Java and C++.

============
Leah Culver: "Getting Started with Django"
============
Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to each other. Leah is the lead developer for the site, which has become one of the largest sites using the Django framework. Leah loves the challenge of developing a web application from scratch and writes about her experiences as a software developer at leahculver.com.

============
Kevin Dangoor: "Overview of the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit"
============
Kevin is the product manager at SitePen and the founder of the TurboGears open source web application framework. He has held positions in software development, management and sales engineering. He has previously spoken at CodeMash, PyCon, EuroPython and GLSEC and is the co-author of the book "Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears".

Kevin's talk isn't directly about Python, but I expect he'll cover how to tie Dojo into Turbogears. And if he doesn't offer it freely, I'm going to grill him on it!

Finally, my talk was accepted, too! It's basically a repeat of my Ohio LinuxFest "Introduction to Python" talk that used vPython to simulate a solar system, but since the audience this time will be a group of high-powered programmers, I should be able to amp it up and cover more ground. I'll try to dovetail with the more advanced talks at CodeMash so that (for instance) you'll be able to understand Leah's Django talk even if you arrived at CodeMash without knowing any Python.

There are also talks on Domain-Specific Languages, Silverlight (which, via IronPython, looks like a great way to Python-power webpages on the browser side)... and the speaker committee isn't even finished selecting talks yet.

Can. Not. Wait! Between this and PyCon in Chicago, it's truly an Ohio Pythonista's dream come true.

Python at MIT

There was a bit of buzz about a year ago when MIT announced plans to experiment with an alternative version of their electrical engineering/computer science (Course 6) curriculum - one that would start students with a Python-based course instead of the famous Scheme-based 6.001. It was exciting news, but I hadn't heard anything about it since then.

Today, a look through the department's webpage shows that the experiment has come quickly to fruition, and the new curriculum is the standard for this year's freshmen.

6.01, Introduction to EECS I, with Python (and robots! Sounds FUN!)

I'm dying to know more about this! I'm going to hit up school friends for info, but maybe somebody here has more details to supply?

I still meet plenty of neckties who have never heard of any language besides C/Java/.NET (hey, it's the Midwest, and it's the Air Force), don't know why Python matters, and aren't interested in understanding its merits directly - only want to know "who's using it?". "MIT teaches it to all their EE/CS students" is a pretty good one-liner response. I'm not above leveraging MIT's name recognition. I did the time, after all (as a chemical engineer, not EE/CS, but still). Granted, it never won world domination for Scheme, but I bet it is the source of a very large fraction of the fame that Scheme does have.

SQL*Plus alternatives (at InOUG)

I spoke last Thursday at the Indiana Oracle Users Group on "The Command Line Lives: SQL*Plus and Alternatives".

I still need to get the full, S5 format presentation posted somewhere; for now, you can see the raw text of the presentation here.

It's an interesting topic, and one I'd like to get drawn more deeply into. Some nice things have been done in producing open-source command-line alternatives to SQL*Plus, including

• gqlplus
• Senora
• YASQL
• sqlpython

Unfortunately, the only one whose development currently seems to be active is sqlpython, and there's just me and Luca Canali working on that. I've just added functionality to sqlpython to let it fail over to sessions of the other tools (when "set failover true" is issued; doesn't work on Windows). That way, the exciting features of Senora and YASQL can be used from within sqlpython, instead of trying to remember which tool has which feature. It's quirky, though, since a full-fledged independent session of each tool is actually maintained "under the covers".

I'm dreaming of expanding sqlpython to the point where it incorporates all Senora and YASQL's features natively. Tragically, my dreams cannot yet be downloaded from the Cheese Shop.

xkcd

I promise not to make a habit of posting about xkcd.

But only because I'm counting on you to read it daily yourself.



I printed this today and then wandered the office, looking for someone to show it to, gradually coming to the horrifying realization that I don't work with anyone who would get it.

cx_Oracle and Oracle XE on Ubuntu

When I first posted about using Oracle XE on Ubuntu, I thought that getting cx_Oracle working with XE was pretty easy. I was wrong! Last night, I installed on a "clean" machine, and it was a lot harder; perhaps last time, I benefited from packages I'd already installed, meeting secret prereqs without knowing it.

[EDIT: As of June 2008, a streamlined set of instructions is here.]

Fortunately, I did work out the necessary steps.

1. sudo apt-get install libc6-dev
   
   If you don't, you'll get

   In file included from /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.1.2/include/syslimits.h:7,
   from /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.1.2/include/limits.h:11,
   from /usr/include/python2.5/Python.h:18,
   from cx_Oracle.c:6:
   /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.1.2/include/limits.h:122:61: error: limits.h: No such file or directory
   In file included from cx_Oracle.c:6:
   /usr/include/python2.5/Python.h:32:19: error: stdio.h: No such file or directory

   ... when you try to install cx_Oracle.
   
2. 
   export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib
export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH
   
   If you don't, you'll get

   error: cannot locate an Oracle software installation

   or

   
   ImportError:libclntsh.so.10.1:cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

3. Download the source code tarball, unzip and unpack, cd into it, and
   sudo python setup.py install
   You will get

   error in cx_Oracle setup command: Oracle home does not refer to an 8i, 9i, 10g or 11g installation

   because setup.py doesn't account for XE. You need to hack it.
   
   Download the patch useXE.diff and run
   patch setup.py useXE.diff
   
   Now run
   sudo python setup.py install
   again.
   
   I'm going to submit a patch to the cx_Oracle folks, so hopefully it will be fixed for the next release.
   
   [EDIT: Anthony Tuininga, cx_Oracle's developer, has taken my patch, improved it, and incorporated it into the cx_Oracle trunk; as of the next cx_Oracle release beyond 4.3.3, this is fixed. This sort of thing is what makes open source fun!
   
   To grab the patched version from the cx_Oracle development trunk right now, install Subversion on your machine, then
   svn co https://cx-oracle.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cx-oracle/trunk cx-oracle
   ]
   
   
4. If you're accessing Oracle XE on your own machine, start your listener. On my machine, at least, the XE installation didn't do that.
   sudo su - oracle
export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib
export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH
lsnrctl startexit
   
   You may want to edit your .bashrc to do this; otherwise, you'll need to for every session in which you access Oracle.
   
