Pycon experience

Pycon 2007 is now officially over. It was very nice to be able to associate faces to so many familiar names from the Python community and get the opportunity to talk with a few of them.

My talk didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped. When I practiced it, it seemed to always take too long. So, when I had to do it in front of a fairly large crowd, I rushed through it a bit too quickly. Still, Crunchy did seem to generate a fair bit of interest and, in addition to the demo in my talk, I got the opportunity to demonstrate it "one-on-one" to about a dozen people who all seemed to be very keen.

Also, the idea of creating a special Python logo ("web badge") for identifying Crunchy-ready tutorials, which I had alluded to in a previous post, will likely be given the ok by the PSF. As soon as it is confirmed, I'll make an announcement here.

Since my last post, the PEP I wrote for keeping raw_input()'s functionality in Python 3000 [but renaming it "input()"] had been accepted. On Monday, I took part briefly in a Python 3000 sprint where I got to implement the required "raw_input(...) -> input(...)" and "input(...) -> eval(input(...))" conversion tool for the general tool that will be available to convert Python 2.x programs so that they work with Python 3k. I also implemented the corresponding simple unit tests as well a few missing tests for the "xrange() -> range" conversion. I would not have been able to do this if Guido van Rossum had not taken the time to explain a few things to me about the conversion framework. In the end, Guido checked in my changes himself. I get the feeling that he could have done the entire thing in about the same time it took him to explain to me the tricky bits. Nonetheless, I do get the satisfaction of having, with the PEP and the conversion tool, given back a bit to the Python community. Hopefully, with Crunchy, I (and Johannes, of course) will give back even more.

Switched to Mac OS

I'm a statistics... I just got a Macbook and will likely use it as my main development platform soon. So far, moving from Windows XP to Mac OS has been fairly painless. I have not done any Python programming but did try out Crunchy and Rur-ple. I found out that Crunchy requires Python 2.4+ (I had 2.3.5 installed on the Mac), that it does not work with Safari, and that there is a "bug" so that the "tooltip" does not work with Firefox on the Mac. I was planning to bring my Macbook to Pycon but will have to reevaluate as I'd like the Drunchy demo to go as smoothly as possible. There also does not appear to be a sound module on the Mac similar to winsound or ossaudiodev... I also found a new bug with rur-ple, but have no time to look into it before Pycon.

Not having taken side in the emacs/vim religious war, I have to find a decent programming environment. On my PC, I used SPE which I really liked but I have read a lot of good things about textmate and nothing negative (other than the fact that it is not free). Any advice from Mac/Python users?

Rur-ple segmentation fault on Ubuntu: solved?

Some kind readers have left comments on this blog regarding segmentation faults occurring when trying to run Rur-ple using Ubuntu linux. I finally got around to installing a vmware version of ubuntu so that I could check for myself and believe I found the source of the bug. I would appreciate if someone actually using Ubuntu could verify.

Near the bottom of rur_start.py, a splash screen is started with 100 (milliseconds) as a default. Changing that number to 1000 removed the segmentation fault when running rur-ple in a virtual ubuntu environment.

There is at least one other bug in rur-ple when using a version of wxPython greater than 2.6; it is in lightning.py. Changing "event.KeyCode()" to "event.GetKeyCode()" apparently solves the problem.

Of course, I would be interested in hearing about any other bugs that have been encountered so that I could do a final cleanup before finally releasing the 1.0 version.