JulioBiason.Net

IMDB Plot:

A chronicle of the early days of James T. Kirk and his fellow USS Enterprise crew members.

Spoiler-ish review follow.

In all honesty, I was expecting the movie to blow. I saw the trailers and they looked pretty shit. So I was pretty surprised that the movie was better than I expected. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as good as I wished.

First thing, special effects (it’s sci-fi, it’s supposed to make a difference.) They are good, in a sense that they kept it out of the plot. As in the series (all series), technology is part of the universe, but it’s not the changing factor. Same goes here.

The Enterprise is redesigned with more fluffy stuff. No more black consoles everywhere and weird, non-sensical flashing lights everywhere. You have transparent consoles and the general look is more whiter than the original. It makes sense, if you consider the leap the actual technology took in those years since the original series.

The plot is also ok-ish, but… there is something missing there. I mean, it’s not bad, there are no holes but it doesn’t totally feel like Star Trek. You have a guy looking for revenge purely for the revenge itself. In all the series, everyone is doing something based on their cultures: Humans like to explore, as do Vulcans (in their reclusive way), Klingons seek honor above everything else, Cardassians and Romulans want to expand their respective empires, Ferengis would do anything for profit and things like that. The main villain is a Romulan, but he doesn’t seem to be acting “for the Empire” although he cites that as one of his motives.

Another plot thing that feels wrong is that the Enterprise, the new flagship of the Federation, is assigned a full crew of cadets instead of a veteran crew. I mean, you have the best ship you could ever build, you have at least 12 other ships around with a crew with more experience and… would you assign some not-yet-out-of-training cadets to it? That doesn’t make any sense.

Acting/characters development is also ok-ish. In a sense, I was expecting Zachary Quinto to, at some point, “do a Sylar” and cut someone’s forehead with his finger. But, for some reason, you never expect him to do such thing in the movie, which seems he did a good job portraiting something that it’s not Sylar. And, honestly, at some point, he did seemed to be Leonard Nimoy and the original Spock. Also, the idea of explore more deeply the human side of Spock seemed pretty good for the movie. I mean, the original Spock was a Vulcan above everything else, even if he had a bit of make fun of himself — and that’s as far as he went in the original series. The new Spock is way more dimensional than the older counterpart, which is incredible good to show how he have a human nature after all.

Chris Pike, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be Kirk. At all. I can’t blame the actor himself, but I guess the script, although focusing in the first years of those, doesn’t pay the proper respect to Kirk. In the original series, Kirk was the damn bastard you’d follow without hesitation. In this movie, he’s just a damn bastard. At some scene, when he’s running away from a big monster, I really wished he wouldn’t escape and that would be his end. “Please, remove that guy from the movie.” But, alas, he survive.

Also, it seems that new version of Kirk have some miraculous healing factor. He hurts his hand while fighting in a platform, only to take the bandages off a few hours later when he is thrown out of the Enterprise. And a couple of bruises around his left eye (after getting into some fights) slowly heals themselves in also a couple of hours.

Simon Pegg, playing the bit of Montgomery Scott, is… bleh. I didn’t like it, mostly ’cause I know the history of James Doohan. And, honestly, making Scott as a comedy relief (in the “pie in your face” sense) it’s just plain wrong. I mean, someone who personally took someone out of a suicide and fought in wars should at least have a most respectful representation of their most famous character.

McCoy is also bleh. DeForest Kelley’s McCoy was the guy that know morals above everything, even if that meant breaking laws. He was the bastion of “what is right” against “what is in the books” (which is exactly the opposite of Spock.) But, right in the middle of the movie, he does what is immoral and wrong at the same time. And, in the end, his character never get enough time to get a proper development. He’s just the guy in the background with a well known name which says a couple of lines and then vanishes.

I guess a lot of people would say “the appearance of Nero fucks up with the old timeline, so things are completely different now, including people.” Well, ok, but, for an old time trekkie, it still feels that those things really annoyed me, ’cause they were not the problem with the series. It was, actually, one of the best baselines for any series.

But not everything is “screw the old series” in this. There are several “echoes” from the original series: A “red shirt” (not shirt in this case) dying seconds after jumping into a mission, Christopher Pike (the original Enterprise captain, not the actor) in a wheelchair and even Orion girls appear in the movie.

Overall, I’d say it’s a good movie, although I would expect something more.