   If you're using Oracle XE as a client to access Oracle (XE or otherwise) on another machine, skip this step, but you'll need to make sure the SID you're looking for is in $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/tnsnames.ora.
   
   
5. At last, you can start using cx_Oracle! See the DB-API2 Cheat Sheet for some quick syntax reminders.

EDIT: comment from teambob

I mistakenly deleted the following comment:

I installed via easy_install, but there was a bit of a trick.

After setting the environment variables I installed using the following command: sudo -E easy_install cx_oracle

The "-E" option to sudo causes all your environment variables to be passed to easy_install

Ohio LinuxFest slides & code

Thanks to everyone for your attendance and feedback at my OLF talk! I had a great time!

A tarball with everything you need to duplicate my presentation is here.

It's pretty complex, so it includes a README file. (I used s5 slides generated by rst2s5, a Socrates file from Bruce, and eight directories of code files. Don't worry, though, it's very lean - just 60K.)

I'm speaking on Python at OLF

What's this? You haven't registered for LinuxFest yet?

But I'm (absurdly honored to be) one of the speakers!

Introduction to Python and/or Solar System Demolition
An introduction to Python programming. Demonstrates the language by developing a graphical solar system gravitation simulation in real-time.
September 29th, 2007, 3:50 - 4:40 PM

Greater Columbus Convention Center

400 North High Street

Columbus, OH 43215 USA

And I'm bringing my own projector this time, just in case... (plus I've got nVidia drivers installed, which should help...)

Ohio LinuxFest: register now!

Drop everything and register for




It's free - but the registration deadline is Sep. 14 - this Friday! Move, move, move!

Ohio LinuxFest
September 29th, 2007

Greater Columbus Convention Center

400 North High Street

Columbus, OH 43215 USA

Microformats talk

Have I mentioned that the Dayton Web Standards Meetup is a great group? It's brimming over with good ideas for every sort of web writer. Very highly recommended!

This coming Thursday, I'll be speaking on Microformats! Microformats are a wonderful way to make your information available to automated tools, while mandating nothing about what else you do on your page. They're great fun, they're catching on, and I'm looking forward to it!

5:30, Sep. 6: Microformats talk at Dayton Web Standards Meetup
at Panera Bread on 1203 Brown Street. Dayton OH 45409 USA (937) 223 6700 microformats web meetup See you there!

Okay, I admit, I wrote this post partially to practice writing a microformat. Install Operator into your Firefox. Now, with one click (each), you can grab a vCard for Panera, get a map there, or pop the event inot your calendar program. Oooooh!

Dayton-Oracle is for real

The Dayton-Oracle mailing list I set up a couple years ago is bearing fruit. The Dayton Oracle User Group is real! We live! We had an organizational pre-meeting last night with five great people who were willing to take up the burden of making this happen.

We had a lot of rich discussion about the way we want to approach running the group. In many ways, we're going to break from the traditional format and content of Oracle User Groups and adopt some practices better-known from the open-source world: more interactive, user-driven content; zero-cost bring-your-own-food arrangements instead of catered lunches with meeting fees and sponsored content; evening rather than daylong meetings; etc. I think these are good practices on their own merits. Also, there are already good traditional user groups in Columbus, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis, so if we want a successful niche between them, it makes sense for us to differentiate; we're not likely to be a better OOUG than OOUG, after all. I hope Dayton people who do already attend OOUG or GCOUG will continue to do so, and will enrich themselves yet further with our meetings.

Watch this space for further announcements, including our first meeting time (sometime early October) and a link to our super-awesome website (once it's built).

openSUSE and the bleeding edge

I fear I'm about to sound both boastful and ungrateful... but my boss refreshed my work laptop with this monster I have dubbed "DellZilla". Cool, huh? Definitely - except that you need a pack mule to actually move it. Once upon a time, laptops could actually fit in your lap.

The other problem is that I haven't found a Linux distribution that comes with the right drivers for it. Ubuntu Feisty was hopeless - all incarnations (u-, ku-, and xu-) were flummoxed by the screen and failed to start xwindows, or gave an utterly black empty screen.

Next I tried openSUSE, and was in some ways pleasantly surprised. It copes OK with whatever video voodoo is required for this monster screen. It automatically noticed that I had a Windows Vista partition and included it as a boot option. In fact, it includes "Restart and boot directly into Windows" as a menu option, so you can go get a cola while switching OS's instead of hovering over the keyboard waiting to catch the boot loader. Considerate! And it comes with all the cutting-edge goodies like Beagle. (And freeciv! Eek!)

One significant complaint is that, if you don't have wireless connectivity while you're doing the openSUSE installation, YAST won't even record the URLs of the repositories you'll need for software. When you need to download the good stuff later on, you'll need to hunt around for the URLs (psst, they're here) and add them to your list of sources by hand. For a SuSE newbie, that's a pain.

But I got through that. The real problem is that I've got no support for the mac80211 wireless card. Trying to get a driver installed for that has been an adventure in frustration. There's a driver here, but it appears to my amateurish eye as though YAST installs the Linux kernel-source into locations where the mac80211 makefile absolutely does not expect it, and trying to hack them into agreement is a step too far for me. It's like being back in the Bad Old Pre-Ubuntu days when Linux was something I only wished I could use.

So here I am, typing on a zillion-dollar laptop and tethered to the wall like it's 1994, and trying to figure out my next move. This says Sabayon 3.4 supports mac80211. I hadn't even heard of Sabayon before this week, and I've read good things about it, but I wonder if it's just too fancy. It installs from DVDs; I've never even tried burning one of those. And I can't even get its blasted homepage to come up under Firefox or Konqueror. But whatever; I need wireless. If you don't hear from me for a while, it's because I need to compile my own drivers for the keyboard, or maybe the AC adapter.

birthday list

Pardon my long absence from the blogosphere. One cause has been that my workplace blocked access to Blogger, all Blogger-hosted blogs, all mailing lists anywhere, etc. I'm becoming thoroughly frustrated. The message it seems to send is, "We don't desire the fruit of your work as much as we value our infantilizing mistrust of your professionalism. We pay for the services of skilled adults yet believe that we got delinquent children instead."

