Skip to main content

PyCon: Keynote

Steve Holden: Python Software Foundation Chairman
The attendance in 2009 was really down; the PSF lost a lot of money. 2010 was better. 2011 has the biggest attendance ever. There were 1400+ registrations.
Dr. Hilary Mason from Bit.ly
List comprehensions are the most popular feature in Python according to her data.

The Kinect For Xbox 360 from Microsoft is awesome.

She recommended the book "Collective Intelligence".

Side note: Tavis Rudd has a totally awesome speech recognition setup. He has created his own spoken language / grammar with words customized to doing everything, especially controlling Emacs. Listening to him speak, it sounds like a foreign language, but he's able to control his machine very quickly. He had to develop this because he was suffering from RSI very badly. He has a Mac with two virtual machines. One runs Windows with Dragon Speak. The other runs Linux. He logs into Linux from Windows. He has high-level words that allow him to operate very quickly.
Labels:

Comments

Tavis Rudd (openid only - no blog) said…
Thanks for the plug, JJ. If anyone reading this is interested in learning more, stay tuned. Friends keep on nagging me to do a video demonstration of it and release my code. I'll be doing that soon. - Tavis
4:17 PM
Tavis Rudd (openid only - no blog) said…
At long last, here's a video of my voice system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI&feature=youtu.be There's another coming out in April on infoq.com
2:59 PM
jjinux said…
Congratulations, Tavis! I'm so sorry I didn't get to see it in person! Ironically, my wife forwarded me a post on G+ about your talk, and I was like, "Hey, that's my buddy!"
7:24 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Drawing Sierpinski's Triangle in Minecraft Using Python

In his keynote at PyCon, Eben Upton, the Executive Director of the Rasberry Pi Foundation, mentioned that not only has Minecraft been ported to the Rasberry Pi, but you can even control it with Python. Since four of my kids are avid Minecraft fans, I figured this might be a good time to teach them to program using Python. So I started yesterday with the goal of programming something cool for Minecraft and then showing it off at the San Francisco Python Meetup in the evening.

The first problem that I faced was that I didn't have a Rasberry Pi. You can't hack Minecraft by just installing the Minecraft client. Speaking of which, I didn't have the Minecraft client installed either ;) My kids always play it on their Nexus 7s. I found an open source Minecraft server called Bukkit that "provides the means to extend the popular Minecraft multiplayer server." Then I found a plugin called RaspberryJuice that implements a subset of the Minecraft Pi modding API for Bukkit s…
4 comments
Read more

Apple: iPad and Emacs

Someone asked my boss's buddy Art Medlar if he was going to buy an iPad. He said, "I figure as soon as it runs Emacs, that will be the sign to buy." I think he was just trying to be funny, but his statement is actually fairly profound.

It's well known that submitting iPhone and iPad applications for sale on Apple's store is a huge pain--even if they're free and open source. Apple is acting as a gatekeeper for what is and isn't allowed on your device. I heard that Apple would never allow a scripting language to be installed on your iPad because it would allow end users to run code that they hadn't verified. (I don't have a reference for this, but if you do, please post it below.) Emacs is mostly written in Emacs Lisp. Per Apple's policy, I don't think it'll ever be possible to run Emacs on the iPad.

Emacs was written by Richard Stallman, and it practically defines the Free Software movement (in a manner of speaking at least). Stal…
17 comments
Read more

JavaScript: Porting from react-css-modules to babel-plugin-react-css-modules (with Less)

I recently found a bug in react-css-modules that prevented me from upgrading react-mobx which prevented us from upgrading to React 16. Then, I found out that react-css-modules is "no longer actively maintained". Hence, whether I wanted to or not, I was kind of forced into moving from react-css-modules to babel-plugin-react-css-modules. Doing the port is mostly straightforward. Once I switched libraries, the rest of the port was basically:
Get ESLint to pass now that react-css-modules is no longer available.Get babel-plugin-react-css-modules working with Less.Get my Karma tests to at least build.Get the Karma tests to pass.Test things thoroughly.Fight off merge conflicts from the rest of engineering every 10 minutes ;) There were a few things that resulted in difficult code changes. That's what the rest of this blog post is about. I don't think you can fix all of these things ahead of time. Just read through them and keep them in mind as you follow the approach above.…
Post a Comment
Read more