Seek Nuance

Living at PyCon 24x7x365 would be so much fun.

Daylight Saving Time is a gimmick and a crock and flipping stupid and I hate it.

Personality cults are odd. At a conference, I see this most often in the backchannels. Like on Twitter. If Fred tweets XYZ, it probably won’t be RT’d; and if it is, it’ll be RT’d at most twice. But if a community cognoscenti tweets the same thing, it’s RT’d 18 times as a gem of profound wisdom. That this phenomenon is so obvious only adds to its oddness.

The first day of the main conference! I’m anticipating syncing up with friends, like Andrew and Kirk. With tinges of loss and misery caused by Joe‘s and Ryan‘s absence…

Great Keynote speeches. Morning is metaclasses, classes, and subclasses. Should one run away from metaclasses, or view them as just another tool?(Apologies to Edward Teller‘s estate.) The subclassing talk taught me a thing or two.

“If your class has only two methods and one of them is __init__, it’s not a class. It’s really a function.”

Advanced security topics summary: We’re all doing it wrong and we’re all hoseheads.

Lots o’ good ideas and tips about context managers and decorators. I’m going to rip up some code when I return to work on Monday.

Yesterday was SQL and MongoDB. I plugged up some knowledge gaps. Goodness. Except for a Ming firehose onto which I held for dear life.

Today is a “Python epiphanies” tutorial, and NLTK. More goodness.

Up for day 1. A nice day in Santa Clara. A lime has no place in a breakfast fruit bowl. If I have anything cosmic to share, I’ll do it here.

WAKE UP!

I’m off to PyCon 2012 tomorrow. Yee haw!

Rick Harding of Lococast.net and Mike Pirnat from the From Python Import Podcast interviewed me about my PyCon 2011 bus trip. Listen to it here.

A live blog of the day..

1611: That’s all, folks! Will now figure out what to do before leaving to return home tomorrow. And I have some ideas for how to spend my time on the bus; I need to flesh those out.

1430: Lightning talks and closing remarks.

1340: Hidden Treasures in the Standard Library. A clever trick for serializing arbitrary objects and classes in JSON. Good logging tips.

1310: Scaling Python past 100. Meh.

Read more…

A live blog of the day.

1745: Lightning talks.

1645: How to kill a patent with Python. A talk directly relevant to my IP Street work. He claims that a patent’s abstract and background are the most relevant for domain searches. He developed display graphs very similar to a couple of IP Street’s lenses.

1545: Handling ridiculous amounts of data with probabilistic data structures. C. Titus Brown is smart && a great speaker.

1445: Advanced Network Architectures With ZeroMQ. Don’t use this on the Internet. Less than my expectations.

Read more…

A live blog of the day.

1750: Back in my hotel room. Going to get dinner in the hotel, then decide what to do. Might chill early — must pace myself…

1722: End of the formal sessions. Now there are lightning talks, BOF sessions, and I’m wondering how long keep going before calling it a day.

1645: How to write obfuscated python.

1520: Extreme Network Programming with Python and Linux. Very dry, very interesting. It may be because of the time of day, but I had difficulty absorbing this talk.

Read more…

A liveblog of the day.

1316: Documenting Your Project with Sphinx. I could read the docs, but I like being spoon fed.

This tutorial’s a little more basic than what I was looking for. Still useful, though.

0828: Warming up the matter/anti-matter warp cores. Settled in for Python/Django Deployment Workshop. JKM is presenting, and he’s always been a good & entertaining speaker.

VMs may be obviating package isolation technology. Hrm.