speaking at IEEE

In my ongoing campaign to teach Python to every multicellular organism in Ohio, I'm bringing my Smash, Crash, Kaboom Course in Python (you know, the one with the exploding planets) to this Tuesday's meeting of the IEEE-Dayton Section Computer Society Meeting. The chapter invites non-members to attend, too; no charge, but $3 to buy into the pizza.

The talk materials are here.

October 21, 2008 11:30 – 12:30pm
Introduction to Python

Lockheed Martin Corporate Sales

2940 Presidential Drive, Suite 290

Fairborn, OH, 45324 USA

Tags: python programming introduction class meeting

This hCalendar event brought to you by the hCalendar Creator.

Counting votes: You're doing it wrong

I have to admit, the first time I heard about people mistrusting computerized voting, I just felt amused. Silly Luddites, I thought. After all, how hard can it be for a computer to count?

Really hard, it turns out, if you start with the stupid premise that you ought to write every byte of the software from scratch, incorporating no preexisting software of known and verifiable quality. That's the approach that proprietary vending machine makers have taken - presumably to lend credibility to their patents.

There's a new interview with the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, where she talks very frankly about the serious problems Ohio has found with its voting software. I'm glad Ohio now offers a paper ballot option. I'm going to use it. I truly have no idea what happened to my 2004 vote.

There's a perfect solution waiting to be used: PVote by Ka-Ping Yee, one of the Python community's greats. In his interview with NPR's Science Friday, he describes how voting software should and can be written: as a minimal, readable, high-level program that relies on existing open-source components of thoroughly-verified quality. Ka-Ping, my vote is for you.

PyOhio's table at Ohio LinuxFest

This year, PyOhio decided to buy table space in the nonprofit exhibitors' area of Ohio LinuxFest to publicize PyOhio (as well as PyCon and Python in general).

It was a really good decision! The "hallway track" is one of the most interesting parts of any conference, of course, but when you have a table of interesting stuff to draw people in and start conversations about, it goes to the next level. I barely made it into any formally scheduled events at all, and had lots of fun meeting people from the big and growing open-source community. I tried to preserve my voice, but I was half-hoarse by the time my 4:00 talk started.

• Ponyshow was a big hit - it caught peoples' eye and drew them over to the table. I'd still like to add more flashy graphics to it for next year, though - I ran short on time, and had trouble installing pyglet. Tables in the nonprofit zone lacked electricity, but I used two laptops to get around that - one on display at the table and one recharging at an outlet elsewhere.
• Python stickers donated by PyCon were an even bigger hit. If 1/2 the people who took a sticker are using or will use Python, we've got a very healthy community here!
• I whipped up a homemade PyOhio banner that went pretty well. I projected our logo onto a wall, traced the outline, used an Exacto knife to make a stencil from the pattern, then used some fabric spray paint.
• For next year: bring candy. We may see if we can do a swag raffle of our own, too.
• A rerun of last year's Python introduction went well. The Python Beginners' Hackathon was good, but small. We'll have to think about what might need changes there.
• I really like the idea of PyOhio running something on the Friday of next year's LinuxFest. Join the pyohio-organizers mailing list to help kick around ideas for that.

There was a lot of interest among the attendees. There were more people already actively using Python than I expected, and virtually everyone else knew Python as something they wanted to learn more about. I think we'll see that reflected in an even bigger and more intense PyOhio next year.

Ohio LinuxFest 2008 - talk materials

Thanks to my Ohio LinuxFest audience for learning some Python with me! The talk materials are here.

Here's the "Resources for Python Learners" handout.

I had a great time at OLF, particularly in the "hallway track"; we have a really fun and growing open-source community in Ohio. Go, us!

I can plot that data in two keystrokes

(plus a carriage return)

One of the ideas I most gleefully stole from YASQL for sqlpython is special terminators, sequences like \g and \c that replace a SELECT statement's ending semicolon. When a query ends with a special terminator, the output is specially formatted: \c gives CSV, \h gives HTML, \t gives transposed (columns as rows / rows as columns), etc. Type help terminators for details.

sqlpython 1.5.0 is out today, with the most demented special output format yet: CHARTS! Instant ad-hoc grapical goodness direct from your query, no tedious mucking around in spreadsheets or exporting to another program. Just terminate your query with \l (line graph), \L (scatter graph - no lines), \p (pie chart), or \b (bar graph).





Also, as of 1.5.0, it's pretty easy to define your own special terminators and formats. Just install sqlpython in uncompressed form (easy_install -UZ will do that), open up output_templates.py, and follow the pattern.

ponyshow: showing off in Python

PyOhio is getting a table at Ohio LinuxFest to advertise PyOhio and Python in general. We're going to set up a computer running demonstrations of eye-catching Python tricks - stuff passing geeks can look at and think, "Hunh! That's pretty cool! I'm going to try this Python thing."

To run the demo, I've written a little script called ponyshow. You can use it yourself (on *nix) - install Mercurial, then
hg clone http://hg.assembla.com/ponyshow ponyshow

I need suggestions for what to put in the show! If you had a few lines of code to show why you love Python, what would they be? Importing modules is fine - I'm certainly going to show off vPython and pyglet, for example. What would you show?

more area events

Ohio LinuxFest isn't the only major geeky event coming up in our area. Also check out:

• the Miami Valley Joint Societies meeting: more geeky groups than you can shake a USB drive at, all coming together for their annual dinner meeting. Sep. 25 in Dayton.
• .NET University: a free 101-level education in .NET. Nov. 8 in Columbus.
• 50 Years of Computing at UC: the big picture. Nov. 10-11 in Cincinnati.

Geek Event Finder: now working

It's working! The Geek Event Finder on Google App Engine! Go play!

In some ways, the Google App Engine is a dream. Not thinking about the app server is wonderful. Deploying couldn't be easier.

