baijum81

Today is my wedding anniversary :)

Noufal Ibrahim, the main organizer or PyCON India 2009 received Python Software Foundation's Community Service award along with Barry Warsaw (Creator of Mailman). My hearty congratulation to Noufal Ibrahim and Barry Warsaw.

Today Andreas Jung, release manager of Zope 2, announced Zope 2.12 release. Also he announced new Zope 2 website. This is not just yet another release, there are many interesting things.  It looks like Zope 2 is trying to become a good citizen in Python web framweorks, whatever that means.

These photos are taken by my colleague Ponnusamy.  Thanks to Ponnusamy for allowing me share these photos.

I just reached home from IISc where PyCON India 2009 is going on.  It was a wonderful day.  There was attendees from all over India, I met people from Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kerala etc.  It looks like more 300 people came today (I don't know the exact number).  The session was started with the keynote by Prabhu Ramachandran.   I couldn't attend his full keynote, because my Buildout talk was the next, which was scheduled in the second room.

I got some feedback about my talk, if you have any comment, please write here!  Those who using Python, only very few use Buildout now.  I think Buildout should have some more love & marketing to attract developers.   After my talk, I attended few other talks.  I also got a chance to walk in the beautiful campus during lunch time with my new colleagues (trainees) in ZeOmega.  They are very new Python, I hope they are enjoying the sessions.

I liked the talk "Test Driven Development in Python" by Siddharta Govindaraj.  He gave very nice overview of TDD with a simple "palindrome" checking program.  He also provided good overview & comparison of unittest,py.test & nose.

I think Django is helping to spread Python in India also.  I felt the same thing at Chicago during PyCON 2009.  I could see many people talking, discussing or mentioning about Django everywhere.  I also mentioned about Django & Django recipe during my Buildout talk :)

I also met some of my SMC friends during the event.  They are worried about the changes going on in Unicode related to Malayalam.  Some developers really frustrated and stopped contributing to Malayalam computing.  Also they are not happy about GNOME moving from GNU Libc locale data to Unicode locale data.  SMC has achieved a lot of things so far, to get some idea about their work, there will be 10+ Malayalam related packages in the next Fedora release.  GNOME & KDE now officially support Malayalam from last few releases.  BTW, tomorrow Santhosh Thottingal, one of the main contributor to SMC will be presenting about Silpa, a Python based application for all Indian languages.

The first PyCON India is 10 days away.  The talk schedule is already out.  The statistics of PyCON India is very interesting. It looks like, so far 555 delegates are already registered.  People can come without registration also, they have some spot registration (fee is just Rs. 300/-)

Mayavi fame Prabhu Ramachandran is giving the keynote talk.  And there are many other interesting talks.  I have one talk about Buildout. More than all these, this is a great opportunity for Python programmers to meet.  I hope PyCON India will become a great success.

I just reached in Bangalore after conducting a two day Python workshop at NIT Calicut .
I was very excited to return to my college again.  Students from almost all departments
attended the workshop.  There was more than 50 participants. The program was organized
by FOSSCell@NITC . Thanks to FOSS Cell @ NITC team & NITC for inviting me
to conduct this workshop. Here are few photos:


1. The beginning


2. Hmm... what is this Python ?!


3. Okay..so printing "Hello World" is just one line !


4. Time to learn more...


5. Oh. we can do all these things in Python !


6. Any questions ?


7. Beginning of second day.


8. Errors should never pass silently.

Python community in India is organizing PyCON India 2009.
This year PyCON India will be conducted in Bangalore.
Next year it will be in some other city.

Website: http://in.pycon.org/2009/
Blog post: http://pycon.blogspot.com/2009/07/pycon-india-2009.html
BangPypers wiki: http://wiki.python.org/moin/BangPypers

Now I am in Frankfurt airport waiting for a flight going to Dubai. I was supposed to be in another flight going to Bangalore. Well, I am not complaining anything. I guess this kind of things will happen.
When we started our flight from Dallas Fort Worth airport, the climate suddenly changed. Until I reach airport it was fine. It was heavily raining and very cloudy. Then our flight delayed for 2 and 1/2 hours. When I reached here, the connection flight's boarding was completed. Anyway, they arranged another flight for me which goes through Duabi and then Bangalore. I will be reaching 9 am morning on Friday in Bangalore. I hope my luggage also will reach there.

