pre-pycon stand up and blurt things out in a crowd practice

Tonight, the Python Cambridge Meetup held a practice run for three pycon talks (six of them are from locals, there will be another session 2010-02-03 or thereabouts.)  I'll get pictures up on flickr tomorrow.  I learned a number of interesting things:

• Astronomy has gone enthusiastically for open source.  "We have far more data than grad students, here, have some terabytes!"
• People are actively looking for those who "get" testing and python ("If you think you could have given the talk Ned just gave - I want to hire you" is a direct quote from someone at a startup out in the burbs.)

• I am *not* taking the DSLR to Atlanta.  Granted it will be a larger space, but mirror-flip is *loud* and the lack of auto-focus when using live-view makes it much harder than it should be to shoot from the audience.  The SX10IS is just a much better tool, especially given that the light may be *poor* but it won't be *absent*, plus it does video.  The DSLR wins on speed-to-shot, which is great for bird stalking, but pretty useless in a conference venue.

Oh, and the title? Ned asked for python adoption stories, and I have a pretty good one, and I'd already gotten up and asked people for permission to take their pictures...

(Also, in keeping with not putting *too* much metablog mechanics in here - it turns out that if you're "low on memory" on a G1, you can't receive inbound SMSes - so although it was shiny and didn't lose any of my hard-fought typing, it's eating at least 4M of storage that I would *rather* be using on the next rev of ASE (r17) which finally has UI object support from python.  So this is back to being written in emacs on the big thinkpad... and due to some roving internet outages, *still* getting posted after midnight...)

Pre-pycon hallway-track practice

Another busy day - didn't get home until after midnight, was at my first IAP talk in ages (and I think I've *given* them more recently than attended.)  Call it a bit of intellectual tourism - I don't really have a good reason to care about Continuous Event Processing, but it was interesting to see another place with opportunities to be seriously hard core, and the bits about visual dev environments definitely deserve pondering.

The after class chat went all over the place, ranging from the mechanics of stock markets to the value of usertesting.com for web-thing testing.  I definitely need to take more advantage of being in Cambridge and being able to hang out at MIT physically, not just on Zephyr.

(I also decided that androblogger's dataloss bugs made using the G1 unfairly unpleasant for blogging, so I ditched it and went back to Blogaway... but I still don't really have enough memory for it and should find something to delete - probably Shazam; while it is awesome that it exists for Android, I use it less tha monthly and if I have enough net for it to *work* I have enough to redownload it...)

bugs! bugs all over me!

Hmm, between clearing snow out of the driveway and hunting what turned out to be an unchecked return value (so APT gets added to the list of things that shouldn't be written in C - yes, I know it is ostensibly in C++ but there's nothing "++" about calling tcgetattr and openpty, especially calling them incorrectly) I've missed a day. Well, I'm still up which has generally meant it was the same day as far as I'm concerned...

Oh, that list? Subversion is on it too, but for more subtle reasons - I ended up diagnosing (and with Paul Burba's help, getting a fix committed) a mergeinfo-related algorithmic bug, by porting the algorithm to python, demonstrating the problem and fix, then porting them back. The unfortunate part was having to port back, the entire code base cries out for a higher level language, and most of the recent performance fixes have been abstract, not bit-tweaking... and many of the outright bug fixes seem to have been as well.

(androblogger just lost another paragraph, and it's in Java, which is bad for entirely different reasons...)

Perhaps I should formalize the list and post it, or even better tie it in to my old "error handling - you're doing it wrong" theme (Are you, or have you ever been, a typewriter?) Not tonight, though, certainly not on this keyboard, especially with the risk of retyping it again!

Oh yeah, toys.

Stumbled across a pocket digital-storage oscilloscope via twitter today. It even has open source firmware, so you can give it different interfaces, which seems especially useful for the low-speed-data robotics/sensor work I'm about to embark on.

