A liveblog of the day…
13:12: Getting set for Advanced Python II. Unicode, the broccoli of my world.
0845: Settled in for Advanced Python I. Minor network glitch when I forgot to disable my static IP address, which our home network backups need.
Wow this talk was excellent.
This year I’m monitoring only the Twitter back channel. I mourn IRC’s slow passing from the scene.
It’s been interesting.
Outside of Louisville, one of my company’s systems got hung. I was on a bus on I-65, working on a VM in a Chicago colo facility, for my Seattle employer. It was neither seamless nor without occasional setbacks, but it was a fascinating situation.
Tonight I check in, shower, eat a sit-down meal, and prep for the first Tutorial day.
Tonight, I leave for the bus station, to travel for 2+ days by bus for a week of PyCon 2011 in Atlanta.
I’ll liveblog and tweet (using the #pycon hashtag) my bus ride through America’s heartland, and then from the conference.
“Kathy,” I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw
I’ve come to look for America“Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said, “Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera”
I expect to gravitate toward talks about optimization and performance analysis; scaling; and deployment techniques.
I’m going to use AT&T tethering while I’m traveling to & from PyCon 2011. CLEAR/Clearwire could have gotten my business, but their service has been so terrible at home. They lose!
I intensely dislike how airline travel is conducted in the US. The TSA’s procedures and behaviour, add-on fees, in-flight comfort minimization… Bah.
In getting to & from PyCon 2011, I’ve decided to try traveling by Greyhound Bus.
Seattle to Atlanta round trip is $245, and 2.5 days each way. That’s about $100 cheaper, two more days each way, and 90% less of a degrading experience than traveling by air.
I’ve never travelled overnight by bus. I’m treating this as an interesting experiment. Will it be relaxing, interesting, and fascinating — or boring, claustrophobic, and tiring? Whatever it will be, I won’t have to take off my shoes and belt and be irradiated by airport non-security.
PyCon registration is right around the corner.
C’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon.
Update: Some videos are available only as Ogg Vorbis downloads, while others play in the blip.tv screen control. The Continuous Integration talk was just put up.
Update: The blip.tv page seems to be videos from all PyCons. There’s no way to search, or filter to narrow down to PyCon 2010. That’s stupid. I’ll update again when I know more.
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The PyCon 2010 videos are becoming available. Rather than squinting at the sidebar episode list, you’ll probably find browsing the archive easier.
Two of my favorite ones were David Beazley’s GIL talk and Titus Brown’s Continuous Integration talk.
I’ll update this as the day progresses at PyCon 2010.
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1518: Boy, the wireless network here done wonders for my, uh, e-mail connectivity.
1512: A hot button of mine: I learned to pronounce it, “LAY-tech”, not, “LAH-tech.”
1509: Please Pirate manifesto! Brilliant lightning talk! And it has a blog.
1433: We’re ending with more lightning talks. After which I’ll hack code for the rest of the day.
1355: Hg and Git : Can’t we all just get along? A comparison of the two systems. “Our enemy is SVN.” Revlog vs. associative storage.
1315: Modern version control: Mercurial internals. More internal information than I needed, but I picked up useful tidbits.
1200: My wife sent me a photo of one of our cats staring intently at a nest of noisy Starlings in the gutter above my study. PyCon has been superb, but I’m looking forward to going home.
Kitty staring at birds: So close yet so far.
I’ll update this as the day progresses at PyCon 2010.
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1727: Debating whether to attend the lightning talks, or have dinner now and hack Django tonight. Django coding wins.
1655: Testing and Testability. “Testability is as important as all the other -ilities.” Testable code is better code – better design, etc. Better tests are convenient, fast, unambiguous, and repeatable. Advises peeling production setup and cleanup from the work, so that the guts of the work will have a clean interface and hence be easier to test. “A Test:Product ration of 1:1 is not unreasonable.” “You will write test framework code.”
1615: Why not run all your Tests all the Time? Hudson, Buildbot, et al. Minimalistic CI can be just a shell script, cron job, and notification system. The speaker advocates Hudson. Although written in Java, it appears to be quite feature-rich, slick, and easy to use. “Great for small-ish projects.” His take on Buildbot: Very powerful and configurable, but requires a high level of expertise for configuration and management. It is “frustratingly annoying to configure and maintain,” and debugging Buildbot setups is excruciating, “‘Just use zc.buildout and collective.buildout’ – now you have two problems.” He pushes very hard for Hudson, and says use Buildbot if and only if you outgrow Hudson. An excellent talk.
1540: Plone folks at PyCon 2010:
Plonistas at PyCon 2010
I’m in the photo, even though I haven’t worked in Plone since Fisher Communications embraced the future by firing 99% of its Web team.
I’ll update this as the day progresses at PyCon 2010.
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1743: Lightning talks. Some sophomoric obscene humor is on display in one of the talks.
1655: Scaling your Python Application on EC2. Reddit’s move to EC2. They run 16 Python applications per server, two per core. 256 virtual CPUs, 432 GB of RAM. Problems in cloud migration. EBS devices sometime slow down, sometimes a lot. Workaround was using software RAID to ameliorate the effects of a slow disk. Latency between virtualized hardware bit them.
They use four master databases, with each one having at least one read slave. They avoid reading from the master, if possible. They wrote their own database access layer, because “at the time there wasn’t a good database ORM layer.” PostgreSQL is used as a key/value store – it was faster than any key/value store they tried. (!) They love memcached: 5GB render cache, 15GB data cache, and 10GB precomputed queries cache.
Logged-out users always get cached content, so Akamai bears the load. These users are about 80% of total site traffic.
Advocated heavy use of queues. They’re used for votes, comments, thumbnail scrapes, precomputed queries, etc.
They also use C. Their whitespace filter is in C. They are switching to a memcache C library.
They didn’t use Django, because Django was “early alpha” then, support was hard to find, rendering was slow, and “the sandbox was hampering.” So they chose Pylons.
Moving to EC2 saved them 30% per month in ?total operational costs? ?server and technology costs? They pay $20K/month for hosting on EC2.
1600: Powerful Pythonic Patterns. http://www.aleax.it/pycon_ppp.pdf. 99% of the #pycon twitter traffic praised the greatness of this talk. I wasn’t impressed. Half of it was a needless exposition of particular words’ meaning. “Design” comes after “research” and before “implementation,” wow, holy Toledo, no kidding?
But, here’s one good slide from the talk:
Anti-Patterns
1455: The Ring of Python. Good talk about the various Python interpreters – differences, idiosyncrasies, pros, cons.
I’ll update this as the day progresses at PyCon 2010.
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1634: It’s just dawned on me that Jacob has as much energy at 4:30 pm as he does at 9:00 am. Yeow.
1620: Linux-HA for redundancy at the very front-end.
1605: Database redundancy via connection middleware. The next release of PostgreSQL will have built-in hot-standby. Advocates pgpool-II. Don’t run the connection pool middleware on the same server hosting the DBMS. Duh. He installed pgpool-II on both httpd servers.
1541: Caching: Memcached. The end. He advocates running memcached on every machine with RAM to spare. Adding extra machines = increasing memcached’s key space. Allocate 1/8 to 1/4 of memory to memcached.
1539: By his descriptions of their capabilities, Perlbal is a win over Nginx as a load balancer. Which matches everything else I’ve heard. I’ll have to ask him why he’s then showing how to use Nginx as a load balancer.
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