I hate the GAE datastore with the passion of a thousand blazing suns, however. 90% of the work of this project has been trying to figure out workarounds and kludges for its bizzare limitations, like

• There is no mass delete. None. No truncate. No way to get rid of a large number of records at once.
• Bulk upload exists, but it always appends to the datastore - never replaces - which brings you right back to the "no mass delete" problem.
• No long-running operations - anything that would take more than a couple seconds dies - so you can't loop over all your records to do something (like delete them).
• Countless unexpected restrictions on queries. Can't filter on one property while sorting on another. Can't do inequality filters on more than one property. Can't filter on a string property if it is multiline (has \n's) or is longer than 500 characters (type Text). Can't use any function calls or arithmetic within a WHERE clause. Queries that fetch a large number of records die instead of completing (so I fetch in LIMIT 20 batches and assemble the results on the app side... crazy).

So if you look at the code and see some incredibly stupid stuff going on with data access - trust me, I tried fifteen different sane ways first. I am so not buying the buzz about this being "the future of databases". Fighting for hours to try to kludge your way to your data... that's the Bad Old Days, not the future.

My workaround for mass deletion was to write pages that would delete one record, then invoke it in a loop from my client computer. That has to run all night to clean out the datastore when new data is uploaded.

But anyway. I'm still very happy. It works!

Ohio LinuxFest

Ohio LinuxFest is Oct. 11 - one month from today!

It's free, it's fabulous. Missing it would be like missing your own birthday. Go get registered!


The PyOhio gang is going cook up some good stuff to do - a table in the midway, a Python workshop in the Open Spaces, etc. Let me know if you have ideas and/or if you'd like to help staff the table.

BigTable blues

This was supposed to be the blog entry where I would announce the Geek Event Aggregator's successful port to Google App Engine.

(sigh)

I've read an awful lot of buzz about how GAE's BigTable is the Next Big Thing in data, makes RDBMS obsolete, etc. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but right now I am utterly unimpressed.

The Geek Event Aggregator needs to search its database of 5000 or so events for events whose longitude and latitude are close enough to the user to be of interest. Does that sound so impossible?

I couldn't do it in GAE. First, "Inequality Filters Are Allowed On One Property Only" - so I can filter for longitude or latitude, but not both. I had to filter only for longitude, pull all resulting records into the application, and finish boiling the ocean in my app. It was slow, in the local application environment, but I hoped it would run faster once uploaded to the actual GAE production servers.

In production, though, it doesn't run at all - "Timeout: datastore timeout: operation took too long.". Querying from 5000 records - too much for the mighty BigTable, apparently. Dropping the filters on longitude (to do all the filtering in the app, in case inequality filtering is just so poisonous) didn't help, either.

Oh well. I still enjoyed working with GAE at first, and maybe I'll use it again for something with very light data demands. For the Geek Event Aggregator, I do have a server available where I can host in TurboGears - it'll just take a bit of rewriting. Later this week, hopefully.

recursive dowload with wget

I often need to download documentation for offline use. Online docs typically come as a finely branched tree of separate .html files; sometimes a one-page or PDF version is also available, but those aren't as convenient to use.

I'd gotten sick of using "File/Save As..." from my browser again and again, but Firefox shortcuts like DownThemAll flattened the directory structure, broke the internal links, and didn't crawl them to get sub-pages.

The answer, of course, was in my /usr/bin all along: wget.

catherine@Elli:~/docs$ wget --recursive --convert-links \
> --page-requisites --no-parent \
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/index.html

or, shortcut form,

catherine@Elli:~/docs$ wget -rkp -np \
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/index.html

pulls down the everything beneath the index page, and it turns out perfectly, with a single command!

--convert-links adjusts all the internal hyperlinks so they'll work perfectly in your downloaded version.

Without --no-parent, wget would find the link to "Home" and download everything under that.

--page-requisites makes sure you get the images, stylesheets, etc. for your pages to work properly.

Now bookmark the downloaded top page in firefox, give the bookmark a keyword, and voila! Now just typing your keyword into the Firefox URL bar gets you to your perfect offline mirror.

Regex skirt review

I got my xkcd regex skirt as a birthday present (funny what subtle hints like "this is exactly what I want for my birthday please please please" will do), so I thought I'd give a review. An hReview-microformatted review, of course.

gloriously geeky, if flawed

Aug 22, 2008 by
Catherine Devlin
(sam18xgy4fz@liquidid.net)product

XKCD Regex Cheat Skirt

Rating: 4 of 5

We've all got a drawer full of geeky T-shirts. But what about a geeky skirt? Thanks to XKCD, it finally exists!

The text is regular expressions syntax reminders, oriented upside down so you can read it while you sit. Simple stuff, like:

Must escape: \|()[{^$*+? 
^ start of string 
$ end of string 
[^abc] ^ means not 
\n Newline 
{N,M} N to M

The font is large, comfortable to read while sitting. I wish the lines weren't double-spaced - I think 1.5 spacing would make the text look more like a trendy decorative hem accent.

The sizes run big. I wear 10's or 12's, ordered the medium, and it is more than big enough, even without the stretchiness. It's a soft, stretchy fabric, stretchy enough to do Rockettes high-kicks if that's what you do (but programming pays better).

The hem falls a bit above the knee, but not at all "you are not leaving the house like that young lady" high.

I'm a little disappointed in the craftsmanship, to tell the truth, for the $35. It kind of looks like a skirt made by T-shirt makers - it's two simple trapezoidal panels sewn together. The text leaves a fairly broad gap at each edge of the panels, making it really obvious where the side seams are. (I guess that could be considered a fashion choice, but I prefer hiding the seams.) The print is that slightly raised plasticky print, and I have zero confidence in its longevity. I will obviously not only have to launder it gently as advised, but also refrain from wearing it every single day. Save it for geeky occasions where it will be properly appreciated.

