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A Week at `PyCon DC 2004 `__ -- Day 6
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Conference Day 2 -- Thursday, March 25
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:Author: David Goodger
:Contact: goodger@python.org
Woke at 6am, again an hour before my alarm was set to go off. Must be
eager. Arrived at PyCon early again, and had breakfast there.
PyCon's sticky buns & muffins beat the hostel's toast & jelly any day.
The day began with Guido's keynote speech, which was very entertaining
and light. A phrase Guido used struck a chord: "active champion".
The reason most (if not all) proposals/PEPs/projects fail is for lack
of an active champion. I was an active champion for reStructuredText
and Docutils.
Next up were some PyRex talks by Paul Prescod. I wonder if his choice
of "shrubbery" as example was deliberate. I got enough out of the
talk to know that PyRex is cool, and if I ever need to code C
extensions it may be the way to go. But I don't now, so my attention
wandered.
Met a couple of people from last night's BoF, who had ideas for reST:
a one-page reST cheat sheet, and YAML support, perhaps with flowing
columns to save on vertical real estate.
Was joined by Vic Kelson for lunch, who had questions about a
database-driven documentation system with boilerplate and custom
sections. Feasible, for sure. He suggested a possible line for a
business: open source industrial control data acquisition systems.
Evidently the industry standarc, SCADA, sucks -- can't extract data
from it easily.
After lunch, saw part of the new-style class tutorial, and the tail
end of the `Panda3D `__
talk. They had a video of a virtual reality system that makes Happy
Tree Friends seem tame. Next was Tamer Fahmy's `High-Level 3D
Graphics `__ talk,
which went well.
I chaired the last session of the day, 3 talks: Ed Loper's `Epydoc: an
API documentation generation tool
`__, Jim Fulton's
`Literate unit testing: Unit Testing with Doctest
`__, and Phil Pfeiffer's
`Twelve Thousand Test Cases and Counting
`__.
Immediately afterward was the PSF member meeting. We had committee &
treasurer reports, then voted on new Sponsor & Nominated members.
Some discussions followed, about various aspects of communication. We
need better, more focused communication (not necessarily more volume,
though). Roundup's nosy lists seem like the might be the solution.
15 of the PSF people went to a nearby Chinese restaurant for dinner.
The conversation was lively and mostly non-technical, at least at my
end of the table. Back to the PyCon site for a late-night Py-dot-org
BoF. I volunteered myself and Brett Cannon to add encoding support to
`ht2html `__. The group came to a tentative
consensus about a website redesign, or at least a new design for a new
portion of the website.
Back in Adams-Morgan, Thursday evening seems to be a lively night. Or
it might just be the exceptionally warm weather. Hopefully no booming
music tonight, but the earplugs will be on stand-by.
As I finished writing the above in the hostel's kitchen, two young
women walked in, speaking Japanese. I shocked them by greeting them
in fluid, if not fluent, Japanese. Turns out they're exchange
students living in Lawrence, Kansas, visiting New York City and DC
during spring break. We had a nice conversation, soon joined by Tamer
and Nester. I left the unattached young'uns and headed off to bed.
* next: `Day 7 -- Conference Day 3 & A Bit More DC -- Friday, March 26
`__
* up: `Contents <./>`__