IMDB plot:

All Lodge wants is for his gaming group to finish their adventure. Unfortunately, they’re more interested in seducing barmaids, mooning their enemies, and setting random villagers on fire. Desperate to rein in his players, Lodge injects two newbies into the distrust: a non-player character controlled by Lodge, who the power gamers immediately distrust, and the rarest gamer of all — a girl. Can the group overcome their bickering to save the kingdom, or will the evil necromancer Mort Kemnon triumph unopposed? A parody of fantasy films and the adventure gaming community, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising is a hilarious romp through the world of sword and sorcery — in this case, a world of exploding peasants, giant house cats, and undead roast turkeys.

First thing you’ll notice is the really cheap special effects. The second thing is the poor acting. Then you’ll notice the warrior with 17 charisma.

Now, if you didn’t understand the last bit, then probably the first two points would take you away from the the movie. If you at least thought “A warrior with charisma?”, then you should watch this.

The first minutes are probably drive you away from the movie. The special effects and the “wood plank” acting looks pretty bad. Then you realize it’s a game and, although the visuals don’t improve (even with the special effects going away), the acting kinda makes sense. But, as you keep watching the movie, the RPG jokes keep flowing in and the thing really “grows” on you.

I never thought nonsense and RPG jokes would work together, but they do. Most of the time is like “I don’t believe someone would do that in a game” and, amazingly, it works pretty fine. The contrast between the munchkins and the real RPG player just makes everything funnier.

A movie for everyone that enjoys RPGing, for sure. May require some understanding of Dungeons & Dragons, though.

IMDB plot:

A guy challenges himself to say “yes” to everything for an entire year.

Let’s start this by the disclaimers: I’m a Jim Carey fan. Every movie he does, I feel must watch. So, obviously, I had to watch his latest movie, Yes Man.

Now, I know that he doesn’t make “haha-funny” movies anymore. Since “The Truman Show“, he seems to be going more into “thinkful/comedy” style. So don’t expect big laughs all the time like in Ace Ventura.

So, the whole story goes around Jim Carey’s character, who refuses to do a lot stuff with his friends, till he have a dream of nobody giving a damn about his death. He goes to a “Yes” convention, where the presenter, played by Terence Stamp, puts a covenant on him: If he says no, bad things will happen. And, by doing that, he ends giving a lift to a homeless guy, give him all his money, end without gas in car and finding a crazy chick.

Acting is… ok, I guess. Brad Cooper, as Carl (Jim Carey) best friend is moot, only to show some life in the last part. Zooey Deschanel pushes the air-headed crazy chick so far you can’t even imagine how Carl (or someone like him) would fall for her if he wasn’t in the “I’M CURSED!” mood all the time.

All in all, a good movie for a lazy Saturday afternoon.

IMDB plot:

After being kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years, Oh Dae-Su is released, only to find that he must find his captor in 5 days.

You know, I have a thing about Asian movies. To me, Asian thrillers are less brutal but a lot more scarier, racing chases seem to be more interesting and action movies seem to be more deep and more packed than the American counterparts.

And “Oldboy” is one of movies that fall in the last category. A drunk man is suddenly kidnapped and kept and a small room for 15 years. In all this time, the question in his head is always “Why?”. His only companion is a TV. And so, he tries to learn whatever he can and his desire for revenge grows. When he finally manages to “escape” (a full tunnel, but the people who kept him there decided to free him when the tunnel is done), he goes after the person who kept him there for all this long. In the way, he’s confronted by his desire of revenge and the question of the “Why?”.

It is a weird movie, although good. The “plot twist” you expect in the end actually happen in the middle of the movie, being quickly replaced by another plot twist soon and so on. And that mix of lots of plot twists make the movie interesting till the end. But that doesn’t mean that you end up with a bunch of unfinished sub-plots: Everything is tied in the end, no questions and everything wrapped nicely.

Honestly, it’s a good action movie, although a little bit tense sometimes.

IMDB plot:

A behind-the-scenes look at the annual Penguin World Surfing Championship, and its newest participant, up-and-comer Cody Maverick.

They have Penguins and surf! What could go wrong?

Yes, another “Hey kids! Follow your dreams, even when people say you don’t” movie. The interesting bit on this one, though, is the fact that it’s shown more as a documentary than a movie. Also, if penguins were a little bit more rubbery, they probably would do what they do in the movie (in other words, the movements of the penguins seems a lot real-like.) Another thing that impressed me was the water: It really looks good and I’m pretty sure it’s one of the hardest things to render (looking at the movie from the technical perspective.)