Nonetheless, it is far and away my favorite skirt, because it is far and away the winner of the "geekiest skirt ever" contest, and that trumps everything in my book.

0.3

This hReview brought to you by the hReview Creator.

taking FOSS to the people

It's all very well to invite newbies to come to your Linux group, but you're not going to get really new people that way. Coming to a meeting or an Installfest is a commitment that demands strong, specific curiosity at the very least. Chances are, if someone knows enough about Linux to know that they want to know Linux, they're going to learn it, helpful usergroup or not. That's especially true now that the entry barrier is so low with super-easy distributions like Ubuntu. But what about those who don't know what they're missing?

That's why some of us from Dayton Linux User Group are considering renting a booth at the Montgomery County Fair. We can set up several computers and let people touch, try, and see just how easy it is - people who had never even heard of Linux or open-source, people who had no idea there was a choice, who thought that Microsoft was just how computers run. Step right up, folks. Surf a webpage, write a document, edit a spreadsheet. It's real, and it doesn't bite.

"Do you know that Tux loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your computer?"

(WOW, if only I had cartooning talent, I would make THE BEST mockup of a lowbrow evangelical tract there has ever been.)

(Wait a minute. Since when did that require cartooning talent?)

(Incidentally, I really am a hardcore Christian. Seriously. Maybe that's why this sort of thing appeals to me so much. "Freely you have received, freely give"; Jesus wrote the GPL!)

The only thing that may stop us is the booth fee: $270. It's reasonable, all things considered, but it's still a sizable hat to pass around for a small group.

Anyway, whether we get this together in time for the fair or not, I'd love to get other ideas for where to take a show like this. The fair is perfect because it has a whole lot of people milling around looking for something interesting. Where else?

Good Kids and Open Spaces

Not everything at PyOhio was perfect, of course. In particular, we were frustrated that we didn't get more participation in the Open Spaces. Some of the attendees pretty much took a spot in the auditorium, watched the scheduled talks, and went home. I think they were satisfied, but those attendees missed out on a lot.

I wasn't too surprised, since even PyCon wrestles with how to encourage Open Space participation. Many PyOhio attendees were inexperienced conference-goers with absolutely no experience with Open Spaces. But I don't think unfamiliarity was the only barrier.

Back in high school, I was one of the Good Kids. I was Born to be Mild. I went to class early, sat down, readied my notebooks, and waited for the teacher to start. I did not hang around in the hallway gossiping. I certainly did not cut class!

I think most people who become programmers started out as Good Kids, and that's part of why this is hard. We can put a preachy message in the program guide singing the virtues of Open Spaces and the hallway track, of informal, collaborative learning - but they were Good Kids, and they're not buying it. When we say, "get into unplanned discussions, skip some scheduled talks in favor of Open Spaces", it sounds to them like "cut class and hang out." No wonder it's a tough sell! Closing their ears to that is exactly how they became educated enough to be at a programming conference in the first place. In high school, the things your peers could teach you would probably get you arrested, hospitalized, and/or pregnant.

So we've got some ideas to get people over this psychological hump for PyOhio 2009. We're going to use panel discussions to ease people from listening into talking, try a schedule that forces people to get up and move around and bump into each other, and leave time slots where there are no scheduled talks.

Honest, everybody, it's OK. One Good Kid to another.

[EDIT: Let me make clear that this wasn't the only thing keeping people in their seats. We had a jam-packed schedule - gave in to the "fit everything in" temptation, I'm afraid; the Open Space rooms were distant from the main lecture room; and there was no natural transition to a hanging-out space when the library closed at 6. We'll certainly be looking hard for ways to improve those for PyOhio 2009.]

PyOhio: wow

Wow. PyOhio went great. I have so much to say, I hardly know where to start. Expect multiple posts.

The hope was to duplicate some of the learning and atmosphere of PyCon on the small scale. I really think we achieved it. The talks were excellent, attendee enthusiasm was high, and plenty of people stepped up to the tasks that needed doing.

THANK YOU to everybody who was involved!

Not everything was perfect, of course. I'll devote a full post to glitches and mistakes. But in general, I'm extremely happy. We could have sat around wondering whether this area could really support a good regional conference, but instead, we just went ahead and did the experiment, and the answer is clear: yes, it can and it did!

Check out some of the neat swag donation we got from WearPython and Apress!

PyOhio: one more week

PyOhio is Saturday, July 26!

Please register right away - it helps us schedule talks properly and guarantees you entry, food, and swag.

What sort of Open Spaces do you want to take part in? Do you want to do a poster? How about a Lightning Talk?

See you there!

serendipity

I just met with Amanda Laucher at the Blue Moose Cafe in Morgantown, WV.

I don't live here; she doesn't live here; we weren't at a conference; we didn't expect to meet. We were both in town on family visits, and both seeking out an internet fix. (I'm visiting my father-in-law at Ruby Hospital - but writing Python there, hah.)

She's a serious geek-community addict like me - she's organizing the DevLink Bus. She gave me great advice for PyOhio and tipped me off to other upcoming events, and I gave her some ideas from PyCon. It was great!

That's just really cool. Someday, when wireless access is ubiquitous, geekish nomads will no longer concentrate themselves in a handful of WiFi hotspots, and unforeseeable meetings like these will become more rare. That will be the downside of the future.

cx_Oracle and Oracle XE on Ubuntu

Simplifying options have appeared since the last time I posted about installing cx_Oracle against Oracle XE on Ubuntu, so I thought I'd produce an updated, simplified summary.