But anyway. That's not why I'm posting. I've been fairly nomadic lately, migrating my work from machine to machine and experimenting with various operating systems, and it's made me crave some good organizational software. Since my birthday is coming up, I thought I would ask the Universe to produce it and see what happens.

1. I need help keeping track of the difference between files I've worked on - stuff I want to keep when I move or rebuild - and stuff I can leave behind because I just downloaded it from somewhere and I'll just download it afresh on a new system anyway. Then it'll be easy to back up and transfer my work. This software will note when I modify a file with a text editor, IDE, image editor, OpenOffice, or whatnot, and will flag it as my own personal work - a "keeper". Stuff that comes from downloads, from expanding zipfiles, automated processes and loggers, etc. will all be flagged "ephemeral".

2. I need help reorganizing my folder structure. I'd like something that can scan my drive and notice that my photos are scattered in four different places, short text notes are all over, I've got four copies of the same file in four directories under three names, etc., and propose and facilitate a consolidation plan.

3. A nice tag-based file access system That could actually replace #2 and be a key component of #1.

If you know of this stuff already existing, speak up! If you want to write it, hooray! If you want to wait several years until I have the skill and the time to do it myself, well... keep reading my blog, I guess. If you are saying, "You wouldn't need any of this if you exercised organizational discipline when creating your files", then please note that I am Sticking My Tongue Out At You.

get a job, sha na na na

If you're reading this and you're interested in switching jobs, let me know...

... because I'm constantly being asked these days whether I know people looking for work. It's a good feeling, but it would be a better feeling if I had somebody to refer them to. And I'm sure I'm not the only one getting these inquiries, so if you've felt stuck writing boringCode for a pointy-haired boss, it's a great time to let your friends know.

This applies to Python people as well as Oracle. That's a neat change; when I got involved in Python a few years ago, the assumption was that most Python programmers had day jobs using more boring languages, and could only use Python in their passion-driven midnight coding sprees. Now, employer interest is very high - it seems employer interest has actually grown faster and overtaken the population of Python coders. That's especially noteworthy when you consider how quickly someone can become a Python programmer.

Anyway, good times for Py and Ora geeks. Woo hoo!

Kubuntu

For Feisty, just to learn something new, I thought I'd try Kubuntu (KDE Ubuntu) instead of Ubuntu this time around.

And... and... I think I'm a believer.

For what I've done so far, the extra information KDE provides is very well thought-out, just what I need to know when I need to know it. For instance...

• When I want to remove a USB drive or somesuch, but something is still using it, Ubuntu (like Windows, including Vista) only tells me that something is using it. Kubuntu tells me what is using it.
• Alt-Tabbing through my open windows gives more information than just the icon of each running program - enough so that I can distinguish between my eight different command prompt windows.
• Hovering over an icon pops up the file properties. Nice! I mean, why else would I be hovering over an icon, except that I was fumbling for the right-mouse button so I could find out more?
• Clicking my networking icon provides all the information I need to choose at a single glance, and then one more click connects me. Also, Kubuntu seems to jump to conclusions and do the right thing for networking - when there's only one wireless network around, Kubuntu just connects me without waiting to be asked.

The downsides I've found so far...

• I really liked Ctrl-+ to increase the font size of GNOME windows. That's important when trying to read laptop screens in adverse environments (like outside). I haven't found a KDE equivalent.
• The built-in text editor, Kate, bungles the spaces/tabs in Python files. That's one good reason to install Komodo (free editor or the real thing) immediately.

Real gurus can discuss the relative strengths of KDE and Gnome for hours, of course, and I thank God that I've never been caught in such a debate. I'm just saying that KDE is making a really good first impression on me, and that's after years of Gnome experience.

Extensible CheckBox List

Introducing a brand-new widget for TurboGears: Extensible CheckBox List!

To use it:

1. easy_install xcbl
2. In your controller.py,
   from xcbl.widgets import ExtensibleCheckBoxList
3. In your form's WidgetsList,
   pets = ExtensibleCheckBoxList(options=['cats','dogs','turtles'])
   (exactly the same as you would for an ordinary CheckBox List widget)

The result - a CheckBox List with an "other" field that lets the user hand-enter new options - as many as they want.

Unfortunately, the new items will appear beneath the "Other:" box, not above it, unless you upgrade your MochiKit to 1.4. Details on how to do that and more are here.

Developing it was lots of fun - it really shows how easily a relative amateur can contribute to TurboGears. I hope to write up a "Developing and Contributing TurboGears Widgets for Dummies" document soon, based on the experience.

cleansing table and column names

What kind of joker thought "BASE POC'S" would make a good column name? Sheesh, MS Access. (Not to mention apostrophe abuse. See Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.)

To my surprise, I googled "script rename invalid columns oracle" and got nothing useful. So here's a chance to play with Oracle regular expressions.

You may be thinking, "If they're illegal column names, how can they get in the database in the first place?" With "quotation marks", that's how. In fact, you can

CREATE TABLE "!!!My Rockin' Table!!!"
  ( "*^@(@  @!!!" VARCHAR2(30) 
                  CONSTRAINT " -- d00d --" PRIMARY KEY,
    "miXiNG CASE is TEH KEWList" VARCHAR2(30) ); 

and, not only will all your hideous names be used verbatim, but they will be case-sensitive. If you take advantage of this feature, you should be slapped. I guess the reason Oracle makes this possible in the first place is so that an import can be accepted from a source - like MS Access - regardless of how awful its names are.

Anyway, here's a PL/SQL cure for bad table and column names.
(link to code)

/*
Renames tables and columns to be Oracle-legal.