Of course, I haven't started to do any of that, so it's more of a "well-matched cool-looking gadget" then a "tool that I already know I need"... but that's really not an issue here in general, and since it is shipping from Shenzen, it's probably not going to arrive before I actually get my new workbench and actually start breaking things.

Slacking off a little on the weekend...

I've ended up doing a post a day almost by accident, as part of playing with Android blogging clients (it's not like there's a shortage of random ideas to write about...) Today I'm being a little lazy and using a full sized laptop keyboard (Thinkpad T60p) rather than continuing to torment my thumbs - but I figured I'd at least try desktop clients instead of directly using the website.

First try was kblogger - that was short-lived, the version in Karmic simply crashes when you try to tell it about a new blog (and the sophisticated auto-report-bug says "traceback is useless", which actually looks accurate as it only contained _start.)


Next thought was "ok, there's bound to be something for emacs, digging around a bit turned up g-client which is an entire suite of googley toys, and some surprisingly brutal blogging support - M-x gblogger-new-entry prompts for a post-URL and a title, and then gives you a buffer full of XML. (Not that I have a problem with that, but it ties directly back to my point about minimizing resistance being what distinguishes blogging from writing HTML pages in an editor.)


So while it is a little "raw", it's working out pretty well; perhaps this will become my default when I'm not specifically trying to use the phone. It's certainly a good starting point for adding other hooks, and might be a lazy starting point for figuring out how to muck with the Atom Publishing Protocol more directly...


Three minor followups, added later:

• g-client is in debian - not standalone, but as part of emacspeak
• auto-fill-mode isn't a good choice, longlines-mode would be better, because the posting code turns the auto-fill newlines into hard line breaks
• when I went to clean those up, gblogger-edit-entry couldn't parse the edit-link response, so I ended up on the web UI anyhow. (this is probably because Karmic is at 29.0 and the current release at posting time is 31.0)
  

"Put... the candle... back!"

I was mailing something last night, and as usual couldn't remember if postage had gone up again or not... so as much for amusement value as anything, I unlocked my phone, hit the voice search button, said "US first class postage price"... and while it didn't quite match it, the first link was close and the second was perfect. Yeah, yeah, welcome to the future. But...


This morning I was thinking about it and realized that that took too many steps. The right interface (humour me a bit and don't skip ahead to "not using paper mail", that's inevitable and not the point) is for me to just say "Hey, Igor?" and to hear back (from the phone, a headset, or maybe the house sound system) "Yesss, Masster?" in Marty Feldman's voice. (The hard part there will be to ask my boring question instead of shouting "THROW THE FIRST SWITCH!!!" but I suppose I'll get over that eventually.)

if birds exploded on impact, birdwatching would be a lot more popular

Yesterday I watched a tufted titmouse fly down out of a crabapple tree (dive-flap flap flap-dive-flap flap flap) towards my birdfeeder, sideswipe a pillar at full speed, recover and curve back around and finally land on the feeder... all to get a single safflower seed and fly off with it.

doing it right when you don't have to makes it easier when you do

Shouldn't it be nearly as easy to take a few idle minutes and write/produce, not just read/consume? at least proportional to "interface speed", I can read 10x faster than I can type (given a real keyboard, not thumbs) and I type pretty fast...

That said, traffic-light-blogging is probably still a bad idea... but the whole blogging revolution was about taking something easy and removing even those energy barriers...

Another client

The G1 is woefully underprovisioned, so a 4M blogging app like blogaway is only going to get a quick test, even if it has pretty icons and picture support... it appears to do posting, and comments (just like androblogger, though both are kind of weak on affordances.) Both are on code.google.com; both continue to make me want either USB or Bluetooth HID (keyboard) support.  Still usable for a paragraph here and there, especially if I'm going to go back and edit them on-line later.

actually doing is what counts...

Just how easy is it to get started blogging from my phone/pda again, and has it improved at all since my Sony Clié-based photomoblog from 1999?

Starting with a gmail account, blogspot signup, and Androblogger for the G1, it looks pretty easy, though thumbtyping is just on the wretched side of not quite fast/transparent enough...