About the movie itself, as I said, the fact that it’s build as being a documentary and not a movie (although they jump between a “narrative” movie and a documentary all the time) makes it really interesting to watch. You are there, watching they do something and then, out of nowhere, a voice ask one of the characters something or some old movie is shown.

There was a joke running around about Shia LaBeouf being the “nononono” guy (you can see this video for more information) and, fun fact, he says the same thing two or three times in the movie. Old habits, right?

IMDB plot:

In the distant future, a small waste collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.

Hey, a Pixar movie! Let’s watch it!

So, looks like WALL-E is the darkest Pixar movie so far. Why? ‘Cause it shows a completely barren, empty Earth where the only inhabitants are the cleaning robot of the title and a cockroach. Still is a kids movie ’cause the cockroach is cute and the robot have big eyes to make it look like a kid.

One of the things that impressed me was how much emotion Pixar manage to put in the robots, using just eyes. Later, when I saw the extras, the director mentioned that they were specifically playing with a binocular and that was used to build WALL-E. All magic broken ’cause you think “Hey, that’s one interesting thing they did by accident” and then they say it was on purpose. Oh well…

Also, this is probably one of the Pixar movies with less lines of all. Most of the action happens between WALL-E and EVE, and they basically don’t talk. They can say each other names, a few words and that’s it. Most beeps and computer generated sounds, some directly from the OS X voice-to-speech synthesizer. Well, since Steve Jobs owns most of Disney, Pixar and Apple, there are a lot of references to OS X/Mac products in the movie.

People mentioned that there is a strong political message in it. In a way, yes: The Earth is dead, the human population is now living in a spaceship with robots doing all the hard work so they don’t do any kind of exercise (not even walking) and so attached to communication devices they don’t see that the person they are talking is sitting just right next to them or look at the stars.

Such laziness is just broken when a small robot that doesn’t belong there start doing things they don’t expect. Then, suddenly, they realize their ways.

Although there is a message there, I think it fails to deliver it. Call the medium for it, but… it just don’t work. There is no transition state: They are lazy, then they are not. It’s weird, it lacks the “getting a conscience” part of the experience.

IMDB plot:

Po the Panda is the laziest of all the animals in the Valley of Peace, but unwittingly becomes the chosen one when enemies threaten their way of life.

Ok, now be aware that I may spoil things, as usual.

In an old China, a Panda, son of a noodle maker, dreams of becoming a grand master of Kung Fu. The village where he lives is also the place where The Furious Five, five masters of kung fu, live, fueling his dreams.

The part that I liked more is the very first scenes. Not because they have anything interesting, but because it looks like a cartoon, much like Samurai Jack, which was, in most of the episodes, more mature than anything going in the TV (ok, it also had some very childish episodes, but I think the mature outnumber the childish.) It made me believe it would be more mature than most “CG for kids” we see these days and, honestly, it was slightly above that. But just slightly.

One of the things that made me think “Why?” was the cast. I mean, wow, Angelina Joile, Lucy Liu, Jackie Chan? Amazing. Except that they gave Angelina about 10 lines, Jackie got 2 and Lucy just one. Jack Black lines are mostly fun, yes, but after a while you start getting tired of his voice. It’s like the whole movie is just a “Here people: Come hear Jack Black for 2 hours!” And some of the things he says really don’t fit a kung fu movie, even if it is for kids.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie. It’s another of those “believe in you” movies for kids. The CG is pretty good (well, most of the CG movies these days are good and Kung Fu Panda is no exception), the movements don’t look too weird, although some scenes go for the child-cartoon-appearance and look really silly, specially when compared with the rest of the movie, where movement and more fluid and real-like.

Overall, it’s a good movie and fun to watch.

The last day of OSDC started with Andrew Tridgell, of Samba and Rsync fame, talking about the fight with Microsoft for the protocol documentation. And, just because I wasn’t paying enough attention, I learned that it was Sun who started the request for protocol documentation, not the Samba team, although, in the end, it was only the Samba team and the FSF Europe in court with Microsoft to get the documentation. In the end, they created a foundation, Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) to allow anyone to read those documents, which encompass more than just the SMB/CIFS protocol. Also interesting was the fact that Tridgell heard that some people inside Microsoft really wanted to make those protocols open, to prove that they were really good programmers and did not need to hide behind closed doors. The keynote ended with Tridgell pointing that Microsoft did a public release of their protocol documentation, including more protocols than the ones listed in the PFIF directory. And, because they are public now, you don’t need to be a sub-contractor of the PFIF to get the documents.