SET LINESIZE 200 before running to avoid unwanted page breaks.
Run from an account with privileges to
  - access v$reserved words 
  - alter the appropriate tables

Thanks to Eddie Awad for his description of v$reserved words:
http://awads.net/wp/2007/01/10/what-does-reserved-y-really-mean/

Catherine Devlin, catherinedevlin.blogspot.com, 11 May 2007, v0.1
*/
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE cleanse_names IS
  new_obj_name VARCHAR2(30);
  CURSOR tbl_names IS
    SELECT owner,
           table_name
    FROM   all_tables
    WHERE  dropped = 'NO';
  CURSOR col_names IS
    SELECT owner,
           table_name,
           column_name
    FROM   all_tab_columns
    JOIN   all_tables USING (table_name, owner)
    WHERE  dropped = 'NO';

  PROCEDURE do(this IN VARCHAR2) IS
  BEGIN
    DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(this || ';');
    -- Uncomment if you're feeling decisive
    -- EXECUTE IMMEDIATE(this);
  END do;
  FUNCTION legalize(name IN VARCHAR2, replacement_letter IN VARCHAR2)
  RETURN varchar2
  IS
    new_name VARCHAR2(30);
    is_reserved NUMBER(11,0);
  BEGIN    
    -- must begin with a letter
    new_name := REGEXP_REPLACE(name,'^[^[:alpha:]]',replacement_letter);
    -- and contain only letters, numbers, #,_,$
    new_name := REGEXP_REPLACE(new_name,'[^[:alnum:]#_$]','_');
    -- and mixing case is evil
    new_name := UPPER(new_name);
    -- and we must respect Oracle reserved words
    SELECT count(*)
    INTO   is_reserved
    FROM   v$reserved_words
    WHERE  keyword=new_name
    AND    (reserved='Y' OR res_semi='Y');
    IF is_reserved > 0
    THEN
      new_name := SUBSTR(new_name, 1, 29) || '_';
    END IF;
    RETURN new_name;
  END legalize;
BEGIN
    DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('set scan off');
    FOR col IN col_names
    LOOP
      new_obj_name := legalize(col.column_name, 'C');
      IF new_obj_name != col.column_name
      THEN
        do('ALTER TABLE ' || col.owner ||
           '."' || col.table_name ||
           '" RENAME COLUMN "' || col.column_name ||
           '" TO ' || new_obj_name);
      END IF;
    END LOOP;
    FOR tbl IN tbl_names
    LOOP
      new_obj_name := legalize(tbl.table_name, 'T');
      IF new_obj_name != tbl.table_name
      THEN
        do('ALTER TABLE ' || tbl.owner ||
           '."' || tbl.table_name ||
           '" RENAME TO ' || new_obj_name);
      END IF;
    END LOOP;
END cleanse_names;

Larry Wall, God, Lois McMaster Bujold

Part of what got me thinking about my last post is that I'm suffering a little crisis over Larry Wall. I'm really admiring his spirit. For instance, I like his way of expressing his Christianity.

As if that weren't enough, he's into The Lois, as quoted here:

Note how we still periodically hear the phrase "serious literature". This is literature that is supposedly about Real Life. Let me tell you something. The most serious literature I've ever read is by Lois McMaster Bujold. Any of you read her? It's also the funniest literature I've ever read. It's also space opera. "Genre fiction," sneers the Modernist. Meaning it follows certain conventions. So what? Nobody in the world can mix gravity and levity the way Bujold does in her Vorkosigan books. It's oh so definitely about real life. So what if it follows space opera conventions. Sonnets follow certain conventions too, but I don't see them getting sneered at much these days. Certainly they were always called "serious".

How long till Bujold becomes required reading in high school? Far too long, in my opinion. Horrors. We wouldn't want our students actually enjoying what they read. It's not--it's not Real Life.

As if the Lord of the Flies is real life. Feh.

Yes, I'm a Lois fan, too. I once drove hundreds of miles to an SF con purely because she would be there...

So, anyway. Yaaaay, Larry. But there's no getting around this: I prefer Python. Perl is great, Ruby is great - all dynamic languages contribute to each others' success, I think, because the prominence and respect won by each rubs off the others, so we can get our necktie-level blessing. But, when it comes down to what I use, I can't write anything else these days without wishing it were Python.

getting a bit philosophical

Have you had the experience of struggling with a problem for hours, going to ask for help with it, and then realizing the answer to the problem while you're in the middle of asking the question?

Of course you have. It's an amazing phenomenon. It really shows how much the brain depends on language to think clearly. It's one reason I'm such a junkie for user groups and conferences! And it's not good enough to just hear it or read it - you have to speak it or write it to really engage your brain. Similarly, sometimes it seems like you never really understand a subject until you have to teach it to somebody else.

Meanwhile, it's become an axiom of conversational politeness that politics and religion are to be avoided in most contexts. Which means... which means that we're forbidding ourselves to use our most powerful means of stimulating clear thought... for some of the most important ideas we have to think about. Hmm...

Microformats

As I work more on the Geek Event Aggregator and similar projects, I'm getting really fascinated by movements like microformats and POSH - efforts to make web content more semantically meaningful and machine-readable, without trying to radically reinvent the web. Just small tweaks to the HTML we've been writing all along can make a world of difference - indeed, often just using HTML best practices that have been around (and largely ignored) forever. Interesting stuff! I'll probably be blogging about it more in the future.

One related concept is blogchalking, so here goes.

This is my new blogchalk:
United States, Ohio, Dayton, Brookville, English, German, Catherine, Female, 31-35, Python, environment. :)

That's for machines to read. Humans, avert your eyes.

Let's see, I have about three more months before I have to update that age category.

Unicode error with TurboGears and Oracle

Thanks to kap_ravi's comment, I tracked down a surprisingly big and poorly-documented stumbling block for folks using TG with Oracle.

I've updated the original TG+Oracle blog post to reflect it, but the gist of it is that you're likely to get

SQLError: (NotSupportedError) Variable_TypeByValue(): unhandled data
type unicode

errors unless you include

sqlalchemy.convert_unicode = True

in your .cfg files.

Configuring Oracle for proper Unicode use may avoid the need for this; I'm not sure. My dreadfully mononational working environment has prevented me from developing any Unicode experience.

good errors vs. bad errors

One of the things I love most about PostgreSQL is its beautiful error messages. For instance, let's say I've inexplicably forgotten to add my home state to a table of states, thus violating a foreign key constraint when I try to insert a Minnesotan city. Here it is in Oracle:

SQL> insert into city values ('International Falls','MN');
insert into city values ('International Falls','MN')
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-02291: integrity constraint (MYSCHEMA.FK_CITY_STATE) violated - parent key not found

OK, that doesn't suck. In this case, it's pretty easy to figure out the problem, especially since I gave my constraint a meaningful name. However, there are cases where the foreign key is not so obvious - maybe it involves multiple columns - and I'm sometimes sent off to look up details on what FK_CITY_STATE involves. Since DESCRIBE won't work on a constraint, that means either an intricate query joining several V$ tables, or a graphical tool like Toad or SQL Developer.

