Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Ohio LinuxFest

Wooo, Ohio LinuxFest!

My reStructuredText slides are at catherinedevlin.pythoneers.com, down at the bottom of the page. Thanks to everybody who attended and gave great feedback!

I arrived Friday morning this time and spent a good chunk of the day at the Hackathon, working with Mark Borgerding on his idea for a new educational game for Childsplay. We made some good progress, especially since we were both 100% newbies to pygame! I enjoyed myself and learned a thing or two. Hopefully we'll be able to finish the game up remotely over the next several weeks.

Next came an impromptu lightning talk session (I looooove lightning talks) where I gave an extremely badly-organized (but well-received) glimpse at sqlpython.

I helped Todd Trichler from Oracle Technology Network with his demonstration of Oracle's free offerings. We had a good group, and the next morning Todd gave away his ENORMOUS box of Oracle software in about an hour.

The hallway track was, as usual, excellent. William McVey and Eric Floehr used the PyOhio table to stir up interest in CincyPy and Central Ohio Pythonistas, and Monday's inaugural COPy meeting had 27 attendees! Score! I enjoyed talking with people so much that I found myself on the verge of going hoarse just 90 minutes before my talk. Eek!

I had a great time. Congratulations and thank you to the OLF organizers and sponsors. Once a year, you make Ohio feel like anything but a technology backwater!

Sunday was the Diversity in Open Source workshop, which deserves its own post. To be continued...

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Python at Ohio LinuxFest

The Ohio LinuxFest fun starts tomorrow! Here are the Python-related activities there that I know of.

Of the Friday hackathon projects, I believe that schoolsplay and sendoff are Python-based.
http://www.ohiolinux.org/hackathon.html

Zenoss Community day on Friday (Zenoss is a Python product):
http://www.ohiolinux.org/zenoss.html

Python for Linux System Administration - Vern Ceder
10 AM Saturday
http://www.ohiolinux.org/talks.html#PYTHON

reStructuredText - Plain Text gets Superpowers - me
5 PM Saturday
http://www.ohiolinux.org/talks.html#TEXT

PyOhio booth - all day Saturday (though not always staffed). All Python groups should take advantage of it shamelessly - bring your literature! - and anybody who wants to hang around there and have Python-related conversations with people, that's fantastic.

And, of course, don't forget Oracle's event at OLF.

See you there!

Thursday, September 17, 2009

easy_install no longer easy on Vista

Since my Windows machine was upgraded from XP to Vista, managing Python packages has become absolutely horrible. Here's what I've puzzled out so far, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth:

1. No matter what rights your primary account has, you need to run easy_install from a Run as Administrator window - otherwise, easy_install runs in a separate window which pops up, flashes some feedback at you for a microsecond or so, then disappears, leaving you with absolutely no record of whether the install works and why. There doesn't seem to be any way to log the results to a file.

2. After installing any module that is deployed as an .egg into site-packages, you need to go and edit its permissions manually to give your account read privileges on the egg. (Giving your account privileges on the whole site-packages directory does not help.) Until you do, import newmodule will fail with ImportError: no module named newmodule on your account - but will succeed when run from a Run as Administrator window.

This is bad news. I fought my way through because I'm a dedicated Pythonista; how many Vista-using Py-curious are going to give up on Python because module installation now requires such hacks?

(Don't forget - Ohio LinuxFest registration ends tomorrow at noon! Move, move, move! You'll hurt my feelings if you don't go.)