1. Install Oracle XE from Oracle's own repository of .deb files
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
3. sudo apt-get install python-dev python-setuptools
sudo -E easy_install cx_Oracle
   The -E flag carries your environment variables into your sudo session; if you omit it, you may get a cannot locate an Oracle software installation error.
4. Test:
$ python
>>> import cx_Oracle
>>> cnxn = cx_Oracle.connect('system/mysystempassword@xe')
>>> crsr = cnxn.cursor()
>>> crsr.execute('SELECT * FROM dual')

cmd2 0.3.4

I just keep having fun with cmd2 (and with sqlpython, which is built on cmd2 and inherits its goodies). The latest:

• If you use > to redirect output and omit a destination filename, your output will go into the paste buffer. Then you can Ctrl-V and paste it into any window.
• You can use the pipe symbol (|) just like in Unix, to redirect output into any shell command.

geographical anonymity

On the Internet, nobody knows you live in Dogtown.

I've volunteered to do the publicity for PyOhio. I guess it's going really well. Two months out, we've already got 80 people signed up for the PyOhio announcements mailing list. If we assume that most of them will come to PyOhio, plus some others, and that the numbers will keep growing... maybe I'd better relax before we max out the library's capacity.

Still, bootstrapping a regional community is an interesting challenge. It's easy to go out on the internet and find a bazillion people who use Python - but how many of them are in or near Ohio? The wonderfully free-floating nature of the Internet and the open-source community, where geography is irrelevant, can become frustrating when geography actually is relevant.

Finding local companies is even harder. Most companies' websites try to give the impression that they have no geographical location whatsoever - wouldn't want to put off a potential client just because they're on another continent, after all. They also try to avoid mentioning the languages they use, again trying not to appear limited. (In a sense, that's a very good thing, because end users should shop for brains, not tools - it's just difficult for this application.) Finally, with a technology like Python, many of us users sneak it into our jobs without our higher-ups even knowing it, much less promoting it as a strength of their companies.

Any ideas? Googling for "Python Ohio" gets... well, me. Looking for "Python" plus the domain names of Ohio universities is helping a bit. (Universities, unlike businesses, do publicize their physical locations and the technologies they use.)

Anyway, if you've been thinking of submitting an abstract for PyOhio, quit thinking and write; our deadline is June 1 (this Sunday). And don't forget to blog...

That number again:

PyOhio

Regional Python programming miniconference

July 26th, 2008

Columbus Metropolitan Library

96 S. Grant Ave.

Columbus, OH 43215
USA

Tags: python open-source programming conference ohio

(Side note: Blogger's captchas are very near the threshhold of legibility, and getting worse. If I quit posting, I guess you'll know why.)

slides from SQL*Plus Alternatives

I've posted my slides from today's GCOUG presentation here.

Thanks for being a great audience! Feel free to contact me to ask questions about SQLPython or request new features.

cmd2 0.3.0

I'm speaking on SQL*Plus alternatives again on Wednesday at GCOUG, and trying to polish up sqlpython a bit in preparation for that. That required polishing cmd2; I've been increasingly embarrassed that cmd2 used homemade code (flagReader) to interpret --options --like --these, instead of using a perfectly good module from the standard library (optparse).

Optparse is not designed for iterative cmd-type apps where you remain at an application prompt after issuing each command - it keeps issuing sys.exit()s to kick you back to the shell. That was my excuse for not using it earlier, but once I decided to fix it, a little subclassing took care of it.

Next I got a little deeper into decorators than I'd ever been, to provide a concise way to specify those options:

@options([make_option('-k', '--ketchup', action="store_true", help="Ketchup on that?"),
         [make_option('-r', '--relish', help="relish (sweet or dill)")])
def do_hotdog(self, arg, opts):
    if opts.relish:
        self.stdout.write('One dog with %s relish\n' % opts.relish)
    if opts.ketchup:
         self.stdout.write('Hope you're not wearing white!\n')

That was pretty fun. Took some experimentation and this article, though, to figure out how to write a decorator that would accept an argument.

I didn't throw away the homemade ("flagReader") code, for backward compatibility; I issue a DeprecationWarning instead. I did throw away the guts and reimplement it as a wrapper around optparse. I managed to do that part on a single 20-minute bus ride, thanks to good doctests on flagReader. I feel so grown-up!

Finally, inspired by Brandon Rhodes' article in the March 2008 Python magazine, I tried supporting buildout deployments this time. I'm not sure I'm getting it quite right yet; expect it to actually work in cmd2 0.3.1.

PyOhio Call for Proposals

PyOhio: Call for Presentations

PyOhio, the first annual Python programming mini-conference for Ohio and surrounding areas will take place Saturday, July 26, in Columbus, Ohio. The conference is free of change and will include scheduled presentations, Lighting Talks and unconference-style Open Spaces.

You can read more about the conference at http://pyohio.org

PyOhio invites all interested people to present scheduled talks. All presentations are expected to last 40 minutes with a 10 minute question-and-answer period. PyOhio will accept abstracts covering any area of Python programming. A classroom area with computers will also be available for possible hands-on sessions.

All presentations proposals should submit abstracts no longer than 500 words in length. Abstracts must include the title, summary of the presentation, the expertise level targeted, and a brief description of the area of Python programming it relates to.

All proposals should be emailed to for review.

The submission deadline will be June 1, 2008. Accepted proposals will be notified by July 1.

choose the tool last

Yesterday, someone asked me if I could design "an MS Access database" for him.

Growl.

As I reflected on it, I realized that the problem is not really the particular technology specified - the problem is that the technology was specified at all before the need was described.

If I offered to make you anything you wanted for dinner, would you ask for "something made with a Teflon spatula?" If you did, I'd tell you, "No no no no no. Describe what you want to eat, and let me figure out what I'm going to use to cook it."

My potential client didn't literally mean that he wanted MS Access to be used, he meant that he wants a database with a GUI interface. He thinks of "Access database" as a way to describe that, because it's the only thing he's ever seen used to build products vaguely resembling the one he's imagining. It's nothing more than a limitation of vocabulary and experience.

