Baiju Muthukadan's Blog

Yesterday was the last date for submitting proposals. Now we have 143 proposals, which includes workshops and regular talks. Now it's time for voting and commenting. Everyone can participate in this process. You are welcome to provide feedback to the speakers about their proposals. Your feedback through comments will help the speakers to improve the proposal. I think it will be a challenging task for the selection committee to come up with a final list of talks. I have proposed two talks, but I prefer to present the second one - about pytest. Pytest is my favourite testing tool. Please let me know your suggestions about this talk.

PyCon India 2014 Call for Proposal deadline is approaching. Now there are 90+ proposals in the funnel . If you haven't proposed any talk yet, this is the time! Since we have 90+ proposals, chance for extending date of deadline is less. So, hurry!

IMHO, every Python community member should try to promote Python 3. I know there are criticisms about Python 3 -- whatever it is, " Python 3 is the present and future of the language ". Constructive criticisms should be welcomed and that should lead to better Python 3.x releases. As a community member what we can do to promote Python 3 ? I am looking forward to your thoughts on this.  Please write your comments here or you can write it in your blog and leave a link here. Before giving any new suggestions, let me check what are the small things that I have tried. In the beginning of 2011, I have created a website with the help of other community members to increase the adoption of Python 3 by collecting issues in a central location.  That idea didn't worked well, then I dropped that project. I have given a lightning talk about that project during PyCon 2011 in Atlanta . I have tried to use Python 3 for my personal projects and written blogs about my experience . ...

The Sixth edition of PyCon India is being held in Bangalore,India from 26th September 2014 to 28th September 2014. The organizers of PyCon India 2014 are looking for talk and workshop proposals to fill the formal presentation and workshop tracks. We accept proposals on a very broad range of topics related to Python programming. Submit your proposal here:  http://in.pycon.org/funnel/2014/

I received the first Kenneth Gonsalves Memorial Award for contributions towards advocacy and adoption of Python programming language in India. My thanks to the Indian Python Programming Community and Python Software Society of India (PSSI) for the award. The award was given on the first day of PyCON India 2013 conference (last Saturday).  This is the 5th year of   PyCON India , There was more than 1100 attendees this time. The keynotes, talks, workshops and panel discussion (on Python in education) were great. I had my workshop (tutorial) on Selenium last Friday. I hope the video will be available soon.

Yesterday we had BangPypers meeting at ZeOmega office. There was 10 members came for the meeting. There was no specific agenda for the meeting, we discussed some general topics related to Python. I demonstrated the installation of Salt in Windows XP ( http://saltstack.org/ ). Salt is a remote execution and configuration management tool. For those who missed, here is the screencast I created today for the installation of Salt in Windows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeJByb-alz8 BTW, community is working on a unified installer for Windows. If you are interested to learn more about Salt, look at the excellent documentation here: http://salt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html You can replace remote execution systems like Fabric & Capistrano with Salt. Also you can replace configuration management systems like Puppet, Chef & CFEngine. I have tried Salt with RHEL,CentOS,Debian,Ubuntu,Fedora,FreeBSD,Windows 2008 Server R2 and Windows XP. For example, if you want to install Salt...

Few weeks back (on 3rd September) I conducted one Python workshop at KSR College of Arts & Science .  I couldn't write about it till now. The college is located in Tiruchengode, a town in Namakkal district of Tamil Nadu.  The workshop was on a Saturday, but I reached the college in the previous night.     There was around 80 students from MCA and MSc courses. One student took some photos using his mobile camera, you can see some of those pictures below. I started my journey from Bangalore on Friday afternoon in one KPN bus.  It was a Multi-axle bus and the road was also very good, so the journey was very comfortable. I reached Erode around 9.30 pm and one college staff was waiting for me. We had our dinner from Erode and went to college by one taxi car.  They had arranged my stay in the college guest house. It is a very good campus, and there are many colleges in that campus by the same management.  Next day during lunch time, the founding chai...

Python Testing Tools Taxonomy page hosted at http://pycheesecake.org was a great collection of links to Python testing tools, libraries and frameworks. It is maintained by Testing in Python (TIP) community members. The page has been moved to Python wiki for convenience of maintaining it. The new wiki page is here: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy Feel free to add/update your favorite testing tools there!

It looks like, the number of Python books which exclusively cover Python 3 is increasing. A Byte of Python by Swaroop C H Dive Into Python 3 by Mark Pilgrim Programming in Python 3 by Mark Summerfield Python 3 Object Oriented Programming Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science by John M. Zelle, Ph.D. Programming Python by Mark Lutz Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 3 from Wikibooks Please comment here, if you find any other book.

I started using LiveJournal in 2004. It was a great blogging platform back in 2004. But now a days I am finding it very difficult to use. So I am changing my main blog from LiveJournal to Blogger. My new blog URL is http://baijum.blogspot.com/ I have migrated all my old posts to the new blog. I have send mail to Planet-Python & Planet-India editors to update my blog feed URL. If anybody else subscribed to my feed, please use my new feed URL: http://baijum.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/python (This will bring any Python related blog posts to your reader)

Recently Selenium 2 has released with it's new WebDriver technology. Selenium WebDriver supports multiple web browsers like Firefox, Chrome and IE. Selenium WebDriver communicate with browser through its native API. Selenium Python bindings provide a convenient API to access functionalities of Selenium. Recently I started writing some documentation for Selenium Python bindings . It still need lots of work, but now it would be good enough to start with Selenium. I am looking forward to your feedback! EDIT (September 30 2011): The documentation has been moved to readthedocs site . And the source is hosted in Github .

