Day two at PyCon started with a cold shower. Not by choice, mind you, but apparently the One Washington Hotel hasn't been investing their profits into an adequate water-heating system. At least it stopped raining -- it's colder, but not wet.
The conference keynotes take place first thing in the morning in a mid-size auditorium. But surprisingly for the tech conference, you can't bring your coffee (or any drinks) into the room -- so it's an early morning, sleepy crowd. This is also the one room that lacks wi-fi and power outlets, which is good or bad depending on how you look at it.
The keynote this morning was Guido's "State of Python" address. He briefly talked about the 'decorator' decision process (mentioning that "Perl isn't all bad") then went on to discuss the formation of new Python Security Response Team in reaction to the first official Python vulnerability alert that happened recently (for SimpleXMLRPCServer.)
Guido then moved on to the more controversial topics of Python 3.0 being incompatible with Python 2.x (for example, old-style objects won't be supported anymore, which is a good thing) the addition of the any() and all() standard methods, the likely removal of map() filter() and reduce() and the potential demise of lambda. He then talked about potential changes to how divide-by-zero can be reported, and the very heated topic of static typing.
After the early sessions, we held an informal Python for Series 60 BoF, where we got some good dialog about networking on Symbian, but not too many people were there to hear it. That's the nature of holding BoF sessions though, so hopefully we'll have a larger crowd at the real session tomorrow morning. We were luck enough to get the main auditorium for the presentation (I say 'we' because Jukka's joining me for the more meaty, technical bits) but unfortunately, the sessions are rather quick (20 minutes) and we've had to drop a lot of things we were hoping to unveil.
After lunch I went to the Lightning Talks, which I think wins my vote for the most interesting session. The format was a quick, 5-minute soap-box window for presentations about random projects, ideas, and questions. It was long enough to get the gist of what people were up to and jot down some terms to google later, but not so long that as to get boring. It's hard to pick a favorite, but I really enjoyed Ka-Ping Yee's demonstration of his new scrape module.
I've once again gathered the URL's I wrote down during the day, but if you're just looking for more detail on the sessions, Matt's been doing a much better job then I at posting regularly.
Now for the links: