09 September 2007
Liveblogging PyconUK 2007 - Sunday
Whew, was saturday a busy day! Simon Willison's keynote on OpenID was disappointing, he basically responded to any critique of the (flawed, IMHO) security model by saying "well, recovering passwords through email is as insecure as this!" which is balderdash :) (there are legal QOS agreements between email providers) and then "well, of course banks will never use this, but your generic stuff might" which again is balderdash because even people behind "generic" stuff do care about security of their data UPDATE: see Simon comment further down for clarifications... Simon is a good speaker, but feedback from people was still sceptical to say the least.
Dinner was awesome, met lots of great people and Jono "LUGRadio" Bacon delivered a "rock&roll" after-dinner (what next, LUG-StandUpNight?) on why his pet-project JoKosher ended up being written in Python, and be fairly usable in less than a year (for an audio editor, apparently, that's a good timescale).
And we start again! David Boddie on the awesome QtDesigner, looks easy to do custom widgets, and autoconnecting features promise to do away with the signal/slot paradigm as much as possible.
UPDATE: Jonathan Hartley on the basics of TDD in python; I was probably expecting a more "theoretical" talk, or something more advanced, but it was just an introduction really. I suppose I should just be glad I already know about this, stop being lazy and JUST. TEST. IT.
UPDATE: The European Union gives 2.5 million euros to the SQO-OSS people to find new ways of measuring software quality: impressive! Paul Adams made an important point on developer turnover and how to get people on your project: open it! (mailing lists, wikis, svn, etc).
UPDATE: the presentation on Python EGGs was very informational, there are lots of ways on which you can use easy_install, not just to install stuff but also to update it, have multiple versions, get svn versions of installed software, and aslo package un-EGGed software. It's a shame that the presenter was trolled in Q&A time, it shouldn't have happened.
I confess I didn't really listen to the Pylons/WSGI talk. Middleware doesn't really turn me on. I filled in my (great) feedback form for a chance to get my dirty hands on a Nokia N800 -- apparently the best presenter will get an Xbox! Lunch was also sponsored from Microsoft, am I supposed to feel guilty? ;) I see the first slides are being posted online already, I shared some of them in my Google-powered sidebar feed as I find them, I'll try to link them all in the next few weeks, many were also recorded so they should appar on the pyconuk site.
I'm almost sad that in only a few hours everything will be gone... My target now is to have a lighting talk next year on my (very cool) django-powered app! The countdown begins, better start coding...
Labels: GeekDiary, openid, PyconUK, PyQt, python, setuptools
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