Now I'll make the same mistake in psql.

mydb=# insert into city values (2,'International Falls','MN');
ERROR: insert or update on table "city" violates foreign key constraint "fk_city_state"
DETAIL: Key (state)=(MN) is not present in table "state".

Now that's clarity! It's one of the things I love about PostgreSQL. After all, the database has all this detail easily accessible to it; why shouldn't it deliver it to me along with the error message? It's even more important when an error like this is thrown from somewhere deep inside some code, where it may not be obvious to me which statement or which row is responsible for it - having the offending value displayed is incredibly convenient. It's considerate programming - no more, no less.

I'll say this for Oracle, though - Oracle's standardized ABC-12345 error codes are really handy for looking them up, for searches on Metalink or Google.

In any case, either of these SQL environments have good error reporting. But what about Oracle Enterprise Manager?


Where am I supposed to go with this? Shall we go search on Metalink for "An error has occurred"? Does someone at Oracle imagine that this message is, in some mysterious way, useful? Maybe there's some logfile somewhere on the server that will tell me more... maybe... somewhere. Maybe. Somewhere.

Seriously, folks. OEM has been around for a long time now. It still throws lots of errors, often for no apparent fault of the DBA (I got this one simply by trying to access the "Administration" tab.) But I would forgive throwing lots of errors, if the errors were clear, and if they included information to facilitate finding out more. This, however, I cannot forgive, and it is all too typical of my experiences with OEM. (Well, a few years back, the errors tended to be screenfuls of Java error-stack vomit; now most of those seem to have been "cleaned up" into these poker-faced non-messages. That's progress? It's like Windows 3.1 all over again.)

So, if you see me rolling my eyes next time an Oracle rep shows a slide telling us how wonderful lovely OEM makes DBAs' jobs so much easier... this is why.

Hello Penguicon

I'm having a fantastic time at Penguicon so far...

except, of course, for being unable to connect my laptop to the projector for my talk. Aaaaaaaaaah!

If you were in my audience, 1) thank you for bearing with me, 2) I hope you managed to get something out of it, and 3) I'm so glad you came here!

The full tarball of talk material is available here. You can use it to look through the plain-text version of the talk (independently available here), or install vpython on your system and run the demos (I recommend running 'python solarSim4.py', then looking at the code), or actually install Bruce on your system so you can run 'socrates.py pyIntro.soc' and see the presentation the way you should have seen it at the con.

Thanks for being a great, involved - not to mention forgiving - audience!

Excel reports from TurboGears

Last week, I had the chance to design, build, and deploy a TurboGears application to outside customers for the first time ever. It was awesome! It was a simple survey form - well, simple in concept, but various questions were dependent in various ways on the answers to other questions, so I did have to get into the JavaScript, praise be to MochiKit.

The application owner wanted to see his survey results in (hmm, can you guess?) MS Excel. "No problem", I said, and then was surprised at how much trouble I had figuring out how to do that straight from TG. AFAIK, TurboGears doesn't have a handy way to output CSV. I could certainly produce a webpage with CSV data, and even use the default method in my controller to serve it with a .CSV extension ("http://myserver/report.csv"), but it still had webpage-type headers and thus Excel still didn't know what to do with it. And no, I wasn't about to tell him to cut-and-paste.

What I eventually hit on was to provide the results as a simple HTML table, then take advantage of the fact that Excel can open a webpage that contains (only) a table rather nicely. Then I gave him a batchfile that simply said

"c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\excel.exe" http://myserver/report

... double-clicking it gets a live view of the data.

If he'd been cooler, the batchfile could just as well have said
"c:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.2\program\scalc.exe" http://myserver/report
- I tried that, too, it works.

Actually, I didn't serve it under http://myserver/report, I served it under https://myserver/reportWithHideousGUIDblahblah4242rtfm22hike. That was my quick-and-dirty way to provide some basic security - the report URL is unguessable, so unless he shares the link, it should be safe. On the other hand, anybody who can sniff his request can extract the magic URL and use it. Can anybody comment on how much of a risk that is? There's no real sensitivity to the data in this case, but it would be nice to know if this the-URL-is-the-password scheme is a worthwhile shortcut or is terribly dumb.

Presenting at Penguicon

Well, two weeks from Friday, I'll be presenting on Python in Michigan... wearing a Starfleet uniform, if the vendor area opens in time.

Yes, I'll be at Penguicon. It's an open-source convention - it's an SF convention - it's a dessert topping! Troy, MI, April 20-22. I've never been there before, and I expect to enjoy it. The schedule included two higher-level Python talks, so it seemed to me like somebody should introduce Python so newbies could get the background they need to absorb the higher-level stuff. Wish me luck!

Introduction to Python, April 20 7:30 - 8:30 PM, Catherine Devlin

Django the Python framework for rapid web app development, April 21 9:30 - 10:30 AM, Dan Scott

Patterns of Data Access implemented in SQLAlchemy, April 21 6:00 - 7:00 PM, Mark Ramm

I also hope to make it to

PostgreSQL & Explaining Explain, April 20 10:00 - 11:00 PM, Aaron Thul

and to sit on the Constructed Languages panel (I'm an Esperantist)... and not to sleep, apparently.

My presentation will be more or less a repeat of the one I gave at Dayton Perl Mongers - it went well there, and the planetary theme should be even more appropriate for Penguicon. In fact, now that I've got a good talk to give, I'm starting to look around for any old place, any old audience in the area I can introduce Python to. Suggestions are welcome! centralOH@python.org is gaining membership pretty nicely, but we're still going to need more to turn it into a really thriving in-person group. Hopefully I can lure a bunch of new people into the joys of Python.

Feeling the love from Oracle

The Oracle Technology Network has rolled out two new features deeply gratifying to the PyOraGeek...

• The Scripting Language Technology Center is devoted to articles about Python and Ruby. Keep an eye on it - more articles are in the pipeline! (Including one by me... oops, now I mentioned it publicly, now I really have to get cracking on it.)
• They established an OTN Forum page just for Python.