Update from Dubai: I reached in Dubai two and half hours before,
I need to wait 2 more hours here. Here Internet is free unlike Frankfurt and US.
In Bangalore airport also, internet is free, but we need to register using a mobile.
I statrted 12.00 pm CDT from Dallas, so my total travel time will be more than 35 hours when I reach bangalore. I need to go to Kerala from there, yet another 9 hour jouney in Bus.

Another thing I am waiting in Bangalore is Swine flu checking, Since I am travelling from Texas, it's very likely that they will do it. I don't know how much time these all going to take.

I was looking to improve the web presence of Buildout by updating
some content in http://www.buildout.org . I got the motivation to
look into it again after reading Jacob Kaplan-Moss's latest blog
series about Buildout. I have added links to his blog from buildout.org now. I
also added his quote: "Buildout is an exceedingly civilized way to
develop an app." into the main page itself ! I think, from marketing
point of view, some good quotes will help. So, if you find any good
quotes about buildout, please let me know.

BTW, I have already collected few quotes there.

P.S: Next week I am returning to India :) Here in Dallas, it looks
like summer is approaching. I attended Dallas Python user group
meetings two times with Brad and Jeff Rush, they are very active.

Check it out here: http://www.buildout.org

Thanks to Jim Fulton for developing this great tool.

Thanks to all contributors to the site.

Please send your suggestions and comments to me.

I reached here in Chicago day before yesterday evening.
Yesterday we visited field museum, shedd aquarium and
walked a lot in Downtown. Now attending some tutorials.
I will be here till 2nd April and planning to attend Zope and friends sprint


Today morning I attended Working with Excel Files in Python by
Chris Withers.

Now attending Eggs and Buildout Development by Jeff Rush (now break time).

Today RMS visited Bangalore again. This is for the first time I am
seeing him. I am bit tired after today's programs. So, I will try to
proide a brief summary of the program. I hope you know what RMS will
be talking about, so I am not going to those details :)

His talk was at NMKRV college in Jayanagar (Bangalore) which was very
near to our office. I reached there with Jayesh around 10 am. I
have seen his talks in video and today also it was a typical RMS
talk. At the end of session, during questions time, I also asked one
question :) I asked him: "Many free software follows release early,
release often philosophy...". He interupted me, "No, that is not the
case, and that is just a development methodology...". I continued my
question like "Why GNU Emacs releases taking so much time...". He
said, "That is due to technical reasons, you can also come and fix it
(laugh) as it is free software and all the code is available in
Savannah..." (Discaimer: This is not his exact wording)

Jayesh left earlier due to some important office works. I was also
about to return home, then, Anivar suggested to go to the second
program of RMS. After lunch we went to the Ambedkar Community
Computing Center. This is a place where many poor people live. They
were using free software for all their computing needs. All the
peoples gathered there was really celebrating his visit.

After this program, my friends Sujith and Anivar was accompanying RMS
to his hotel, they arranged some interview with press persons there.
Again, as I had no other option, I also joined them. While
travelling RMS' friend, Hareesh, Anivar & Sujith was talking about
Dalits, Hiduism, Politcs etc. RMS also expressed his opinions
sometimes.

We stopped in one hotel for tea and net browsing. He was sitting
opposite to me. I was surprised to see that he was ordering an Indian
cool drink very easily, "One cold badam milk" :) Hmm.. he had come to
India many times, so he must be familiar with it. We spend almost
one hour there. Later, I returned to my home and they proceeded to
their hotel.

Here are few pictures I have taken today:


1. RMS just Arrived at RV college


2. Welcome talk by Renuka Prasad


3. "Free as in Freedom"


4. St. iGNUcious is getting ready!


5. With common Indians


6. Ambedkar smiling at Stallman from wall.


7. RMS releasing a book


8. Tea with a song


9. Hacking after a cold Badam milk at hotel

Oh, it's almost 5 months I have written anything in my journal! Well, there
is no specific reason for that :) But, now I can't stop writing this.
I am just coming back from a two day Python workshop conducted at R.V
College of Engineering, Bangalore.

More than 50+ students attended this program. This was my first
experience conducting a workshop. Thanks to Renuka Prasad and his
students for organizing this workshop. Five of my colleagues and
my friend Jayesh accompanied me, thanks to all.

The program was well organized. Students were sitting in two near
by computer labs. The labs also was well equipped. They provided
projectors and audio support in both halls. My friends were walking
from one desktop to another, without them it won't be impossible
for me to conduct this. Thanks to ZeOmega for allowing 5 persons
to accompany me for this workshop.

