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.

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

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