Thank you, OTN! This attention is important for more than just the benefits to those of us already hooked on Python. Oracle's interest carries a lot of weight; when Oracle embraced Linux several years ago, it was a big step forward in establishing Linux's credibility in the corporate world. I think we can expect a boost, too.

Intro to Python presentation

I've put the presentation for tonight's Intro to Python talk here.

It's not exactly the "slides" - it's a Bruce presentation. Bruce is great for live demos, especially for Python. Unfortunately, there's no "slide deck" that you can review statically - if you want to use it, you have to install Bruce and run it. The TAR I posted has a README with some basic instructions.

Since many conference organizers want a slide deck, one nice addition to Bruce would be a way to generate a slide deck. (No, I'm not volunteering... yet.) The other wart I ran into was the difficulty of changing the font sizes for the interpreter. Setting values in Socrates !CONFIG directives and config.py didn't work; I had to dig down into baseinterp.py and hard-code new font size values. That one, I probably could patch, if I get time.

Anyway, I did end up using Visual Python to do some fun solar system simulations. That should hold audience attention, I think...

Dayton, meet Python. Python, Dayton.

I'm giving an introduction to Python at the next Dayton Perl Mongers meeting:

March 14th 7pm to 9pm 2007 —
Introduction to Python at Dayton Perl Mongers—
at 119 Valley St. Dayton, Ohio, USA

Introductory talk on the Python programming language

This hCalendar event brought to you by the hCalendar Creator.

(Caution: the hCalendar creator didn't work for me with Opera or IE, only Firefox.)

If you're in the area, and still haven't learned Python (how have you put up with this blog?), please drop by!

I think that, to keep some visual interest up, I'll use Python's turtle module for some of my demonstrations. Not exactly snooty enterprise stuff, but turtle graphics are cute. Either that, or possibly vPython, which is certainly more impressive - but a bit more complex and less intuitive, possibly wrong for an introduction.

(I haven't forgotten my promise to post about PyCon. I'm waiting for presentation links to be published so I can refer to them.)

Geek Event Aggregator design notes

I finally created a central page for the Geek Event Aggregator - mostly it's design notes, but it's also a home less ephemeral than a bunch of blog posts:

http://catherine.devlin.googlepages.com/geekEventAggregator.html

Thanks to Google

... the Geek Event Aggregator is working again. Shortly after my post about the upload to gCal not working, I got an email from Ryan Boyd, of Google's Calendar team:

Someone brought the following post to my attention and I thought I'd follow up and see if I can be of any assistance... The problem that you are experiencing (500 error: Cannot access the calendar you requested) is due to the large size of (number of events in) the calendar.

Wow! Thanks to whoever passed my whining on to him... let me never speak ill of this social web stuff!

With that information, I was able to get it working again, so go ahead and check out that APL conference near your uncle in Kalamazoo.

Better yet, I was able to give my Lightning Talk on it, and it was very well received. The Lightning Talks are so popular that PyCon doesn't even schedule anything opposite them anymore, so basically the entire conference body of 593 people (!!!) was there; I've never spoken before so many in my life. I'm glad that didn't occur to me until afterward.

In the talk, I briefly outlined the architecture. At some point I'll post about it here. The basic principle is: HTML interpretation is hard, let's go datetutils.parser.parse()ing!

Yeah, PyCon! I just got back, and I've got so much to say; expect a flurry of blog posts as soon as I can get to it. I'm as happy as a clam. As several clams! As several unusually happy clams!

Geek Event Aggravator

I swear to you, the code that gathers data for the Geek Event Aggregator is running great.  It's harvesting over 5,000 events, with ever-improving completeness and accuracy.  

Unfortunately... the code that ships the harvested data up to Google Calendar - which worked perfectly at first - is now falling flat, with gCal returning 
"Error: Cannot access the calendar you requested." 
when I try to ship the new data up, or to clear out the old data - thus the redundant entries.  (No, it's not a simple password problem, I did check that...) 

I suspect that I triggered something at gCal that said, "Hey, there's way too much activity on this calendar, it must be some evil bot, lock it down."
  
I guess this is the problem with mashups.  It's great to springboard off the work of total strangers - but you're at the mercy of a black box.  Maybe I can buttonhole somebody from Google at PyCon next week (holy cow!  PyCon next week!) and ask for a contact somewhere in the bowels of the gCal team who might be willing to help me troubleshoot.  The sad thing is, this pretty much sinks my plan to do a Lightning Talk on it.

So anyway, my apologies if you've been trying to use the Aggregator and have found only stale and redundant information.  My box is overladen with fresh, hot event data; I just have to figure out a way to get it out to you.  I tried Swivel, but can't seem to get the data there, either.  And the old-fashioned solution - the app running in the Oracle Application Express sandbox - can only receive data by manual uploads, and then only in small chunks; I would have to do about fifty mouse clicks every time I wanted to refresh the Aggregator's data, and I'm sorry, but I'm not a clicker.

The ultimate solution, of course, is to build my own app on my own web server, or on a web host with permissive policies on installing software.  I don't have those resources right now, unfortunately.  (sigh)

[I apologize; Blogger has gone loony on the line breaks for this post, and I can't seem to fix it. Grumble. All my web resources are letting me down today.]

Presenting at Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp

The following topics you submitted have been selected to be included in this year’s Code Camp:

· Data in Python, from ASCII to ZODB

Yay! Be in West Chester, OH (i.e., Northern Cincinnati, basically) on March 24 for a fun, free day of Code Camp. Most of the content is .NET, but they're very gracious about encouraging other content, too.

My talk is going to be a broad survey of ways you can get data of various sorts into and out of Python programs - not just RDBMS, but everything from the simplest to the most elaborate of data infrastructures. It's a lot to take on in an hour, but I think it'll be good for raising awareness of the breadth of possibilities - even for non-Python programmers (you poor things). I know I've learned quite a bit already just outlining the talk.

held for ransom by Vista

I attended an MSDN event here in Dayton last fall, where I was given a beta CD of Vista. I finally got around to putting it on my Windows partition last month. The install went pretty smoothly - it had an option to upgrade the XP partition, preserving the applications and data already present.

