Today morning, the first session was a Linux Kernel roadmap by Jonathan Corbet. Although I’ve never been a kernel-level guy, the talk was interesting and he clearly explained how features have been added and improved over the various versions, and how the development process has improved and become more “professional.”

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Then, it was my turn to talk and I talked about TurboGears. The talk went pretty good and it was well-attended which made me quite happy even though I had some tough competition, heh.

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I did make two mistakes. First was that I got worried about the time I had to finish the talk, and second, I concentrated too much on the slides. Whenever I have presented well (which has been most of the time, thankfully), I tend to leave slides as guidance for the audience, and have my thoughts free-flowing enough to be coherent and entertaining. Well, I don’t think I’ll be making these mistakes again. However, I did get good feedback about the talk from various people, and a good number of questions after the talk, which is always a good sign. For those who couldn’t attend, my TurboGears slides are online.

And one more thing … my book’s website byteofpython.info is now running on TurboGears! This is only the second public website ever running TurboGears after diggdot.us.

Then, I attended Gopal_V‘s talk on programming in the Mozilla platform. He gave a very detailed approach to creating Mozilla applications and how to go about things. I must get the slides from him later, but it shouldn’t be a problem grabbing hold of him since he works in the same floor as me at Y! His slides are online.

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I was on my way to the OpenLaszlo talk, but took a peak in the Ruby on Rails tutorial. Does Ruby on Rails really need the CREATE TABLE SQL statements to be written by hand? …. I think I prefer the SQLObject approach of having all the database-schema in one place as simple Python classes instead of having separate database creation and database manipulation (ActiveRecord) parts.. Update: The new RoR migrations feature is simply brilliant. Thanks to Mark Ramm for the tip.

Other than that, Rails looked cool. The directory structure created by rails as well as the test-driven nature was good.

Then, I got into the OpenLaszlo talk by Nirav Mehta. I had seen the OpenLaszlo demos before and used to follow Oliver Steele’s blog, but I never got around to writing anything with it. Nirav kept the audience engaged and showed off some eye candy stuff that OpenLaszlo provides from images to animation. Somebody in the audience asked him to put audio as well, but unfortunately, he didn’t have any mp3s.

Then, my friends and myself headed to the food court and then went around the FOSS Expo section. The Sun Microsystems booth was the best one and they showcased real open source projects such as Belenix (the OpenSolaris LiveCD) and NetBeans. I got a demo of OpenSolaris’ DTrace functionality and it was pretty impressive.

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Sadly, the other stalls like the Google and Yahoo! booths didn’t showcase any open source projects at all! When Google has open sourced many projects and Yahoo! has contributed open source stuff such as the Alternative PHP Cache, why can’t they show it off and demonstrate they too are part of the community (and invite people to join the company), which I thought was the point behind the stalls…

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Then, I saw Pramode in the Phoenix stall and it seems people are showing interest in Phoenix which was good to hear. Nearby, Anush and Tejas were in the Python stall and trying to entice people to talk about Python, heh.

Soon, we were back in the Intel hall for Jaya Kumar’s talk on GPL and non-GPL code interaction in the Linux kernel. He stressed that binary-only kernel driver modules are not a good idea and his explanation was pretty simple – it screws users on other architectures and users using different distro-compiler-etc. combinations. Another point is that they are not respecting the people who wrote the Linux kernel. He quoted Linus Torvalds saying it has to be a two-way street, if somebody wants to write something using the Linux kernel, they have to contribute back as well. Jaya Kumar was over-shooting his time slot but he had a lot of interesting examples and incidents to talk about. I think he had more than 100 (sic) slides in his presentation. Outside the hall, Jaya Kumar and Harald Welte were mobbed and they had a good time interacting with others.

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Then, I attended the “FOSS in Education” BoF. Philip, Manish and Praveen were also there. The discussion involved quite a number of issues and Praveen has added a nice page in the FCI wiki regarding the discussion. The focus was mainly in creating awareness, and getting students interested, at the high school level. The emphasis shouldn’t be in simply using open source but stressing the points on why open source is good for everybody, and how the community is the core strength.

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Phew. As you can gather, it was a long day but an exciting, educative and interesting one.

I was looking at planet.foss.in and hoping to look for any insights from the many talks that I missed today (there are 6 tracks running in parallel!), but it seems very few people write such long posts as dumb me!

OSoft, Inc. have released my book ‘A Byte of Python’ in Thout format. There are two aspects of Thout – one is that the Thout format is based on XHTML and second, the Thout reader software (similar to Windows .chm Help Viewer) is available for all the major platforms. I am excited about this because Thout provides some very cool functionality – for example, users will soon be able to "upload/download public notes that are placed at the point in the documentation the comment refers to".

There are currently three Python books in Thout format at the OSoft website – the official Python documentation, my book and ‘Dive Into Python’. There are lots of books in the other categories as well.

Btw, Thout software is OSI-certified open source, so it’s good to know that the Thout format itself is implicitly open as well.

Lutz Horn, Bernd Hengelein and Christoph Zwerschke have volunteered and started to translate my Python beginner’s book to German! The project is hosted at developer.berlios.de/projects/abop-german.

If you know Python and German, you’re most certainly welcome to join the translation as well. You can start just one page at a time! Please contact Lutz Horn (lutzhorn at users.berlios.de) or myself (swaroop at byteofpython.info) for more details.

Thanks to Lutz, Bernd and Christoph for taking up this effort!

