PyCon

As a sponsor of the conference, CCP gets a booth in the expo hall. I have no idea what we would choose to normally send to a conference to man a booth, and the fact that GDC is on at the same time as PyCon probably exacerbated that.

Personally, standing at the booth was the most enjoyable and productive part of the conference to me. People would walk up, and I could talk about EVE or Stackless and maybe to a limited degree even World of Darkness. It was like an open space in a way. And the company in the hall was great, Slide over to the right and another group to the left who fired these rockets my way. An unexpected rocket actually caught me in the eye...

I only managed to see three presentations during the conference because of this. Jeff Rush's namespacing talk, which is good background detail for the namespacing and code reloading systems I talked about in my presentation. My coworker, Kristjan Valur's presentation, and Mike Fletcher's presentation on OpenGL. Both of which seemed very well done.

CCP also rented a suite at Sofitel, to which people relevant to our business were invited. And at some state, someone helpfully twittered it, which got us some helpful late attendence to clean up the alcohol. I had the amusing task of filling the bathtub with ice, to keep the drinks cool, although it worries me that the ice for the black label whiskey was taken from the bathtub. I was pleasantly surprised that a design requirement for an ice machine seems to be the ability to fill a bathtub.

There were soft drinks, beer of different brands and let's not forget flagons of wine. Now, I'm not a drinker, but there's a certain charm to drinking wine from a flagon. Well, poured from a flagon that is, not literally. It's not everyday you are present for the cracking open of a flagon of red wine, so I took it round the room and made sure anyone who had the inclination had a cupful. Not a drinker and therefore not a wine person, I found it not too bad a drop.

There was also a flagon of white wine. However, it wasn't opened after I left apparently. I saw it on the table in the green room this morning. I'm told that the conference audio visual staff saw the twitter about the party, and came along later. Perhaps they took it back with them.

PyCon: CCP tools and tips presentation online

Did my presentation today. Although I had practiced the actual speaking part twice, I hadn't practiced running the EVE applications (our systems testing tool and our content development tool). Initially, I had planned to go into some implementation detail, but with only 25 minutes and wanting to give as broad an overview into our use of Python as possible, this wasn't possible.

A technical problem which got in the way was the inability to get what was on my screen output to the projector. Back when I had a Dell, the switch button worked and took care of this. On the work VAIO, it was not happening. Kristjan, who did the other CCP presentation, which followed mine, also had the same problem with his VAIO.

I hope that someone got some value out of it. It was somewhat reassuring to get people coming up after the talk, despite the lack of question time, to ask about various aspects. Someone even managed to check out the open source project I linked to - which was good, but they also pointed out its lack of documentation. I concentrated on getting the code working ready for my presentation and was relieved to get that much done.

The slides are also now uploaded to the conference website.