I didn't really play with it long enough to form a firm opinion on Vista, but the experiment ended rather badly. Vista popped up a window telling me that the trial period had expired, and it was time to pay up. I had to go to work at that point, so I shut down the machine, brought it into the office, and booted it up again. Then, the "trial period expired" window and a browser window - supplied so that I could buy a license at the MS site - were the only functionality that Vista would enable.
I couldn't go to my desktop, Windows Explorer, a command prompt, or anything that would enable me to access my hard drive. Files that I had created under my paid-for XP were now inaccessible to me; no way was provided to copy them off before reinstalling XP. My hard disk was, in essence, being held hostage; paying for a Vista licence was the ransom.

I tried to reinstall XP from its CD while preserving the data on the partition, but I got some frightening error messages in the process and aborted before risking the whole partition.

This could have been a serious crisis, but for two things -

• I do all my real work on the Linux partition, and didn't really have anything to preserve from the Windows side. I just wanted to take a look around to verify that.
• The Windows NTFS partition was perfectly accessible from Ubuntu, so I copied what I needed that way - didn't even need a thumb drive, just dragged icons onto the Ubuntu desktop. Hooray! I hadn't realized that read-only access to NTFS was so foolproof from Linux.

But what if I hadn't been a Linux freak? This could have been a real sackcloth-and-ashes event.

[If it hadn't been a dual-boot machine, I think I could have accomplished the same thing with an Ubuntu install CD, booting from it and copying the files to a USB drive.]

I don't think MS planned it this way. They just failed to plan a soft landing for their software's trial period ending. I'll remember that next time I play with a demo.

Microsoft Expression Web

Let me say two things in praise of Microsoft today:

1. They sponsored CodeMash.

2. I really, really like their new HTML editor, Expression Web. I like the split-screen, with the cursor that simultaneously shows each element in the WYSIWYG and HTML panes; I like the ease of generating in-line styles and moving them easily and cleanly to a separate CSS, I *love* the clean, uncluttered HTML it generates (*so* unlike FrontPage, ptui)

And, to my amazement, it's not Microsofty at all. It doesn't generate IIS-dependent code, you can preview the rendering in Firefox, etc. as easily as in IE. It's... respectful!

I'm officially asking my boss to buy us a copy. The one problem is... I prefer to work on Linux. Yes, I have a dual-boot machine, but going back and forth is a pain. So - can anybody recommend their favorite Linux-compatible HTML editors? Has anybody else tried Expression Web? Can you speak to how its features compare? Honestly, I've pretty much stuck with a text editor all this time, and I don't know if Expression Web's features are unique or routine.

centralOH@python.org

There's a new mailing list, centralOH@python.org, for Python users in and around Central Ohio. If this describes you, please join us!

http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/centraloh


The Cleveland area already has a wonderful Python users' group - clepy. Those of us too far from Cleveland have been out of luck, though. We hope to use the new mailing list to gather together a bunch of Python users from the area, then begin to plan some live events. Eventually, perhaps we'll have a full-fledged, regularly meeting user group. First, though, we need to contact each other!

So, please, if you know anybody within shouting distance of central Ohio, let them know about centralOH@python.org !

Pardon, your template is showing.

Forgetting to apply data to your template is a pretty understandable mistake. But why are quantities like $baseCommittmentNumber queried live, while "6th movie" and "7th movie" are hard-coded? I hope they weren't just too lazy to generate ordinal forms of $baseCommittmentNumber+1 and +2 on the fly!

Incidentally, when all is said and done, the Columbia House deal works out to a minimum of ($0.50 X 5) + ($15 X 1) + ($20 X 3) + ($2 X 9) = $93.50 for 9 DVDs.

photos on business cards

Joe Wirtley (a CodeMash attendee) blogged an appeal for folks to include a photo of themselves on their blogs. I think it's a great idea - this weird bloggy world of electronic chatter is the most useful when we keep it linked to the world of flesh-and-blood. It's a shame to think that I've probably walked right past people at conferences whose writings I knew well.

I'm thinking of taking the appeal a step further. I love being able to recognize people and call them by name. Unfortunately, I'm a nerd, and I'm not very good at it. I struggle to find techniques to empower my socially deficient brain. Often, after I get someone's business card, I rush away to jot notes on the back - notes about what they're involved in and what we talked about, but also notes on their appearance. This is a desperate attempt to enable myself to recognize them the next time we meet, probably months or years in the future. The trouble is, a few phrases like "tall; curly hair" or "beard, glasses" really aren't enough.

I fantasized today about buying a cameraphone, snapping a photo of each person I meet, then finding a tag-based filing tool so that I could store the photos with the people's names and keywords about where I'm likely to see them again. Then, before arriving at an event, I could review the photos of people I'd be likely to see there; when I arrived, I'd call out to them by name and feel so cool.

Now, just imagine if somebody gave me a business card with their picture on it. Wow! I'd be so grateful! It would short-circuit this entire dilemma!

It's almost time for me to get new cards printed, and I could lead this incredibly useful trend by putting my own photo on them. Except... I'm nervous that it will come across funny, like I'm a wannabe model or something. Traditionally, geeks are supposed to imagine themselves as not really even having faces, as just being disembodied intelligences free-floating in the ether. The thing is, that's really not a useful myth. Talking to each other - face-to-face when we can - has very real value.

Maybe I should go ahead and do it anyway, and not worry about what people think. Maybe just being "the weirdo who puts her picture on her business cards" isn't so bad - for networking purposes, being weird isn't as bad as being forgotten. It's not "goofiness", it's "branding", right?

Hmm. Opinions? Would anybody join me on this?

CodeMash summary

Wow, CodeMash was FUN! It was chock-full of the kind of inquisitive, energetic people who make you glad to be a geek, both in the formal sessions and the informal sociable stuff.

I'll give just a few highlights, hopefully ones that haven't already been blogged to death by other CodeMash bloggers...

Even for someone who already uses TurboGears a bit, Kevin Dangoor's TG talk was great. Almost too high-energy to follow, but I got great ideas like using an in-memory SQLite back end for development testing (thus not worrying about repairing the database after testing);

It was nice to have Kevin's co-author Mark Ramm there, too. Questioning the authors beats leafing through a book any day... I just ordered my copy of the TG book for $26.99 from Nerdbooks. Amazon can slightly beat that price ($25.64), but at Nerdbooks I could toss in mildly outdated books on Unix and DB2 for $2-3 each.