The problem is that, so often, that kind of pidgin is taken literally. Tools are pre-selected far too early - while the business users are imagining their needs, before the geeks themselves are even involved,

As a result, there are a lot of geeks out there trying to beat eggs with Teflon spatulas.

My story ends happily, however. My potential client got it when I explained this, and we're going to meet so I can find out what he wants. Then - and only then - will we start discussing which tools to use.

Penguicon talk materials

Ooh - sorry, I got distracted! Here, at last, are the materials for my talk last Saturday, "Into the Dayta-b'hase: A First-Level Introductory Adventure".

A tarball is here with the slides (dnd.html), queries run (scripts.sql), and a big SQL script to set up the database (dnd.sql)

tax rant

ABSTRACT

Citibank spends a lot of time imploring their customers to go to all-electronic statements... but they don't improve their electronic statement availability to make them practical. Ohio Dept. of Taxation spends a lot of time imploring people to file electronically... but they can't be bothered to test their forms, or to provide a feedback button so that end users can notify them of errors they find.

This is a bad pattern. If you want people to go electronic, focus on getting it right, not on pro-electronic cheerleading.

* * * * *

Ohio has a "use tax" - a law requiring that you add up all your mail-order and interstate purchases from out of state so you can retroactively pay Ohio sales tax on them with your tax return. I think six or seven of us actually obey this law, and the folks at the bureau of taxation laugh, blow a kazoo, and scrawl "PATSY!" on the return whenever they come across someone who paid it. Oh, well.

Digging up records on all these purchases sucks. Citibank, though I love their customer support*, didn't help. (You can download your last six statements, one at a time... or, after March, you can request a PDF report of the whole last year - please allow two business days for your request to be processed. Excuse me? Some people store information on devices called "computers"? A year of credit card statements is about 50 KB... I think you can afford to keep that on disk. Ask Google if you're hard up, they'll give you a few gigs.)

So anyway... I finally, FINALLY, splice electronic records and sift paper records and total up my internet purchases for the year... open up the Adobe form from tax.ohio.gov... and...

...and the line to enter your quantity of out-of-state purchases is not editable. It is pre-set to zero and locked.

One good thing has come out of tonight: I found wesabe, a really nice site for slurping up records from your various accounts automatically. Next year I won't need to fight Citibank, because my Wesabe account will keep itself updated all year long. Wesabe, I'm happy to say, gets it right. Free services generally do, as opposed to people I pay, who generally get it wrong. It's a strange era we live in.

(* - When my credit card was stolen years ago, Citibank was absolutely wonderful to me. It'll take a lot of blundering to erode the goodwill they earned from me then.)

PyOhio

It's official! We have a place, we have a date... now all we need is you!

PyOhio

Regional Python programming miniconference

July 26th, 2008

Columbus Metropolitan Library

96 S. Grant Ave.

Columbus, OH 43215 USA

Tags: python open-source programming conference ohio

Alas, Mendelson's

Mendelson's is planning to shrink their store and relocate. This is very sad news. I can only hope they don't shrink too much or move too far. Fortunately, they have no timetable for this move yet, and if we're lucky a giant asteroid will hit the earth and wipe us all out first.

If you don't know Mendelson's, the best way I can describe it is "a Jawa sandcrawler parked in downtown Dayton". It's a giant industrial salvage shop, the most amazing pile of thingies and whatsits you can imagine. I consider it the most entertaining location in our fair city. If you can walk through Mendelson's without saying, "MY robot will have THIS!", then you are already dead.

Beautiful Visual Python examples

The best thing that can happen, when you try to teach something, is to have somebody learn it and do something that amazes you. That's exactly what happened after my demo of Visual Python at CodeMash... Doug Mair started to play with vPython and came up with two really beautiful examples: a (working!) Rubik's Cube and a set of magnetized disks.

Thank you, Doug!

PyOhio

a regional Python miniconference

Ohio had a good representation at PyCon, and we agreed that the time has come.

http://pyohio.org

announcement-only list: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pyohio

planning list: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pyohio-organizers

Almost everything is up in the air right now... all we know for certain is that we're aiming for one day, presumably a Saturday, in the Columbus, OH area. Join us, and help the plan take shape!

Teach Me Twisted

I got home from PyCon last night, having stayed for sprints for the first time (I'll blog about that later). It was amazing.

One of the amazing things was Steve Holden's Teach Me Twisted session. I came out of simple curiosity; I witnessed the invention of a whole new form of teaching, I think.

Steve had the front of the room and a laptop with a projector, just as if he were teaching a conventional class - only he wasn't teaching, he was learning. All he had, to begin with, were some ideas of what Twisted could do, not how to do them. "So, how would I use Twisted to check if my website is up?", he began. The Twisted experts sprinkled throughout the audience talked him through it. Steve asked questions to move the session along, and channeled the discussion to keep it focused on his needs as a learner. In particular, when the Twisted experts started waxing eloquent on subtleties or engaging each other in esoteric discussions, Steve cut them off and redirected them back into the task at hand - the task of directing a beginner.

It was wonderfully effective! When you think about it, the standard classroom arrangement gives all the power to the teacher, which is precisely where it doesn't belong, because the teacher is distanced from the learners' needs. By the time you're an expert, you've forgotten what it was like to be ignorant. Bad teachers even forget how to pity the ignorant, using the podium to demonstrate their mastery of the subject to an imaginary audience of fellow masters. Good teachers try to be responsive to the learners' needs, but the arrangement conspires against them. They're like a blindfolded chauffeur, trying to find the road by the verbal instructions of their passengers, who may be too shy to even speak up. It's very hard for a learner to muster the courage to tell a teacher, "I still don't understand what you're saying, and your tangents aren't helping."

