Ryan Wilcox: rpwConferences

ADHOC (finished!)

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 01:46:13 GMT

The ADHOC conference is over for the year. Here's hoping for many more. The ADHOC 2005 Papers have also been released, including mine (Types++: Typesafe Metadata, and Other Thoughts Beyond int ). Also reported by: OSNews.com

AHDOC: Applescript training

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 20:07:25 GMT

I just discovered today that ADOC is going to have Applescript training sessions by... (wait for it)... Matt Neuburg! Matt's Applescript Book really is the authoritative source about learning about the Applescript language itself, the deep dark corners, hidden secrets, and the skeletons in the closet. This year I'll certainly post the List Of People I Met At ADHOC 2005. Hmm. I thought I had a list of People I Met At ADHOC 2004 (or maybe 2003), but Google can't find it. Hmmmm. I did find the list of people who came to my Blogger BOF at ADHOC 2004, so that's nice. Speaking of the Blogger BOF, anybody want to do that again?

Too much fun (or too much caffine)

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 03:32:29 GMT

So I'm at ADHOC writing my slides, and loving it. It's either that I understand LaTeX now (but I'd better, after spending probably 2 straight days in it), or because I'm having lots of fun hanging out with nerdly people talking about geeky stuff. Or it could be the caffeine rush. I'll be back with talk about the keynote and some sessions... well... sometime Thursday.

PyCon Day 3 Wrapup

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 17:29:47 GMT

Something I've noticed during my stay here at PyCon - it's harder to get people going after the first day. The first day all the sessions start on time, go over through some of lunch, and sessions scheduled to start after lunch do. The second day during (and a bit after) lunch we had a tounge-twister competition whic went a bit over... and it seemed really hard after that to pull my brain back into Python. Today I meant to go to a session at 11:30, got distracted by lunch, and now at 1:15PM we're starting the after lunch session. (Oh, and today there are no formal sessions after the 2:45 break. After that we're doing informal group discussions, work, etc as we see fit.) But in one way I'm glad we're wrapping up earlier today - I'm very spent after 3 days of 10-12 hour days (and a big day of adventuring around DC). I'm going to enjoy the extra time I'll get to sleep in on Saturday (our plane doesn't leave until mid-afternoon).

PyCon: Day 2 Wrapup

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 01:01:55 GMT

I'm at the Python In Education Birds Of A Feature now. A lot of people who are currently programming got their start either playing around with early computers (C64s, Apple ][s, etc) and teaching them to do amazing things, with a simple, easy to learn, and languages/APIs with instant gratification. Except now that it's much much harder to make programs that do significant things - rolodex programs already exist, you don't have to write your own like you did and learn how programming works just to scratch an itch, as you did in the old days. If you did want to build a rolodex program today, you usually have to either learn C++, a framework, and spend waaayyyy too much time starting up - you need to get something up and going fast. Python may provide the answer - an interactive console where you can try stuff out (and get responses right now), a simple programming language with very little confusing syntax, and you can start going with Python with very little formal structure (you can even do an amazing amount of stuff without functions.) For the beginning programmer statically typed languages just don't make sense - I want to save something in a variable and I don't care that there's a difference between booleans, ints, longs, strings or anything - I just want to save that value for later. With a statically typing language, you must care - you can not have variables without saying what kind they are. But why? There's so much other stuff to understand at the beginning, without having to add something extra into the mix. Educators are beginning to teach foreign languages at an earlier age, and introducing computer programming concepts to younger age children helps shape logical thinking skills, even if they aren't going to be programmers at a later age. (I know my programming experience helped me understand accounting in senior year.)

Switching from PHP to Zope/Python

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 15:47:07 GMT

Since it's Zope day (or morning) for me, I'll get around to posting to k5's Switching From PHP to Zope/Python article.

Hmm

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 00:04:02 GMT

Some people just walked in with a SubEthaEdit BOAF (Birds Of A Feather) - they wanted to create a cross-platform SubEthaEdit. If I wasn't working on other stuff, I might be interested... maybe I'll take a peek at what they have tomorrow.

PyCon: Day One - Wrapup

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 21:12:35 GMT

Today I especially enjoyed the talks on: mod_python, the C++ code generating Starkiller project, and a talk on a Data Extraction and Analysis program - a program for astronomers written by a Python newbie using wxPython. The Starkiller one was really really good - translating the dynamic nature of Python into the static-ness of C++ ('cause static, compile-time decisions are faster than runtime decisions) - the project seemed very promising, the creator was very excited about his work - so it turned into one of the fastest paced talks so far at the conference. The Data Extraction and Analysis talk was also interesting - this Python newbie built something in 3 months that was amazingly complex (well, to me - any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic), in a language (and using a framework) that she had just started using. Tomorrow looks like a full day: Zope sessions in morning, 2 hour long sessions in the afternoon, and sessions right up until "close". (Today for me had 1 or 2 dead spots where I didn't have any particular talk I wanted to go to - not so tomorrow.) While I'm at a conference I like to poke at personal projects. Today I got the documentation, infrastructure, and general organization of files working (or at least planned out), so I feel I made good progress on that as well. So very profitable day. No Internet for the rest of the night, so don't expect any more posts... (and yay, fighting Radio to get this to post. w00t. (Maybe this will work)

PyCon SubEthaEdit notes

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 16:50:22 GMT

Ted Leung posts SubEthaEdit notes of the PyCon talks So far participating in this group-notetaking has been a great experience - instead of everybody taking their own notes (like has happened at MacHack the 2 years I've been there).

PyCon Impressions and Keynote Speech

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 12:59:09 GMT

Compared to MacHack (and other random notes):

About the same size, maybe a bit larger. I'm guessing 200-300 people here, although I haven't looked at the offical numbers at all
A fair number of Macs, but mostly Win2K/XP machines
Stranger humor
Working (read: normal people) hours
GWU conference center is fairly nice
Note to self: bring camera
Organized group notetaking (thank you SubEthaEdit)
Nice (printed, laminated) schedule
A dozen contributers to notes (via SubEthaEdit) is interesting (side points/questions, references, many-hands-make-light-work)

More impressions throughout the day

Radio Categories: One Strike, One Home Run

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 04:14:53 GMT

I was playing with Radio categories today. I created one new category, and that worked fine. Slick even. Then I created another (actually I think I changed the name of an existing one), and that didn't work out so great - I have no idea where I am posting. Hey, a 500 ain't bad... but it's software, not baseball, folks.