Zeta-Puppis.com » Me

My Italian PyCon experience

kratorius — Mon, 11 May 2009 10:42:00 +0000

I came back yesterday from the third Italian PyCon (aka pycon3) which was held in Florence and all I can say is that has been an amazing experience. I had the chance to meet a lot of new great people as well as the BDFL (which won’t be back in Europe for quite some time, as he said). Here follows a resume of what I think were the most interesting talks.

On first day, there were two keynotes: “A retrospective of how the community helped build Python 3.0”, held by Guido van Rossum and “Zen and the art of Abstractions’ maintenance” by Alex Martelli. I can just say that they were two extremely interesting talks which by the way weren’t diving too much — or any at all as in Guido’s talk — into code.

On the second day I really enjoyed two talks: “Erlang + Python, joining two worlds” by Lawrence Oluyede and a really great talk by Raymond Hettinger, “Easy AI with Python.” The former left me with a great curiosity about the functional languages world, while the latter really impressed me with how easy is to solve certain AI problems with Python (I solved many of the problems Raymond talked about previously, but never in Python and never really thought about even trying to).

On third day the Antonio Cangiano’s talk was enlightening. Even though it wasn’t really Python specific, he has given a great insight of how you can, well, “become rich with Python.”

Unfortunately I didn’t follow the Sunday afternoon’s talks since my airplane was leaving at 3.00pm, but at the end I can say that this was an incredible experience that I hope I can make again next year. And as a side note: the food was marvelous.

Practical Django Projects

kratorius — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:02:58 +0000

Due to my devotion to the Django web framework, I finally got my copy of Practical Django Projects, by James Bennet. Not really expecting to have that soon, but a beautiful suprise anyway (to say the truth, I didn’t bought this: this has been sent to me as replacement prize for djangodash because I was not elegible to get the G33K beers since I live outside US. Thanks to the generosity of Daniel Lindsley).

Another LinuxDay is gone

kratorius — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:35:17 +0000

And even this year, the LinuxDay is gone. This year we attracted more than 400 people and, as the other years, it has been an amazing experience!
So, thanks to all the visitors, to the LUGBari and to everyone else has contributed to make yesterday a great day.

Additionally, I published the slides of my yesterday’s presentation. If you’re interested, you can freely download them, but please note that they’re written in italian. You can found the PyGTK talk’s slides here, while the PyClutter’s slides can be found here (sources here and here).

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go home and have a heart attack

kratorius — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 17:30:59 +0000

It’s 2007. And it’s October. And there’s the LinuxDay this year too.
For those who doesn’t know, the LinuxDay is a day where every LUG promote Linux and the free software philosophy to everyone who’s interested.

Last year I had a talk about Inkscape and the vectorial graphic; this year, instead, I’ll hold two talks: an introduction to PyGTK and an introduction to PyClutter.

So, if you don’t have anything to do on October 27th and you live near Bari, why don’t you join us in the LinuxDay?

(the title is a quote from a Tarantino’s film, do you like it?)

When you’re a collector (and a programmer)

kratorius — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:28:36 +0000

As above, when you’re both a collector and a programmer, strange things could happen. I’m a beer coaster collector and my collection now reached 250+ unique items so it became a bit a mess to keep that well organized.

So that’s why a developed BeerCoaster manager. Yes, I done a program that help me to keep my collection organized. It is still a bit rudimentary but does its job pretty well. So, if you’re a beer coaster collector like me, you’ll found this useful.

It’s written in Python and uses sqlite as database to store it’s informations, so it is portable across various platforms (i.e.: you can copy & paste your files from Linux to Windows and it will keep working).

Currently, it can be downloaded only by SVN and it is everything but stable. I hope to release something good within the end of year.

The project homepage is hosted on Google project: http://bcmanager.googlecode.com/

Getting it working under Windows, currently, is really hard: for the final releases, though, I should provide a Windows installer.

Moved (again)!

kratorius — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 09:53:08 +0000

This is a double post: it will be published on two different blogs. The great news is that I bought a domain and I have a new hoster, so from now on I’ll publish all my posts on the other blog. The wordpress.com platform was very restrictive to me, so I had to move toward a much more complete web hosting platform.

So it’s time to move away again. This time the site will be hosted on friend’s server (thanks!), and I’ll have my own domain. So, please update your bookmarks, the new URL is http://zeta-puppis.com and the feed URL is http://zeta-puppis.com/feed/.