On second day I attended two tutorials specific to Python 3.  I am realizing more and more that Python 3 is really a simple & cool language.  I want to start at least one project in Python 3.  After announcing the getpython3.net  site, the site started getting more feedback. On third day (First day conference) I attended the keynote by  Hilary Mason . Later we moved to the expo hall, ZeOmega has one booth. I was there in the booth for some time.  I also attended two talks: Pylons project talk and Flask talk.  During lunch time I got a chance to speak to  Matthias Klose .  In the evening we went for a dinner organized by PSF for sponsors and core developers. During dinner Brad introduced me to Barry Warsaw  and Guido.  We also talked to some other folks there.  The dinner was arranged a in hotel near by  georgia aquarium and CNN.  The night looked very nice and it as very cool. Today I woke up early morning a...

Today I am happy to announce the official launch of getpython3.net ! Thanks to all contributors Recent changes from Arun from Ubiqurio made it a great looking site. I will update about todays PyCON happenings later.  Now sitting alone in a table at Hyatt lobby with lots of Pythonistas hanging around here.

I reached here in Atlanta with my ZeOmega colleagues on March 8th evening. ZeOmega is a Gold sponsor this time ! (from 2003 onwards ZeOmega was a silver sponsor). On the first tutorial day, I attended the Advanced Python tutorial, both part 1 and part 2 . It was a great tutorial, Raymond Hettinger explained many advanced topics in Python. I really liked the explanation about Descriptors . In the evening I volunteered for placing flyer and goodies in the bag for participants. There was two teams standing around a table, picking one piece and passing around, finally a bag will be ready with all materials. I went for dinner with a crew of 10 somewhere in Downtown. It was lengthy dinner, I got some nice fish with green beans and rice, but forgot the name of fish :) The street was very beautiful in night. I met Noufal & Anand C at the restuarant (unexpected!), so we have 3 BangPypers here now, any other BangPypers here ? Today I am going to atte...

Currently there are 270+ distributions with "Framework :: Buildout"  trove category in PyPI. Now it's becoming bit inconvenient to identify whether a distribution contains a Buildout recipe or extension.  ( Recipes and extensions are two types of plugin mechanisms supported by Buildout).  Now there is a solution -- two sub-categories are added .  If you publish Buildout recipes or extensions to PyPI, please use the new trove classifiers in addition to the existing "Framework :: Buildout". If you are developing a recipe, use this classifier: classifiers=[ ... "Framework :: Buildout", "Framework :: Buildout :: Recipe", ... ], If you are developing an extension, use this classifier: classifiers=[ ... "Framework :: Buildout", "Framework :: Buildout :: Extension", ... ],   If the distribution contains both extension and recipe, use:   classifiers=[ ... "Framewor...

Last Friday (13th August) I conducted a Python training at Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai (REC) . I got the invitation few weeks back from Jayakumari, a faculty member of computer applications department. Initially we planned for 2 day workshop with hands on sessions. But later it changed to 1 day training program. I started my journey from Bangalore on Thursday afternoon in a KSRTC bus. I reached in Poonamallee , Chennai around 9 pm. Two students - Gurubaran & his friend Rajaram was waiting for me. They got me into a bus going to Thandalam where the college is located. The campus looked very nice and it was very calm and quiet. They had arranged my stay in their hostel guest room. It was a very nice stay and the Tamil style dinner was very good. This was the second time I going to Chennai. Previously I came for US Visa interview at US consulate . The training session started around 9.30 am. There was around 60 participants including some faculty members. The com...

So, did you submitted your talk proposal for PyCON India 2010 ? You have 10 more days to do it. But why you need to wait till the last date? :) There are a good number of talks submitted already. Yes, I also submitted a talk proposal, this time about BlueBream . This is for the first time I am going to speak about BlueBream project. Last year, my talk was about Buildout .

PyCON India is coming again ! Two days back official announcement about CFP was out. The conference will be hosted for the second time in Bangalore. Make sure you are submitting the talk proposal on time. Looking forward to see you all there.

Dear Lazyweb, I am looking for suggestions for building a healthy community around one of my FOSS project.  Recently I initiated re-launching of  Zope 3 project with a new name: BlueBream . You may know from my old posts that I am very interested in Zope 3 and Zope Component Architecture (ZCA).  I have written an entire book about  ZCA in 2006. You can read more about the new project in the BlueBream project blog .  I am looking for your suggestions.  You can send mail to me: baiju.m.mail AT gmail.com or add comment here . Well, I will continue with my past experience with FOSS. This is my second largest FOSS project, the first project which I started in 2001 ( SMC ) is still very active.  However, for the past few years, I am not active in that project. I still watch that project growing (of course, I help them whenever possible ). There are more than 500 members in the group itself.  The developers regulary meet at various events.  They o...

Now there are more than 175 Buildout recipes available in PyPI ! Some of the recipes are updated in Buildout site . If you have some which is not listed there, please ping me or add a comment here. If you are adding a recipe to PyPI, please use the Framework :: Buildout trove classifier, so that it will be automatically listed in the PyPI list .