Europython 2005 report

Europython 2005 is now officially over.

I did a talk on Monday that covered gtktest, a small collection of helpers to make unit-testing pyGTK applications easy. Check out the slides (PDF).

I also delivered a lightning talk on darcs, which is a very well-designed revision control system. Slides (PDF) are available. I use darcs for managing gtktest code, and it has been great so far, much more pleasant to use that Arch and much more powerful than Subversion which I use at work.

I have compiled a list of talks that I attended. You can find a description of each talk on the Europython website, but I was too lazy to add direct hyperlinks on each and every talk. I did include links to day timetables, where you can find complete lists of talks (with hyperlinks to descriptions and slides).

Monday (schedule)

• The art of giving a talk (Hellwig)
• Architecture of a large Zope 3 system (Alexander)
• A Python Framework for Rapid Application Development (Goodwin, Wrigley)
• Document Library (Blake)
• AlphaFlow (Theune)
• MayaVi2 (Ramachandran)
• The world according to Leo (Ream)
• Teaching computational engineering (Fangohr)
• Enabling bare Python as universal connector for ad-hoc networks (de Ridder)
• Pulling Java Lucene into Python: PyLucene (Vajda)

Tuesday (schedule)

• Kamaelia (Sparks, Lord)
• Complex security with Zope 3 and an RDB (Alexander)
• Twisted news (Virtanen)
• PyPy as a compiler (Bolz, Krekel, Tismer, Rigo)
• Recoverable Exceptions In Python (Hudson)
• Greenlets: coroutines aren't stranger than generators (Rigo)
• Where metaclasses surpass decorators (de Ridder)
• Solving puzzles with Python (Niemeyer)

Wednesday (schedule)

• Stupidity and laser cat toys: Indexing the US Patent Database with Xapian and Twisted (Salib)
• The Python revolution in the publishing industry (Masini)
• ItsATree - creating a multimedia editor (Gietz)
• Web Application Testing with Selenium (Roeder, Roeder)
• WYSIWYG interface design with CPSSkins and CPSPortlets (Orliaguet, Anguenot)
• The Personal Internet Endpoint: Using Python and Twisted to write Reliable Peer-To-Peer Programs (Salib)
• Lots of Python lightning talks (I did one too)

I will cover the talks that I liked best later.

Back again

It's been quite a while since my last post. Now, having finished my exam session, I hope to resume regular posting.

So, what's been up lately? Well, just a few days ago version 1.1.1 of the calendaring server SchoolBell, free software that I'm working on, has been released. I am fairly satisfied with the reliability of this version as it fixes most problems that surfaced in SchoolBell 1.1, which was tested by quite a few people. SchoolBell will not be developed further on its own in the near future, instead we will be working on SchoolTool Calendar (version 0.10 released recently), which is an extension for SchoolBell that accommodates some education-related use cases. You can find some nice screenshots on the webpage and in the "screencasts" for SchoolTool and SchoolBell.

In other news: I'm leaving for EuroPython in Sweden on Saturday with my colleagues. I will be doing a presentation there on unit-testing PyGTK applications, which is not quite my area of expertise, but, well, they accepted the talk, so they can't complain. The code behind the idea still needs a lot work but I intend to clean it up a little bit and make it public before I leave.