We reached Durgapur around 3:30AM on Friday, woke up by 6AM due to the really cold temperature. The inauguration event started few hours late and after that Mether started doing his RPM workshop.
My workshop started after 6:30PM , around 60+ students. Started with basics of python as a language. I did this workshop slowly so that everyone can pick the things we were discussing.
Next day morning my second session started from 10AM and in the afternoon I had my PyGtk workshop in the lab. After finishing talking for more than 6 hours did the final talk for the night with the first year students. Total time I spoke was more than 7 hours , which is a record for me :)
3rd day again started at 10AM and I was surprised to see more than 30 students in the seminar hall where I was doing the python workshops. We discussed in details various modules in python and also discussed about projects for the students.
Generally I don’t get many mails from the students after the workshops or even if they do mail , they don’t continue. But here I found 3 students still continuing. I hope at least one of them will be able his/her journey in the path of freedom.
Photos can be found here. Will update the post with flickr set when I upload there.
So I am back from PyCon India 2010. I missed last year, so was waiting for this year’s event. Met many faces after very long time and to be in a place with so many other python lovers is always a nice experience. The total attendance was around 700 but the venue was too big for that number , so except the lunch time, corridors had lesser number of people discussing. The selection of the talks were also matching the environment as they came from different directions. We saw talks with hardware accessibility to web development to GUI application toolkits, network programming, scientific computing, terminal based works etc.
Day 1 started a bit late, David Goodger gave the keynote, it was fun. Next talk I liked was from Dhananjay Nene on “Functional Programming with Python“, he managed to show many things within the short time.
I stood in the queue for lunch as soon as possible, it was late, too much crowd at the same time, but the taste of the food was delicious. During and after the lunch I was discussing with Jace about Wing IDE, I had a thought of buying that previously also but the price is high for me. Wait, not anymore, they gave a 90% discount for the PyCon India :) Started using it right away with vi mode and it works like a charm.
After lunch, thought of going in Mahendra M’s Twisted programming talk, but the room was full, no place for standing also. So hoped over to the auditorium for Vijay Kumar B.’s Device Interfacing with Python and ZIO , it was one of the best talk I ever attended.
Met DP and Jacob after long time :)
This was first time my laptop’s X crashed while trying to use the projector, so after few tries I started my talk with the black terminal on the big screen :) newt widgets looked great on that screen though :)
Day 2: I came a bit late as I had to meet few seniors from my college in the city (event was in a far corner of the city), I spent the day mostly in the corridors talking with people. I met so many Pune based python lovers there :) Strangely enough few speakers were absconding from the talks, so the organizers had to innovate to fill in.
At the very end we had first AGM of Indian Python Software Society, too much fun in that :p. I applied for membership, I still need two votes. I also resumed my work on “Python for you and me” 2nd edition. You can also read ml-IN or zh-CN translation of the book.
Any python lover from the country should attend this event, next year it will be in Chennai. Photos will come later this week.
Following my last post, spent most of the of the time on different imaging libraries to find a faster way of doing thumbnails and optimization.
I tested the following libraries to create image thumbnails, GdkPixbuf, imlib2, ImageMagic, epeg. Pixbuf gives somewhat nice timings , imlib2 is fast but was leaking too much memory. ImageMagic seems to the slowest among them. Last try was with epeg which can only handle jpegs and it came out as the fastest. So wrote a C function and using it from inside vala code using extern.
Next target was to find better way to get thumbnails from RAW images, tried libopenraw and LibRaw for that. But with help from yorba developers found the way to do it using gexiv2 only.
In between tried few tools for profiling the application, sayamindu told me about sysprof which seems to be the easiest for my purpose. Using it I found gexiv2_metadata_open_path is taking around 67% of time, inside it Exiv2::TiffImage:readMetaData is taking 51% of time.
Now coming to the point of speed , 1st run is on 1GB of RAW files
real 0m2.946s
user 0m2.542s
sys 0m0.116s
2nd run is on same 36GB of images , among them around half is RAW.
real 4m0.807s
user 0m54.283s
sys 1m24.789s
Now this is fast in my textbook :D I should not forget to tell about the great help I got from #vala and Adrien Bustany in the whole work.
I was looking into this feature request yesterday, good news is lekhonee-gnome already supports this. Lets say your wordpress username is foobar.
So, in the accounts in Preferences window you add the first account with your username and password and WordPress as service.
Then add another account with same username and password but service as other and type the full url of your 2nd blog following /xmlrpc.php (example: http://secondblog.wordpress.org/xmlrpc.php).
Now you can access both the blogs from lekhonee-gnome
So this weekend we had FAD Pune 2010. Being organizer the main issue was to get inside the office before everyone else :)
Among the things done:
Packaged accessx ( with help from Sayamindu to patch it for Fedora)
Updated code in Pony so that it works with new flickrapi API (committed but not pushed yet)
Now we have cover images in Pathagar , the digital library system.
Helped people with packaging
Yesterday in the last hours almost everyone were busy with packaging and helping each other. Had fun with all other contributors for 2 days, now getting back to the normal routine. Photos will come up later this week. I also recorded Sayamindu’s talk on OLPC as a downstream of Fedora project, you can view it here (111MB).