By taking the role of the ultimate, empowered learner, Steve turned all that on its head, and made for a session that really was all about the learners' needs to learn. Yet even the experts said afterward that they, too, had learned from it. Perhaps that's because it harnessed the multi-directional, easygoing, collaborative spirit of a good Open Space session, while remaining technical and specific, not wandering into vague chitchat. Bravo, Steve!

Pycon-organizers is buzzing about it, with perhaps overambitious dreams of immediately start a whole series of "Teach Me..." sessions. I'm thinking about trying it out at a local Dynamic Languages SIG meeting. Teach Me Ruby, SIG guys?

PyCon Cleveland 2010: Python Rocks!

PyCon is coming to Cleveland in 2010!

OK, I understand there are some other places bidding to host PyCon - some podunk towns like San Francisco and Atlanta - and I'm sure the PyCon organizers will hear their bids attentively, because they're generous people. But, c'mon, you don't seriously think anybody but Cleveland could win, do you? After all, Cleveland is Cleveland, and the others are not!

Anyway, if you want to help bring PyCon to Cleveland, it's time to join the ClePy mailing list and start figuring out how to make it happen.

Live from PyCon

Yesterday, I was wondering whether this year's PyCon was really turning out to be as amazing as its attendance suggested.

I'm not wondering today. I saw some excellent conventional talks earlier in the day. Mike Bayer showed yummy new SQLAlchemy with infectuous enthusiasm. Kumar McMillan gave a blessedly clear explanation of Unicode in Python. Brandon Rhodes laid out ideas like Adapter patterns very nicely, and showed magnificent stage presence, too.

During discussion of Boston's PyCon 2010 bid:

Steve Holden: "I'm not surprised food is expensive. You send them perfectly good tea, and they throw it in the harbor."

And then, as the pre-scheduled talks ended, the Open Space board went white-hot. I learned a lot at well-attended Open Spaces for DevChix, DBSprockets, and usergroup leaders, and could have enjoyed a dozen other sessions if only I could fork myself.

Right now, I'm finishing my day at Steve's "Teach Me Twisted" session, and wow. I didn't even really care about Twisted, I just wanted to see how the learner-driven idea would work out, and it's going great. About a dozen fat brains and fifty hungry brains are here, and Steve is doing a masterful job of herding us along with skill and humor. How he's managing to absorb this all at the same time as he guides it along with well-placed questions, I don't know. I guess that's what years of teaching experience can do.

Itamar Shtull-Trauring: "Can't we refactor the code a bit more?"
Alex Martelli: "No."

KDE 4: wait

I'm a habitual early adopter. For instance, I moved my production databases to Oracle 11g weeks ago. So, naturally, I had to try the new Kubuntu with KDE 4.0. Sometimes, however, "alpha" really means "alpha", as in "nope, it's not ready yet, leave it alone unless you really want to suffer for science".

So far, these are the features from earlier Kubuntu / KDE combinations that aren't working for me on the new Hardy / KDE4 alpha-alpha.

• response to volume / mute buttons on hardware
• Automatic mounting of USB drives (the device doesn't show up under /media until after you've navigated into it with Dolphin)
• Alt-Tab switching between windows (AAAAAARGH!)

This last one brings it to the threshhold of unusability, and I'll probably uninstall, unless I can find a keyboard shortcut to switching windows soon (and I've had little luck finding a good users' introduction to KDE4). Now, I'm sure there's lots of wonderful stuff about KDE4. I think there's an eternal tension between brilliant designers who improve products and ungrateful users who do nothing but gripe. That's because, if you introduce fifty new features that will please me greatly - when I get around to learning to use them - while, at the same time, breaking five old features that I know and have come to rely on... well, I say the new version "sucks". It isn't fair, is it? But it's the way it works.

learner-driven Open Space

Over one thousand registrations are in the system for PyCon 2008. Over 2**10, actually. Amazing!

After exulting a bit over that kind of growth, I moved on to worrying about whether PyCon can keep the magic that makes it so great as it grows. A look through the still-forming Open Space schedule quickly reassured me. For instance, Steve Holden has scheduled an Open Space session called "Teach Me Twisted" - not because he knows Twisted, but because he wants to learn it. So he's challenged the Twisted community to come and teach it, and it looks like they're responding.

Learner-driven content - I love it!

Introducing Mixed

As far as I know, the Cheese Shop didn't have any way to handle fractions and mixed numbers... until now. Introducing mixed.

>>> print Mixed('-1 1/2') + 2
1/2
>>> print Mixed('3/4') + Mixed('1/2')
1 1/4
>>> print Mixed('-1-1/4') * 2
-2 1/2

You'll feel like you're in second grade all over again!

easy_install mixed to get it.

I hosted the code on Assembla, which has free mercurial repository hosting, so anybody who wants to polish it up is welcome to! hg clone http://hg.assembla.com/mixed_python mixed_python gets you a copy of the repository.

And all this because I was importing into a table last night and noticed some mixed numbers. A normal human being would have just converted them to floats in her head and gone to bed...

Speaking at PenguiCon

I really enjoyed last year's PenguiCon - science fiction geekery and FOSS geekery make a surprisingly nice combination, with the SF people adding a nice lightheartedness to the atmosphere.

I'm giving a talk again this year, but this time, it will have nothing to do with Python - really! I'm going to try some of that hybrid vigor for my own talk, hoping that a fun theme will leaven a potentially dry topic.

Into the Dayta-b'hase: A First-level Introductory Adventure

April 19th, 2:00

Relational database technology underpins modern business, finance, engineering, and a lot of other boring stuff. You know you ought to learn something about databases, but how can you stay awake long enough? Come see database software used for something that actually matters: D&D characters. We'll set up a postgreSQL database, demonstrate all the fundamentals of relational databases, and advance Gruk the Unbathed to 4th level.

