Category: liveblogging

Last night, I was sitting around the conference lobby and overheard some people talking. One person was saying the conference was ok, though he’d heard nothing remarkable so far.

Going to a techie conference can be a hit-or-miss thing. You never know what’s going to strike you, what’s going to be relevant. I’m reminded of a story of a Buddhist monk at a monastery who holds up a single finger during a talk, which mystified all the monks listening to him except for one, who immediately attained enlightenment. (Yes, Zen Buddhism is replete with these loony kinds of parables, something you don’t find so much in Christian scripture).

I sat on several different sessions, none of which seemed to lift a finger for me. Actually during one of the plone tutorial sessions, the instructor  answered a question of mine with an explanation that only somewhat satisfied me, and then he mentioned a key phrase, “XML-RPC” which totally made me understand. Rather, I didn’t totally understand, but I understood what I needed to do to learn to craft a solution to the problem I was dealing with.

Sometimes when working on a technical problem, sometimes all you need is a  nudge to  a solution. When asking a question in a forum or newsgroup, you don’t need a complete explanation, just something to look up. Often the problem is one of terminology. You want to do X. What is the technical term for this functionality so I know how to look it up in the documentation?  Sometimes you have an idea about how to do something, but then an experienced pro may have a different view of what the problem actually is. Also, in the open source world, chances are someone already has done a similar kind of project, so all you really need to know is that it exists somewhere, so you can search for it.

Yesterday, I talked to one of the coauthors of Python Cookbook, a great book of recipes submitted by the python community that illustrate how to write in python. Programming books, typically are too abstract or deal with one example application that is discussed and extended throughout every chapter. (By the last chapter, you are sure to be sick of this movie database, online bookstore that was invented by the author. Recipes are smaller and more task-specific; plus you can see how problems can be solved in different domains (not only the ones of interest to you). When using a mature language like python, chances are you’re relying on standard libraries which provide domain-specific functions, so maybe you may never need to use the networking modules if you don’t touch this for example. But algorithms, tricks, shortcuts, organizational methods, all these things can be gleaned whatever type of problem you are trying to solve.

I type this as I listen to Guido Van Rossum give his keynote address. Guido is the elder preist/benevolent dictator/code pope  of the Python language (now he works at google apparently).  Disciples listen and nod approvingly, but few understand the ultimate truth of it.

For the record, my last day working at Texas Instruments was Tuesday. (more on that later).

But I’m now at a session about python programming for Nokia cellphones. (Nokia was Texas Instruments biggest customer). Curiously, in this room, I bumped into about 5 different owners of Nokia 770 PDAs, a device which  I own also.  This device has lots of mindshare in the geek community, presumably more than the subject of the talk I’m attending. The neighbor next to me writes medical records applications for portable devices; the company he works for sees the advantage of writing something in an opensource environment.
I’m agnostic about the companies I used to work for; I don’t make it a point to say great things or bad things about Dell or TI, but it’s great that Nokia has embraced the open source community so wholeheartedly.  A few years ago people were predicting that linux would become the OS of choice of portable/embedded devices, and lo and behind, a European country was the one to figure that out.

Conference note: although Wifi provided by the conference hotel is adequate, the big limiting factor is power strips. About a third of the rows don’t have any access to power as we know it. In today’s keynote, I noticed about 200 developers all in one room, everybody with their own laptop (and  presumably checking email or their feedreaders during slow moments).  If I had a gun, and demanded that everybody hand over their laptop to me, I could become a wealthy man.

This morning I ran into someone who was wearing my exact same windbreaker. Yes, we admitted with embarrassment, we bought them at Walmart.

At conferences like this, people are constantly looking at each other’s nametags to see if you’re famous (I’m not).
Yesterday I sat through two tutorials: one on Text Processing with Python. Dry subject, but of immense interest to programers. It has to do with massaging data and creating reports, understanding how to format strings in exactly the right way. It’s also about using regular expressions to find and change data. A little over my head, but still helpful to walk through (esp because you really need to try it yourself to make it work).

Other things: apparently HP installs Windows OS using Python scripts (that’s why ordinary consumers are seeing Python directories in their HP machines).

Joel Burton gave a talk summarizing the cool things about the Plone interface. A lot of this stuff was already familiar to me, but I was pleasantly surprised to see some features working better than I remembered when I first considered it (over a year ago). The GUI editor looks less buggy, and they have better management of sections. They have several default views of folders (thumbnail, etc) that work out of the box. Also, they have live search, a more responsive search method which is definitely better that what they had before. Basically when you type in some terms, a popunder css box shows objects similar to the query. We talked a little about importing large objects (multimedia, etc) . Theoretically zope could import this into its object database but separate products exist to handle that (letting zope/plone handle the metadata). Nate Aune has a short guide on that .

Surprisingly, plone hasn’t really come out with a decent way to manage comments; you need to create a custom workflow for comments, and the views of article + comments seem primitive indeed. We need flatter views, or at least more ways to customize how comments appear. I say this as someone who finds wordpress comment management as superior (even though I’ve turned it off).

On the other hand, plone is adapted to corporate environments where security and control matters more than ease of use.

Keynote talk from 2 plone developers:

Alexander Limi: It’s about empowering the middle class, not figuring out an esoteric syntax problem in your code. Have you seen how most people and companies work? Limi mentions the example of a billion dollar Fortune 500 company that shared valuable financial information by emailing spreadsheets and dropping things on shared network drives. That’s how most people work.
Alan Runyan talks about the experience of deploying a bigass system for Oxfam. Yes, they did cool things, but it was eye-opening nonetheless to see it was saving the company time and money. Even with employee turnover, it was relatively easy for newcomers to catch up and get started. Training costs were reduced, and over time Oxfam was able to do development work internally.