David Stanek's talk on "Python Web Services" was actually more important, I thought, for the language-independent description of the relative merits of REST, XML-RPC, and SOAP-based services than it was for the Python-specific content. If you were off at some .NET talk instead, and you've always been a little fuzzy about how those work and relate to one another, go read his slide deck.

As a data geek, I really perked up at Scott Guthrie's keynote on LINQ. It's a new language component that basically extends the SQL idea (describe what data you want, let the computer worry about how to get it) beyond just RDBMS and into flat files, XML, web services... wherever the data may be squirreled away, it'll be a way to go get it with a single consistent syntax. Cool! I'll be eagerly looking forward to IronPython implementations of LINQ. So, Microsoft - thank you for LINQ, thank you for being one of the CodeMash sponsors, and I forgive you for Vista overwriting the GRUB boot loader on my dual-boot machine this morning (but only because I found a tutorial on how to repair it).

James Ward demonstrated ooooh-aaaah stuff you can do with Flex, which wasn't surprising. More importantly, I learned that the Flex/Flash world has really opened up ("opened" as in "open source"). When I looked into it a few years ago, it seemed that you needed a $mucho-K Flash server to even dip in. That's not the way I do things; I build a minor app or two - something that will really be used, not a development-only toy - before I know whether I really want to run with a technology. Now, most of the stack is open-source and free; only a couple optional (admittedly very convenient) components are commercially licensed. Adobe's new mostly-open-source business model for Flex permits my kind of experimentation; good for them!

Kevin Dahlhausen's talk on Test-Driven Development filled an embarrassing gap in my understanding of TDD - I'd heard of mock objects, but had never really figured out what role they play in TDD.

I took part in two Open Space discussions - one on women in IT, one on social networking for nerds - that were important enough that I think I'll give them their own blog posts in the next few days.

I heard Martin Fowler's name come up so many times that I finally screamed (internally), "Okay OKAY I'll read his stuff, already"!

In a week or so, I'll update this post to include hotlinks to the talk slide decks; most of them aren't posted yet.

Anyway... so much glorious fun. With CodeMash in January and PyCon in February, who dares call winter a blah time?

CodeMash

I'm here at CodeMash in Sandusky! I'd thought about blogging the whole conference real-time, but I think I'll only be doing a little of that... my laptop is fearfully heavy, and dragging it around all day would seriously inhibit my enjoyment of the Hallway Track (the stuff you learn chatting informally with people between sessions).

Anyway, so far, CodeMash is AWESOME. Very professionally run, and with excellent content. It began last night with a great expert panel discussion on languages - the sort of experts who seem to know a dozen different languages in more depth than you know your very favorite. It feels so good to have something like this here in Ohio.

A couple notes from the language panel...

• As a Pythonista, I was very gratified that the whole panel had a lot of knowledge of and respect for Python; it seemed to be mentioned more than any other single language!
• Tha panel took up the question of "which language should new computer science students learn?" The consensus was that sticking to any one language is a real mistake. Every language carries its own limitations and patterns of thought; learning new languages broadens the ways you have to think about a problem. Teaching students only one language risks hard-coding the assumptions and limitations of that language right into their brains. The rule of thumb "learn a new language every year" came up.
• As for specific languages, Python was the first reccommended... and assembly ended up also very highly reccommended.

Anyway, it's going to be a great conference. I'll try to update tonight. There will be a lot of tough decisions about which talks to go to, and I may decide against some of the Python talks - partly because I might be already beyond some of them in skill, and partially to honor the cross-language spirit of CodeMash.

PyCon and CodeMash

I'll be at PyCon, Feb. 23-25 in Dallas!


I'll also be at CodeMash in Sandusky!



I've mentioned both these conferences, but this is a good time to remind you of both of them, because the early-bird PyCon registration is almost upon us (Jan. 15) and CodeMash itself is almost upon us.

After two conferences in two months, my employer will probably manacle me to the server for the rest of the year, but it'll be worth it. I'd been coy up until now as to whether I'd actually make it to these events; my personal schedule has been wildly chaotic. But now I've got reservations in hand, so I'll see you there!

Geek Event Aggregator is back

Re-introducing the Geek Event Aggregator - the world's most comprehensive and least accurate compilation of technology events! The Aggregator regularly scans a huge variety of event announcement websites and gathers the information into a single location. Now, when the VIC-20 Users' Group schedules a meeting down the street from your in-laws in Pittsburgh, you'll know it.

(Yes, I've introduced this before, almost a year ago. But a LOT has changed, and the accuracy is much better now.)

The Aggregator uploads its data into a Google Calendar account - the most convenient way to access it is as a Google Calendar user (which I really do recommend.) Here's what you do.

1. Log into your Google Calendar account and choose "Manage Calendars".
   
   
2. Click "add calendar"
   
   
3. Search for "geek event aggregator", then select "Add Calendar".
   
   
4. Return to your calendar home. Oops, your calendar now looks dense with events. That's because you're seeing an unfiltered list of all events, everywhere. Better un-check "geekEventAggregator".
   
   
5. Now you can make real use of the Aggregator - search for the city, state, or region of interest. The Aggregator attaches several keywords to each event based on its location.
   
   
6. Don't take anything the Aggregator reports at face value! Double-check it all. Remember, it's just a poor computer trying to read webpages that were written for humans. It doesn't even attempt to find the time of day, it just declares that everything runs 9-5 Eastern time (who cares if it's in Johannesburg?) I expect to keep gradually improving the accuracy as time goes by.

If you don't have and don't want a Google Calendar account, you can also access it through a static HTML page, an ICS document, or an XML feed. In that case, you don't get Google's handy Search button, and you'll need to use your own patience/creativity to find events in the places you want.

The Geek Event Aggregator is written in Python (of course!) Behind the scenes, it uses TurboGears and PostgreSQL. (No, you don't see a TG-based web application; the web app generates an annotated version of each scanned webpage, which I can use to troubleshoot the scan; thus, the improved accuracy of this second-generation Aggregator.)

I expect to present a Lightning Talk on it at PyCon 2007 (you are going to PyCon, aren't you?)