Northfield B
Hilton Detroit/Troy-Auburn Hills

5500 Crooks Rd

Troy, MI 48098 USA

(248)879-2100

how to spoil an OSS conference

I'm expecting to be in Washington D.C. on April 22-23, so imagine my delight when I learned of a "Military Open Source Software Conference" at that very time... in that very place! I work on a military contract! What could be better?

Now imagine my shock when I went to register. $1.945. For two days. Two days!

This, folks, is the problem with conferences run by for-profit training companies instead of volunteer organizations. No, wait, it's just one of the problems.

26 Senior Experts from: OSD, BTA, DHS, DON/CIO, AFAE, SPAWAR, FCS-BCT PO, HPCPO NGA, NASA/JPL, PEO-STI, USACE, Hill AFB, BAE, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Unisys, IBM, CSC, Rockwell Collins, Sun, Booz Allen Hamilton, Autodesk, SEI, and Mercury

What's wrong with this list? Not one representative of any open-source project! With a speakers' list like that, I don't know if it's even worth pilfering a hotel catering uniform and a pitcher of ice water to go eavesdrop on the talks.

Apparently, the topic is limited to decisions regarding open-source at a managerial level, rather than the actual use of the software and participation in its communities. That shows a serious lack of understanding. Breaking the separations between decisionmakers, code-writers, and users is part of what gives open source its power.

And suppose you, as an attendee, wish to suggest a topic, present a talk, or facilitate a discussion? Well, you can't. There's no provision for participation by the attendee community. Again, they very seriously do not get it, only seeing one-way relationships from paid content creators to passive content receivers. It seems that, just as "you can write COBOL in any language", you can buy proprietary software under any license.

It all makes me extra-grateful to the volunteers who run conferences like PyCon. (Register by March 7!)

VC cloning into an existing directory

Mercurial won't let me clone into an existing directory.

This is a problem when trying to put (only) a subset of files under version control. For example, an Oracle installation includes an enormous directory structure. A few of its files really, really ought to be under version control (init.ora, tnsnames.ora, etc.); most shouldn't. I need an hg repository in the root of the Oracle software installation. Then, when I set up Oracle on a new machine, I need to clone that repository into the new machine's Oracle root... even though the new machine's Oracle root already exists and is chock-full of files.

$ hg clone src target
abort: destination 'target' already exists

I'm surprised that there's no --overwrite flag for hg clone, or anything like it, saying "go ahead and clone into that directory even though it already exists." Perhaps it's simply because VC programmers are software developers, used to working with a clean slate rather than configuring an existing directory structure? Anyway, I made up a script workaround.

hg clone $1 $1_clone_temp
cp -r $1_clone_temp/* $2/
rm -r $1_clone_temp

Or, in Windows,

hg clone %1 %1_clone_temp
xcopy /e /s /h /g /y %1_clone_temp %2
rmdir /s /q %1_clone_temp

Thanks to the Linuxchix irc channel for helping me figure out the syntax.

Dayton Oracle SIG

At last, it's time for DAY-O to meet!

Meeting of Dayton-Oracle SIG (DAY-O)

March 10, 2008, 5:30 pm

A hands-on, cooperative, laboratory-style meeting. Bring a wireless-enabled laptop if you have one. This meeting's topic will be Flashback.

Mary-Ann's Kitchen

33 N Ludlow St

Dayton OH 45402 USA

(937) 222-3663

Access forbidden. Attempted work detected.

The forbidden-content blocker at my worksite is more stupid than the one at your worksite. Doubt me? "Computing/Internet" is one of its forbidden categories. Blogs, another forbidden category, are the biggest problem because, as you know if you're reading this, most of the good code samples in existence these days are on blogs. We aren't allowed to appeal categories, only individual sites.

When I whined about it to my boss, he reminded me that I've done some work with web-scraping, and that I could probably write a Python script to make an exemption request for thousands of blogs at once, including ones I've never seen but might Google up someday. It'll benefit thousands of geeks across the organization, and maybe even convince somebody that they should turn the "stupid" dial down a notch.

I love my boss.

Here's the plan:
1. whitelist and blacklist of known legit and non-legit sites, respectively
2. count words. Words that appear much more frequently on whitelisted sites than on blacklisted are positive scorers, and vice versa.
3. apply the scoring vs. unknown sites. Hand-check a lot of results. Beef up the whitelists and blacklists and repeat until the scores against new sites are reliable.

Oddly enough, the hardest part of the process is gathering a long enough blacklist. I'm not just talking porn - I need harmless but non-work-related stuff, blogs where people are writing about their Irish setter instead of their SQL queries. (I need bunches of them - dozens, at least - so don't just comment to tell me, "My blog is useless and banal!")

One of the best sources I've found so far has been googling for "typical stupid blog".

TechFest 2008

If you're near Dayton, and you have a child, or know a child, or can find a child, or feel like a child, then you really need to get to TechFest!

ASC TechFest 2008

Hands-on science and technology family fun

Feb. 16, 10 AM - 6 PM; Feb. 17, 11 AM - 5 PM

Sinclair Community College - Ponitz Center

444 W. Third St., Dayton, OH

I'm afraid the information technology people haven't traditionally brought stuff with quite the "wow" factor that the physical scientists and engineers bring. What's something we computer geeks could do that would compete with the chemists' goo-making or the physicists' pneumatic implosions? Have to think about that one.

in school, not even a Smurfette

So far, I've taken my smashing-planets introduction to Python to two groups of college students: the Wright State chapter of ACM and an OO programming class at University of Dayton. It's been lots of fun. I appreciate the chance to show young people something I really love, something I think can make their computer work more productive and more fun. My thanks to the folks who decided to invite me and the students who gave me their attention.

But. If I don't see a woman student in computer science soon - just, for crying out loud, one woman student - I am going to... I don't know. I'm going to have to research "how to go berserk".

What's going on in this country? I think I'd see better gender balance in a classroom in Iran.

