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PyCon day 3 |
2005-03-26
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After day 2, I went out with Donald to a cocktail bar that had some new people to meet and a very good Caipiroska.
I overslept a teenie bit, missing the "Python@Google" talk. I started working on my slides with the goal of trimming down my 30 slides to a smaller number for a 25 minute presentation, but ended up with 40 because I wanted to explain some of the Python-specific stuff.
I went to Abe's talk on Yarn which was very interesting. I wish I had some time to look into the problem space he's trying to solve.
During the lunch break I went over the demos I wanted to do for my talk. The first would be just streaming from my webcam on my own machine, which would be easy. For the second, I actually wanted to connect a worker from my laptop to the manager at work and stream the Firewire camera from work through my laptop.
Unfortunately, Firewire and Linux kernels not liking each other is a problem - while stopping the test the server hung. Of course, it's Semana Santa in Spain, no one is in the office, and Christian couldn't be reached. I had to bribe Andy to go to the office and reboot the machine (I now have to find five pounds of grits as a result)
Saw a good chunk of Itamar's talk on Fast Networking while preparing for my talk. and waiting for the machine to come back up. Itamar overran his slot slightly, causing me to rush through the slides as quickly as possible. The demos went nicely, and Andy had made a little show for the PyCon people, which drew laughter from the crowd. I had to skim over some of the nice things I wanted to show. I did show the UI tests we have, slowing them down so people could see what was going on. I also did a false commit, but buildbot was too slow in actually insulting me on IRC for people to see.
In any case I need to rework this talk a little in the future if I have such time constraints. I had one person coming up to me saying that this was the nicest Python application he had ever seen. Another said it was the "ballsiest" demo he had ever seen during a presentation :) And a third guy said he has used Quicktime's tools a lot, and ours looks way better than that in his opinion. All in all, good comments.
Spent some time after my talk talking to a guy called Lutz who said he was impressed as well. He showed me some of his stuff, including some Python plugins for Maya, the 3D rendering engine, to control particles. If I understand correctly he'd like to be able to export Maya rendering somehow to GStreamer and use Flumotion to stream it. That would be interesting.
As a consequence I did miss the last talk I really wanted to see - Glyph's talk (Glyph started Twisted). And after that the conference quickly came apart, with people leaving all over. That was a bit annoying - having my presentation so late meant I didn't get to discuss some of my stuff with people the way I would have liked. Going into a conference it's hard to find the people that might be interested in what you do. Doing a talk that people enjoy makes a good incentive for those people to come and talk to you. Something to remember for next time.
In any case, the conference was a success - I met lots of interesting people, discussed some of our problems with Twisted people, as well as possible solutions, had some ideas for buildbot stuff I want to do, and got to enjoy the general vibe and lots of people's approaches to working with Python and building projects and businesses around it.
I put some pictures online - I didn't take that many, but hey...
After the conference, went into town and bought 14 (!) books. Two of them are work-related, three programming-related, and I stocked up on some literature material for my flight back and because Barcelona doesn't really have a good English book store that I know of.
In the evening I took out my house hosts Donald and Paolo to a place of Donald's choice. He chose a place called La Tasca that served Tapas :) I must say, they were quite good, and some of them I hadn't had in Barcelona yet - Gambas with bacon was exceptionally good.
I don't really have a jetlag problem, which I contribute to the fact that I left Barcelona around noon, so I didn't have to get up really early. Last time I had to get up at 5, which means you end up having a 24hour+ day. The downside is that every day feels like I've been out until six in the morning and slept as long as possible, but only about six hours. And now I need to find a decent way to deal with the trip back.
All worries for later - now it's time to hit DC proper, find a good comic book store and CD store, and go to the museum - which is free !