EuroPython 2008, day 2

I skipped most of the sessions for the day as they didn’t seem even remotely interesting to me. But, the ones I did attend where really good.

Last nights partying kept me pretty much in bed for better part of the morning. Descriptor tutorial by Raymond D. Hettinger was very good and I think it was actually the first conference tutorial ever that actually teached me something about programming and Python in general.

There was quite a bit testing-related material on the Lightning talks. One thing I wrote down on my notes was the phrase “Given enough tests, all bugs are shallow” (originally from Linus Torvalds in a form “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”).

The keynote talk for the day was something that absolutely blew my mind. Hans Rosling talked about Gapminder and how statstical data and databases should be free. First thing that crossed my mind when listening to him was that “I wonder if Adrian Holovaty has ever talked to this guy — they’d have much to talk about”. If you havent heard about Gapminder or Hans Rosling before, you should definitely see his talk on last years TED conference. In Django-terms, thats some cool shit 🙂

EuroPartyPython 2008, night 2

Smile!

After Roslings inspiring keynote there was the conference dinner. We ate well and headed again to down town Vilnius. (Todays dream team was Edgars, Nicolas and me.) The two girls from last night showed up as they had promised. We had great time with them for a couple of hours untill they left early. We stayed at the bar and eventually hooked up with three cute Lithuanian girls. Lots of dancing, beer and fun until the bar closed at 3 am. What a great night — again!

Django unicode-branch: testers wanted

The long-waited unicode-branch is finally at a stage that wider community testing is needed. Read the notification at django-users mailing list.

Malcolm has done terriffic job with the branch and there are already fairly solid documentation available. For most people, the short checklist (five steps, maximum!) is all you need to convert your applications to handle unicode well. If you want more information, check the detailed documentation from the trunk.

Using this branch means an end for the numerous unicode-related problems (for most of them, anyway) when using Django. So, this is a must for every djangonaut who is living in the Real World 😉

Go on, get on with it! 🙂