I have some pictures also:


1. Ready to start !


2. In action.


3. Ok, everything is fine.


4. With Jayesh.


5. My right and left wings.


6. With Renuka Prasad and Jayesh.

Today at 7.30 PM (IST) our baby boy is born.
Just now I took a snap:

In India some organizations say that they are "producing open
source software" and follow a cathedral style development model !
People who produce these so-called "open source" in India presume,
"code" is everything and it can be released once everything is
ready. But they fail to understand that free software is not only
code but also a community of developers and users around it.
How to build & sustain this community is very crucial to the
success of any free software project.

Well, this may be true in other countries also. But recently I noticed
this in some organizations especially few government funded
projects.

Recently when I was traveling from Calicut to Bangalore
in a night bus. I happened to meet an old fried of mine
who is working with a government funded organization.
Most of his work was software projects which they release
under some free software license. One interesting thing I
noticed is that they do a lot of duplicate works and unnecessary
forks of existing free software projects.

Another thing which I inferred from our conversation is
about their development model. The couldn't yet adapt the style of
free software projects, which follows release often and release
early culture, building a community around the software etc.

Update: One of my friend asked me whether I am targeting free software
based custom software. No, I am not. A custom software may not be released
at all.

There is a bug in GNOME bugzilla regarding a rendering bug in
Malayalam ( http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441654 ). This is
the last major rendering bug in GNOME related to Malayalam. If any
programmers can fix it, that would be a great contribution to
Malayalam computing. Please go through the bug and see if you can
help.

Behdad, the mantainer of Pango is looking for a good explanation of
current patch. Otherwise a better patch is required based on his
suggestion.

(A comment to blog post by Tres Seavor -- I can't figure out how to add comment there, so this post.)

Buildout is build tool which can be used for any Python packages and
not something only for Zope. Since it is created Jim Fulton, the Zope
Pope, naturally there are many early adopters from Zope community.
Buildout itself may not be enough for all purposes, but it can be
extended using "recipes", the extension mechanism provided by
Buildout. Buildout use setuptools, but it's not for replacing it.
You can make use all features of setuptools while using Buildout. So,
all the strengths of setuptools are available for Buildout also.

A buildout.cfg of a Python need not to have duplicate information
given in setup.py . For example, a typical configuration file for a
package will be like this:

   [buildout]
   develop = .
   parts =

As you can see above there is no additional detail, the only
information given is the packages required to be developed.
(Here . means package in the current directory)

As you know any build system should have some kind of configuration,
if you think its a clutter, well I don't know what to say.

Most of the packages are setuptools based and so you can run any
command provided by setuptools. But if you want to get the benefits
of using Buildout you should learn the Buildout system. Then you will
be able to overcome the "foreign feeling".

As I said, Buildout doesn't prevent you from running any setuptools
command. For example if your package's setup.py is configured to run
'test' command, you can run it. There are some buildout recipe which
helps you to run tests in some weired way, but that is not a problem
of buildout ! That recipe may have it's own reason for doing it that
way, like handle extra dependencies, be more explicit, use a
particular test runner etc.. If you don't want this recipe, it's OK,
use your old setuptools test mechanism.

This is for the first time I am writing about Malayalam language in my
blog. Unfortunately, this is about a catastrophe going to happen for
our language :( . I created this blog for writing about my interests
(Python,Zope etc.). I hope you will excuse this cross posted blog.

By breaking Unicode's basic principle, that, it will only inlclude
basic characters of a language, now they are going to add charaters
which are formed from other basic characters in Malayalam. You can
read more about the issue here:
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC/AtomicChilluIsUnacceptable
and in this document:
http://www.rachanamalayalam.org/docs/ChilluEncodingIsWrong.pdf .
The changes are added to draft version of Unicode 5.1.0, so we still have some
hope that it can be reverted. Please support us !

Some background: I started the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing project
almost 7 years back while studying at NIT Calicut. Later, when Free
Software Foundation of India started working on this project, I joined
them to work on this project (as a Job). After I left FSF India, some
others continued that project. Two years back a
new team started working on this project, you can see details
about this team at their wiki: http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC . This
is such a great team with good leaders. Now they are touching all areas
of Malayalam computing: i18n,l10n and other software tools for
Malayalam. I am no more involved in this project, but I used to follow
up the developments.

After a long time, we had a BangPypers meet yesterday at ThoughtWorks
office (thanks to ThoughtWorks for hosting us). Pradeep gave us an
excellent introduction to Django using a TODO list application he
created. This application used SQLite (RDBMS), jQuery (JS framework)
and BluePrint (CSS framework). He will publish this code soon in his
site.