After the keynote, I went to see the Python presentations. The first one was “The State of Python” by Anthony Baxter. He spoke about the current changes in Python 3.0, which is at full swing in the news (like Reddit, Ars Technica and such) and I knew most of the changes by going to the SyPy meetings. If you’re not aware, Anthony put a collection of a few links in in a TinyURL link. The things you probably don’t know (and I wasn’t aware till I saw the presentation) is that there will be a 2.7 release in about 8 months to provide further information how to convert your applications to Python 3.0, there should be a 3.0.1 release around 6 months with bug-fixes and a 3.1 in about a year with some better standard modules (and I’m guessing it means that modules will adhere more to the PEP8.) He also mentioned that a “Programming in Python 3.0″ book should be available in the US in about a month.

Still in the Python line, I went to see Michael Hudson talking about “The PyPy Project And You.” PyPy is a very interesting project but something keep me distracted enough to not take enough notes (note to self: do not open IM when in a conference.) What I noted is that they have what they call LOP architecture/problem: A language L, for an output O, for a platform P. Because of the way PyPy is designed, they can take any language L, generate an output O for a platform P in any possible combination (when they have such L, O and P, of course.) They can do what IronPython and Jython do, taking Python as a language and generating an CIL/JVM output (which are basically “platform-less”, since the VM itself doesn’t change in any platform.)

Last Python talk in the conference was Alex Holkner with “Game development with Pyglet 1.2″. My flatmate keeps talking wonders about Pyglet and, after this, I have to agree with him. The API is incredible clean and, as I’m saying recently about my small projects, it’s pretty cute (and Pyglet having way more lines of code than mine, you can be pretty sure it’s as cute as this.)

After the Python sessions, I went to see Stewart Smith talking about “LD_PRELOAD for fun and profit (or evil)”. For those that don’t know, LD_PRELOAD can be used to load libraries before the code execution, so you can, as Smith shown, create a library with redefines fsync() to not do anything. Just as an example, Smith pointed that some tests, which took around 23 minutes to complete, took only 6 with the “hacked” version of fsync(). He also demonstrated how to use LD_PRELOAD to load a library that overwrote open(), close() and the family to get a backtrace.

Jonathan Lange closed the sessions before the lightning talks with “Your code sucks and I hate you! Code review for human beings”. He spoke about the experience of the Bazaar team with code reviews, not only pointing how you could ask for code reviews when sending patches to other projects but also how to answer code sent by other people for reviewing (kinda like an “etiquette of code reviewing”.)

After the lightning talks (which I won’t say what I saw ’cause I’m still ashamed that I didn’t wrote the speakers names again), Adam Kennedy (which, yet again, I didn’t wrote down, but Slashdot saved me) took the stage to talk about “The Sekrit”. He spoke about this story with Perl, his “distribution” (I think I can call it that) “Strawberry Perl” and how he managed to make a distribution of Perl 6, which he gave to Larry Wall. Also, he told us that he was approached by a Microsoft employee asking if he needed any help. If you clicked the link above, you’ll notice that Microsoft is offering free virtual machines with almost every single supported Windows version for free for all CPAN users to test their modules.

The closing keynote was Pia Waugh talking about the OLPC-AU project. The “One Laptop Per Child” is starting its way into Australia, but Pia followed the distribution of the laptops to children around the Pacific and how kids love their laptops. For us, developers, she pointed the OLPC-Friends website, where we can help improve the OLPC “from the inside”.

And that was it for the OSDC 2008.

The second day of OSDC started with Larry Wall, the creator of Perl. At first I thought he would ignore the elephant in the room, but all his talk was about Perl 6. He shown the parser and the weird new operators (like “»+«” and no, this is not a mistyping) which means I’ll have a harder time trying to understand Perl code. But, on the other hand, their changes on the regular expressions make them a lot easier to use and a lot more logical (well, once you understand the basics of regular expressions.)

After the opening talk, I went to see Joshua May talking about “Going mobile – tips, tricks and tools for building mobile web-apps”. He basically summarized all the things I heard the mobile developers talking in the office: It’s freaking hard to make something that would work on every mobile. WURFL is here to help with descriptions of capabilities on mobiles. Another very interesting point was the Facebook mobile application which have a special “Call” link on it, ’cause it is easier to call someone than leaving a message and he also suggested that, instead of a “Contact us” form, business should have a “Call us for suggestions” or something around those lines, ’cause, again, it’s easier to call someone and tell them about something than typing a message on a phone.