Juan Shen has translated my beginner’s book on Python ‘A Byte of Python’ to Simplified Chinese! Juan Shen is postgraduate at Wireless Telecommunication Graduate School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China PR.

You can read the Chinese version online right now. More details about Juan Shen and his efforts to spread Python in China is in a appendix in the translated version. Huge hug and thanks to Juan for taking up this effort

I have redesigned ByteOfPython.info and now have a nice and clean theme based on Negen.

The theme had the right combination of the two things I look for : simple and attractive. I usually like to hack up a theme myself just like I did for my blog, but this one was too cool to let go

The content on the website has been reorganized and updated as well.

This is cool – ‘A Byte of Python‘ is the most popular link for the python tag in del.icio.us! In fact, its been bookmarked by 53 people (as of now)!

Thanks to Prem for telling me about it

Update: Its bookmarked by 119 people as of now.

I’ve been working on restructuring my book and split it into Part I – The Language and Part II – The Libraries. I am designing it such that readers can learn the language from Part I and be happy. Whenever they need to do more stuff such as GUI and databases using Python, then they can refer the appropriate chapters in Part II and get started on their programs. Of course, any interested reader can just read from cover to cover and be happy

This also means that I will be adding chapters on GUI and databases to the book (What? You didn’t get the hint??) – I’ve already started writing a database chapter and started on the DB API. There’s also another secret weapon that I am including in that chapter – something that surely raised my eyebrows when I first read about it and I’m sure it’ll do the same for you. It’s just one of the things that highlights the strengths of Python. I will keep you in suspense about it- you can read about it in the upcoming version 1.21 .

I am formally announcing the Byte of Python book mailing list. The first post is reproduced below for your convenience:

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the Byte-of-Python mailing list Its exciting to write this first post!

New version

I just released version 1.20 of ‘A Byte of Python’ [1] and with the same I would like to formally welcome you all to the Byte-of-Python mailing list [2]. This first post is mainly about the philosophy and purpose behind this mailing list. For more details, regarding the new version, please see my blog [3].

About this List

This mailing list is in simple terms, a formal way for me to seek suggestions and comments from interested readers of my book.

Let me explain, in detail, the parts of the above sentence:

• The idea of a mailing list appeals to me because it provides a formal and easy way to have discussions. There are many other advantages such as archiving, digest options, etc.

• I will be writing my views and thinking on the roadmap for my book and soliciting suggestions and comments from you, the interested reader of my book.

• You are welcome to send in your suggestions, corrections, and criticisms about the book to the list.

• Please talk only on topics directly related to the book. General questions regarding Python should be posted on the comp.lang.python newsgroup where you will get better and more informed help.

• I want to keep this list as low-traffic and as meaningful as possible. In order to achieve this, I will have moderation on for all posts to the list. So, please be patient if your post does not appear immediately on the list. If certain mails do not need the attention of the entire list and can be answered by myself, then I will personally reply back (and not forward the mail to the list).

• Moderation also helps prevents spam mails to the list (as already experienced by me).

• I think these are reasonable ‘rules’ of the list – please let me know if you are uncomfortable with any of this.

  Hope to start some interesting discussions in future.

Thanks!

Swaroop

[1] http://www.byteofpython.info/version120/ [2] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/byte-of-python [3] http://www.swaroopch.info/archives/2005/01/13/byte-of-python-revived/

Interesting trivia: The list already has 11 members (excluding myself) even before this formal announcement.

Now that the list is also open for discussion, get ready to see a lot of action regarding the book in the coming months!

The 1.20 version of ‘A Byte of Python’ is finally out – this new release has been long overdue – more than 9 months since the last release. This is the revival of the snake charmer

This new version is a rewrite of the book and I’ve improved the explanations of most of the examples and added some new examples as well.

I took most time to rewrite my DocBook setup and to write new scripts to handle the generation of the various output formats. I tried to make it a platform-independent thing by using the Java-based DocBook tools but it was simply too slow and cumbersome. xsltproc simply rocks!

Okay, getting back on track… I will be formally announcing the mailing list for the book tonight (after I reach home).

I will be writing some new chapters for the book on topics such as databases, wxPython, new style classes, and hopefully chapters on advanced topics such as metaclasses and decorators as well. It’s gonna take time and patience and lot of feedback from you guys to help me accomplish this.

I haven’t planned on how to go about all this yet. However, you can join the mailing list if you want to give your suggestions, criticisms and comments.

Sidenote: I’m really groggy now, I slept at 5 am after making many edits to the book and then doing the xsltproc dance and uploading all the stuff to ByteOfPython.info and the Ibiblio mirror.

I’ve been invited to conduct a workshop on Python at NIT (formerly REC), Calicut, Kerala. It’ll be most probably on 29th of this month (date to be yet confirmed). I’m glad to tell you that Pradeep will be joining me – we’ll be conducting an on-hands session on Python in the computer lab. I’ll be posting details on the session later.

Other speakers include Atul Chitnis and Shanker Balan.

Also, Pradeep and myself intend to hang out in Kerala after/before the event and want to go sight-seeing. Any suggestions? Which beaches are good? Any must-see destinations?

Renaissance 2005

I’ve also been invited to talk at Renaissance 2005 at Govt. Engineering College (GEC), Thrissur, Kerala next month. Here’s the brochure (in PDF form).

Note : I have been invited to both NIT, Calicut and Renaissance – I was confused between the two and wrote ‘Renaissance 2005 at NIT, Calicut.’ I apologize for the mistake.