Comments on Doug Hellmann: PyCon 2008

Doug,The badge preview on the view/edit registrati...

2008-01-27T19:33:00.000-05:00

Doug,

The badge preview on the view/edit registration is coming. We got it working with dirty registration form data just before we went live. Now we need to get it working with model and cleaned form data.

Doug,Posting details about a daily schedule on my ...

2008-01-27T18:12:00.000-05:00

Doug,

Posting details about a daily schedule on my blog neat, but I don't think it is a Killer Feature. Being able to sync the schedule into a PDA or phone with alarms seems much more useful.

I remember a badge preview while I was registering, but I don't see it when I go back to look at my completed registration. Should I?

Doug, Yes, the app already supports ICS export ...

2008-01-27T17:59:00.000-05:00

Doug,

Yes, the app already supports ICS export and ICS Feeds (for both the full schedule and your custom schedule). There are instructions for use on iCal, Outlook and Google. The use of the feed is the syncing I am talking about. Very few people used this feature last year and only one person used it to put the information on their blog. There were two problems. First it was too complicated; second people did not have a google account.

We will continue to have that feature, but we are also looking at other potential social networking features.

On the registration app; thanks! I spent too much time on the back end issues (blog post coming about that some time), so the client side is a bit confusing. Carl Karsten created the badge preview which I believe is the key feature of the new system.

Thankfully the rest of the organizers are dealing with cleaning up the instructions and AMK is managing all the issues as the Registration Manager. With registrations in his more than capable hands things should go smoothly.

Doug,Being able to set my schedule on the PyCon si...

2008-01-27T14:21:00.000-05:00

Doug,

Being able to set my schedule on the PyCon site would definitely be a nice feature. Are you planning to support ICS export? That would let users subscribe from desktop calendar apps such as iCal as well as Google Calendar, and you wouldn't have to worry about the syncing issue (since it would be one way). The HTML/IFRAME export could be useful, too, but I'm not sure if I'd use that or not. I would *definitely* subscribe to an iCal feed.

BTW, the registration app looks really good. Keep up the good work!

Doug

Doug, I am working on getting the schedule app ...

2008-01-27T14:06:00.000-05:00

Doug,
I am working on getting the schedule app up and running for this year with some new features.

Last year, people could publish their personal schedule via google calendar. For those without accounts this was a one-time import/export. For those with accounts it was a live feed connection so changes were synced. This required having a google account and a 5 step process to create, connect, add comments and then embed the schedule in your blog. As a result only one person did it (well two if you count my test).

This year I want to add a more direct embed mechanism. That is once you select the talks (and sync to your account) the first time, there will be a link to generate the IFRAME html for embedding your schedule in your blog. It would not have all the features of the google calendar (no comments, no tooltips, no publishing, etc.) but it would allow us to have a list of links on the talks back to the blog posts.

The tooltips could be done as well but that could have nasty side effects/bugs so I would want that as a late optional addition.

Do you think this would be useful? Would you have found it useful for your post?

Last years schedule app:
http://us.pycon.org/apps07/schedule/

(sorry logins are no longer working)

Hah, I wish was qualified, because that would mean...

2008-01-27T12:29:00.000-05:00

Hah, I wish was qualified, because that would mean I was getting to use numpy on a regular basis, rather than the ugly C++ libraries which dominate my field. (At least I get to use them through python bindings.)

You'll have to corner someone who looks competent at Travis's talk. :)

Thanks, Stan. I suppose I should go and read the ...

2008-01-27T10:03:00.000-05:00

Thanks, Stan. I suppose I should go and read the full descriptions of the talks. :-) I was working from the schedule, which just gives the titles.

As far as a NumPy article goes, we would LOVE to have one. Know anyone qualified to write it? (hint, hint)

Hopefully the buffer interface talk will have some...

2008-01-27T09:47:00.000-05:00

Hopefully the buffer interface talk will have something to do with getting the low-level interface of numpy (also by Travis Oliphant) built into Python. numpy, and its predecessors Numeric and numarray, have always been so generically useful to scientific computing that something like them really belonged in the standard library. Guido turned down Numeric once in the past due to coding issues, but perhaps this talk is about making the existing Python buffer interface more amenable to efficient N-dimensional arrays in Py3k.

Speaking of which, an article on numpy would be great for Python Magazine. It's a tool that anyone who works with large, homogenous data sets should have in their Python toolbox.