Then it was Ben Balbo with a quick demonstration of how to stream video with a talk about “Streaming the world for free”. Basically, only using free software, you have DVgrab to capture video; FFmpeg, VLC and Mencoder to encode the video; HTTP, RTSP, RTMP as streaming protocol; Darwin Streaming Server, VLC, LScube, Red5 and Helix Server as streaming server and VLC, MPlayer and Helix Player as, well, players. On a quick demonstration, he showed the stack of DVgrab, VLC, HTTP, Darwin and QuickTime Player playing a real time video using his laptop. He also demonstrated Kyte.Tv played a video capture from his mobile phone.

The third talk was Silvia Pfeiffer talking about “An open source ‘YouTube’”. The system they build for the University of Queensland uses the FedoraCommons (not to be confused with the distribution) as the archiver/storage (FedoraCommons can store a lot of stuff, like documents) and they use Fez as a front-end to retrieve that information and display it.

Following her talk, John Ferlito joined Silvia to talk about “MetaVidWiki: When you need a web video solution”, which mixes MediaWiki (Wikipedia) with video playing. They also menioned the failed attempt of the W3 Consortium of making Ogg Theora (the free media codec) the default media format for the new <video> tag in HTML 5. As a solution they presented Mv_Embed, which is a Theora-capable player that can work with MetaVidWiki to stream the videos.

After lunch, I went to see Andrew Bennetts talking about “How to make a FAST command line tool in Python” and his experiences with Bazaar. Just to demonstrate where the basic problem is, he run two commands: time python -c "", which basically runs nothing, taking 0.013ms and time python -S -c "import os; os._exit(0)", which doesn’t load the site module and forces an “unclean” exit, before the garbage collector can do anything, reducing the run time to 0.008ms. So, basically, the big culprits are imports. For that, both Bazaar and Mercurial have a “lazy import”, which is capable of doing the proper imports only when requested. Also, a lot of imports are bad right now, like String module, which imports the regular expression module, which is slow. Also, same goes to urllib, even when you just want to use the encoding stuff there (it loads the socket module, which loads the _ssl modules, which is incredible slow and large to load.) Some suggestions he gave was use PyFlakes to find unused imported modules. Later, in the questions part, I got the sad news that locally importing modules (e.g., doing import inside a function) does not improve the load speed, which means most of my new code in Mitter is bad.

Then I went to see “Managing category structures in relational databases” by Antonie Osanz. He basically explained how to use nested sets in a relational database. I saw nested trees in Uni, but I couldn’t understand how that works properly and it seems I stil can’t. But basically you keep a left and right information pointing where the element belongs in the set. It makes insert and delete slower (’cause there are more records to be updated than just one) but search is way faster (and the query is incredible simple.)

In the same database line, I went to see Jonathan Oxer talking about “Self-Healing Databases: Managing Schema Updates in the field”. His suggestion is basically never run a schema upgrade script, but you code your ORM layer to, in case of error running a query, check for probably upgrades (e.g., table creation script, column creation script), run it and then re-execute the query. Yes, you can have problems of two users trying to access your site just after an upgrade and two scripts running at the same time, but things could probably go fine if you don’t capture the error of the upgrade procedure (I’m not sure about data convertion.)

The last talk in the day was “MySQL Optimisation by design” by Arjen Lentz. He mostly talked about the good practices we usually apply. The good stuff, though, came in the little tips. For example, you can add a small C comment inside your SQL query and that comment will appear in your logs. He also suggested that you should worry about replication and write your code thinking about doing requests in a group of servers and updates in another group, so your application is ready to work in a master-slave environment (updates in the server, requests in the slaves.)

