Christopher Merle (ENTP)

To keep up on the Python universe I follow Planet Python which is a blog aggregator and to keep up on my two favorite Python products Django and Plone I follow Django Community and Planet Plone respectively.

I sort of fell into Python through Zope when I started working at my current job as a web administrator. Python has a fairly gently learning curve and you can become productive for simple programming tasks fairly quickly. Zope on the other hand has a very steep learning curve. I’ve probably mentioned this before in previous posts, but I was tasked to upgrade the website and after looking at dozens of PHP based content management systems I decided upon Plone. Due to legacy Zope applications the current website is a hybrid of Zope and Plone. I’ve seen Plone evolve from version 2.0 to 2.1 to 2.5 to 3.0 to version 3.1. I think with version 3.x Plone has finally come of age as a content management system and would pit it against high end commercial CMSes. What I really like about Plone is its security, workflow, and it’s shallow learning curve for end users.

Plone is open source and is used by a number of high profile sites, Oxfam America,Discover Magazine and University of Louisville come to mind. Plone also has a steep learning curve and it’s a little frustrating when you have relearn how to customize it from version to version. There wasn’t as much of a change from 2.x to 2.5, but the change to 3.x was pretty big. When I did a test migration from a 2.5 site to a 3.0 site it broke all of my template customizations. I relearned how to redo the customizations and I like the 3.x way better.

You do have to keep up Plone developments and one of the best ways is to read Planet Plone which is a blog aggregator of Plone/Zope/Python blogs. I have yet to attend a Plone conference but I have attended three Pycons 2006, 2007, and 2008 and I plan to attend 2009.

I have devoted some attention to Django which is a very nice web framework and I’ve used it to replace a number of outdated Zope applications. I’ll go into more detail about it in a future post. I see it as having a different workspace than Plone does. Anyway, back to Planet Plone. I found a few posts from it that I wanted to share to show how useful it is to follow.

Plone Conference 2008 Video Offerings

Plone Replaces Sharepoint, Red Dot, and Vignette

And last week was World Plone Day to raise awareness of this underappreciated CMS, but that is changing.

World Plone Day After Action Report

Although I’ve become a big fan of Django, my introduction to Python was through Zope. Zope led to Plone which I’ve been using for a few years now. Plone can be customized but it’s a steep learning curve. I’ve found a slide show with some tips for customizing this wonderful content management system.

I found this as a related slide show about World Plone Day 2008

In February of 2007 I attended my second Pycon, a conference devoted to the open source programming language Python. One of the coolest system of presentations I saw were the lightning talks. Each presenter gets only 5 minutes to give his spiel. The one that made the biggest impression on me was by Ka-Ping Yee. He demonstrated how using less than 300 lines of code could make electronic voting much more secure. Consider this. A voting machine made by Diebold (now Premier Election Solutions) has over 31,000 lines of code. Some machines have over 100,000 lines of code. Which do you think would be easier to audit and certify?

As we get closer to the election, voting security becomes more important. Ka-Ping Yee is getting some news coverage. Since that talk his pvote code has ballooned to just under 500 lines of code, still somewhat under that 100K mark.

No matter what system is used, transparency and the ability to audit the system and the votes is of paramount importance. No one should trust any system to work. Proper checks and balances need to be in place, so that should questions arise, people can see what happened.

Yee was interviewed during Pycon 2008 in Chicago: In Voting Software We Trust?

Ira Flatow also interviews Ka-Ping Yee in this recent segment of Science Friday. Comes in at 13:30.
E-Voting Update (broadcast Friday, October 24th, 2008)

One thing to note about the electronic voting systems mentioned in the podcast was calibration. They use touch screens. If they are not calibrated properly, voters thinking they selected their candidate of choice may show they’ve selected a different candidate. The co-ordinates of the selections you see on the screen should be synced up with the co-ordinates of the touch display. This is a separate issue that needs to be addressed, but as long as it can be calibrated visually and on the spot this should not be a serious technical issue. The only downside is that voters may not be paying attention to their choices or summary.