Packet from table 6

I wish I knew more about networking. I have a technical need that I can barely describe, much less name.

For our new Dayton Oracle SIG, we want to run interactive, laboratory-style meetings. We'll meet in a place with wireless, one member will bring a laptop running an Oracle server and Oracle Application Server, and other members will use their laptops to access it and muck around.

This requires the computers using the wireless network to access not just the internet, but each other. I'd call this "peer-to-peer" networking, but it's really "peer-to-router-to-peer".

If I connect to my wireless at home and issue ifconfig, it reports eth1 ... inet addr:192.168.1.45. For other machines connected to the same router, that IP address is as usable as anything on the internet. If Oracle and Apache are running on the machine, I can use 192.168.1.45:1521 and 192.168.1.45:80 to log into the database or view webpages from other machines. If I go into my router and set Port Forwarding to ship incoming traffic to 192.168.1.45, then those become visible to the wider internet... but, to access them within the wireless network, I don't even need to do that. (In fact, I don't see any way I could turn it off even if I wanted to.)

So all we need is a meeting location that allows the same thing. It's not that simple, though. As far as I can tell, the wireless at Panera Bread (my first choice) doesn't permit this kind of inter-machine connection. That locally assigned IP address doesn't produce any response from other machines in the same network; it seems the router simply doesn't route traffic between machines. For security's sake, that kind of makes sense; I wouldn't want somebody hacking my database from the next table over. (Actually, if they did, I'd invite them to the SIG, but that's me.) But it removes some really neat possibilities for interaction.

I've found one place so far - the Hope Hotel in Fairborn - where the wireless does allow connections between machines. I was all ready to declare the hotel restaurant our meeting location, until my boss reminded me that it's full of GIANT TELEVISION SCREENS BLARING SPORTS and some people don't tune that out as automatically as I do.

I suppose there's always the option of bringing a router with me... but then I'd have to bridge people's traffic up to the internet somehow. I'm sure it can be done, it's just something I've never developed the skills for, nor do I own a particularly portable router. Hmm...

Chicago

CODE Hacker for the World,
Programming Tool Maker, Stacker of w00t,
Player with Rails and the Nation's Error Handler,
SourceForge, Cheese Shop, CPAN,
City of the Big Dynamic Language Conferences:...

I just found out that Chicago, after hosting PyCon in March, will host YAPC::NA in June, and hosted RailsConf in 2006. Crazy!

Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need makes a joke that every single state claims to be "dynamic". Looks like they all lose to Chicago, though, because that's where the real dynamic types come to play.

brilliant PyCon publicity ideas

I was alarmed to find that many of the attendees at CodeMash didn't know that PyCon 2008 will be in Chicago - right here in our beloved Midwest.

So, as volunteer publicity coordinator, I thought I should brainstorm on more ways to get the word out. Here's what I've come up with so far.

• National "got whitespace?" skywriting campaign
• Spread urban legend about programmer whose kidneys are stolen by organ smugglers when he fails to attend PyCon
• Invite presidential candidates to debate their choice of Python web framework at PyCon
• Post hilarious "DO NOT WANT STATIC MANIFEST TYPING!!1!" pic at icanhascheezburger
• Vote Guido into final round of American Idol
• Bribe fortune cookie factory employee to replace fortunes with "PYCON 2008 CHICAGO IN BED"
• Use laser to engrave giant announcement in the moon's surface
• JEN IN TEARS AFTER ANGELINA'S LIGHTNING TALK

Please supply more ideas in the comments... (serious ideas doubly welcome!)

CodeMash slides

Thanks, everybody, for another great CodeMash - even better than last year! More babbling about it will follow when I have time,

As promised, the material from my presentation. It's almost identical to my LinuxFest presentation of last September.

Introducing cmd2

cmd is a Python Standard Library module for constructing command-prompt applications. It's very easy to use - just subclass its Cmd type, create an instance, and call that instance's .cmdloop(). To support a command, just write a do_yourcommandname(self, arg) method within your Cmd instance.

cmd is also very bare-bones. It forms the backbone of sqlpython, and while improving that package, I've created cmd2. cmd2 is an extension for cmd that adds helpful functionality without requiring any changes to cmd-based applications.

• Searchable command history
  
• Load commands from file, save to file, edit commands in file
  
• Multi-line commands
  
• Case-insensitive commands
  
• Special-character shortcut commands (beyond cmd's "@" and "!")
  
• Settable environment parameters
  
• Parsing commands with flags

I've found several alternatives to cmd in the Cheese Shop - CmdLoop, cly, CMdO, and pycopia. cly looks wonderful, but I haven't been able to get it working under Windows, and that's a show-stopper for many potential sqlpython users. In any case, none of the alternatives are based on cmd - they're written from scratch, which means that a cmd-based app would need complete rewriting to use them. I like sticking close to the Standard Library whenever possible. cmd2 lets you do that.

Switching a cmd application to cmd2 is as simple as changing from from cmd import Cmd to from cmd2 import Cmd, and the new functionality is ready to go. See a usage example of cmd2.

It's in the Cheese Shop, so you can easy_install cmd2. (Cheese Shop page for cmd2)

Geek Event Aggregator code

I've told several people that I would post the code for the Geek Event Aggregator "as soon as I get it cleaned up".

Today, I swallowed my pride and admitted that I've really got to post something - that the much-needed code cleanup isn't going to happen for months. So, I created a page for it at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/whatwhenwhere/

Not that you want to do that. It's ugly. Really. It will be cleaned up someday, but if you really want to make use of it now, there it is.

I decided to name the project "whatwhenwhere" because the code might well be used to aggregate events that are not at all geeky, and to host it at Google Code because, well, I'd never tried it.

Most of the stuff you might be conceivably interested in is in scan.py, ship.py, and events/model.py.

CodeMash

Oops, I've been forgetting my blog badge.


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!