And this day I decided to stay around and see the Lightning talks. Honestly, I have a problem with 30 minutes presentations (it’s too short) and I was kinda worried about presentations in only 5 minutes. But it was, nonetheless (and yes, I love that word.) Unfortunately, I wrote the name of the presentation but forgot to write down the presenter name. Shame on me. So we had:

• Golly, a Corwin’s Game of Life with an impressive size;
• That joke about “if languages where cars”;
• Faster Beer, where the presenter make use of Corepy to speed up his Pythton application (I think it was Michael Hudson, but my memory fails me here);
• “So you’re a kick ass coder”, which pointed how we, as developers, should get more involved in the community;
• “Ladies Get In Free” by Pamela Fox about a suggestion to bring more girls to this kind of conference;
• “SiliconBeachAustralia.org”, a developer community;
• “Freeway 2.0 on Zend Framework”, which I completely lost ’cause I decided to check something different (sorry about that);
• “Counting Your Users Without Download Statistics”, which explains some tactics used to count users using surveys;
• “SQL vs NP”, which was a really crazy talk with SQL, first making a text/ASCII-code fractal and then solving the traveler problem using just SQL and PL/SQL;
• “Geek my ride”, presented by Jonathan Oxer showing how he did add a computer in the trunk of his car, with power source, Wi-Fi and G3;
• “OSDcLang for Mobile Devices”, also by Jonathan Oxer, with a simple, Turin-complete, Brainf**k-like language running on mobile devices — HIS CAR! (see above)

Ok, first “real” day of the conference.

The opening keynote was made by Chris DiBona, Google open source manager and license extraordinarie (or something along those lines.) He made some points about the grown of Summer of Code in Australia (with the sad note that only 7 students registered, even with 68 tutors), the number of licenses used by Google, Google usage and contribution of open source code… And yes, suddenly, it start sounding like “Here, Google is a friend Open Source!” propaganda, but DiBona manage to point that most of what he was talking was to make a point to other companies and how they could make a step into and alongside open source. But, apart from the little propaganda side (I can guess that it was completely unintentional), the graphs he showed, like the number of students and tutors through the years of Summer of Code in Australia and the number of licenses used by Google and other small peals, where really interesting.

The first session I saw after the opening keynote was Michael Neale talking about “Rule based systems – using rules to manage business logic”, mostly because I worked with a system written in C where we had to write all the business rules and such. Well, I surely wasn’t expecting a talk about decision trees, expert systems and logical programming, but it was interesting nonetheless. The interesting bits to me were some talk about logical programming and how rule based systems approach that. Even more interesting was knowing that Clips can generate rules by analyzing other rules.

Then I went to see Nicolas Steenhout talk about “Web accessibility and Content Management Systems”, mostly ’cause I’m terrible annoyed by websites that force me to use the mouse (looong time memories of using Lynx/Links ’cause it was the only thing that run properly on Linux and because I’d like to be a “real nerd”) and ’cause I really dislike the way sites are built these days. He pointed the current state of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines): 1.0 is too old and 2.0 is not finished yet. He also mentioned the problem that the Sydney Olympics 2000 website had due not having any accessibility (they were sued about that) and how Target was also sued for not providing accessibility in their website.

Third session was Tennessee Leeuwenburg and “Google AppEngine + ExtJS prototyping demonstration.” That was one presentation that didn’t went well. Because the wireless was down and everyone had no internet at all, there was no prototyping and, obviously, no demonstration. So we saw some nice screenshots about AppEngine and some ExtJS screenshots and… that was it. I’m pretty sure the 30 minute space to talk about a topic was also a problem.

Next was Thomas Lee and “Python Language Internals: From Source to Execution”, which was a pretty good demonstration of the Python code. And by Python code I mean the very core of Python. What he did was, using the trunk code of Python, add a new command, from the parser, to the very end of creating a bytecode for it. Really impressive and, honestly, a big surprise that Python code is clean even when it’s not written in Python (most of the changed code was C code.)

Then Andrew Bennetts and “Python’s Unittest module: an under appreciated gem”. I was expecting a lot of weird tricks with unittest, but it seems that after a whole year using it, there was nothing new I could get from it. On the other hand, I got some pretty good list of extensions for Unittest, which provide a few more things that I may use in the future. The canonical (pun intented, as you’ll see) of such extensions is in Pyunit-Friends project in Launchpad.

“Extending Nagios with Python Plugins” by Maneschi (whose name I managed to completely lose somewhere) was more about Nagios than Python which was completely my fault. Anyway, it was an interesting talk, pointing some code used to collect information to Nagios.

Lastly, I went to “Getting Your Average Joe to use Open Source Software” by Peter Serwylo. Nothing new, I know, but he pointed some “gentler” methods to make people use Open Source (like keeping the user files and such — something that I barely thought after being constantly annoyed by “technical support” calls from my parents.) I think the way he described his methods were more in the way of “show the users what they can do” than “convert them!”, which seems to be the most commom way of making people use free software.

And I completely skipped the Lightning talks, and the Dinner Keynote.