Yee didn’t mention anything about a paper audit, but it would be trivial to add a few lines of code to print out the cast ballot. Not only does this make it possible to vote more securely—by an order of magnitude—his system makes it easier for the voter to cast a vote, including those requiring accessibility.

You can also view his Pycon slide show. It will walk you through the steps, and you’ll see how it is possible to make electronic voting far more secure than it is now. With the proper checks and balances people can be sure their vote is counted. These checks are sadly lacking in Diebold’s and others voting machine technology.

Since I’ve started learning Python and using it I’ve been learned Zope, Plone, and Django, and I’ve been to 3 PyCons. I really like the Python community.

To keep on on all things Python I follow Planet Python (planet.python.org). It’s a monster RSS feed following dozens of python related blogs. It even links to other planets feed aggregators, including Zope, Plone, Django, and OLPC.

While it’s still fresh in my mind I should go ahead and write up my Pycon 2008 report. I’ll flesh it out as time permits or add new parts. Overall I had a good time and it was worth it for me, but the event was not without it’s problems. I’ll have more positive things to say in Part II.

This is my third Pycon. I attended 2006 and 2007 in Dallas. I’m glad I listened to the latest TWID podcast while waiting for my plane to board from St. Louis. I couldn’t get a direct flight from Tulsa there, but did back. The one thing that stuck in my mind was 1000 people were signed up. There were 600 in 2007 and 400 in 2006. They said there were that many signed up for just the tutorials alone.

Thursday I got to the hotel checked in, called my cousin and then went downstairs to help stuff bags while waiting for him to get off work. I met a guy from LexisNexis and we worked out a great system for stacking the paper that was going to be stuffed in the bags which got changed to what was a less efficient system. Anyway there was a lot of people helping to stuff the goodies bags. My cousin Gary showed up and we went out to dinner with his family.

We went to a great Chinese restaurant called Yue’s in Elk Grove Village. I hadn’t seen them in person in almost 11 years though I keep in touch with him via email. Anyway, I got back to the hotel and had a beer in the bar and got my first shock. It was $6. I soon discovered at the hotel you were a captive audience. I’m glad most of the food was covered by registration because everything was overpriced. The room rate was reasonable though. The nearest place you could walk to was the convention center and other hotels. Even the ‘L’ was 3/4 of a mile away. I thought Dallas was pedestrian unfriendly, but Rosemont, IL has it beat. At least you could’ve walked a 1/4 mile from the hotel in Dallas and found a half dozen nice restaurants.

My first clue that things did not go well was I overheard some people talking on the shuttle bus back to the airport. They were talking about how lightning talks were sold to the sponsors as were keynote slots. I had noticed that there was a lower percentage of good lightning talks and panels than from last year. I realize that Pycon is run by all volunteers and what right do I have to complain when they are doing the best they can. Then I checked Planet Python and there was mention of Bruce Eckel’s rant.

I didn’t even know he was there. Bruce wasn’t even listed in the speakers list. I saw his name on the open space boards downstairs. I’m familiar with Eckel’s Thinking In Java. I thought that was cool. I thought I saw him chatting with someone. I was curious why he was there. Go see his blog to find out. He had some valid points in his post, but I thought he was being overly harsh. His major complaint was that it had become too commercial. Maybe it had. It really didn’t seem more commercial than it was last year. It was and it didn’t really bother me that much. But after reading the rant that it was the reason why the panels and the lightning talks weren’t as good.

One of reasons I go to Pycon is to meet other programmers. I also go to learn about cool things you can do with python. The keynotes this year weren’t as good as they were last year.

I’ll say this for all those who complained and this goes for me to. Help to make Pycon better next year. It doesn’t have to be much. There are a lot of people in the community. I had a good time helping to stuff the bags for the attendees and I wouldn’t mind doing that next year. More later.