I found some time to finalize my pictures and notes on PyCon 2006. I tried my best to identify people in my pictures. Now you can see their names and links to their blogs. I added links to official descriptions of their talks, as well as to excellent detailed notes of some talks by Steve Holden. I advise to visit his blog, because he has notes on some talks I didn’t attend.

I added more pictures from PyCon 2006. Enjoy. Now time for a blog roll of my photo models (far from complete): I know I missed some blogs, please let me know your blog address, and I will add it.

Here in Dallas PyCon 2006 gave us an opportunity to meet many "virtual" people from Python community, and put faces to names. For those who couldn’t attend I am publishing pictures and small notes on Flickr. I will add more pictures tomorrow. If anybody’s name is misspelled, or missing (I didn’t catch all names), or you want me to remove your name or picture, please contact me and I will change notes.

Update 9/30/2006: when you finish this article don’t forget to read more about setting up tools in the second part: Setting up tools 2. My goal is to set up working environment for Django development on Windows box. You can find a lot of information on setting up open-source development tools on Linux. Somehow it is assumed that your project should target LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python). Windows-bound guys are advised to decorate their platform as ersatz Linux: install Apache, install MySQL, and you have WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, Python).

It looks like this is the last update before upcoming beta release. Besides some minor bug fixes, it sports improved firewall configuration widget: Compact representation of port ranges. Example: tcp 9000-9100 ⇒ mycomp Port redirection. Example: tcp 8080 ⇒ mycomp:80 While the former improves on existing functionality, the latter implements totally new feature. It allows mapping external ports to different ports of internal computers.

Have you been frustrated lately by speed of web applications? Typically they have a lot of art, and structured into a nice set of JavaScript and CSS files. They look beautiful, aren’t they? But do you have the patience to wait them load? And proceed from step to step? Of course, it is possible to prepare a web application to high-demand life: merge all stylesheets, and JavaScript files, and compress the result, structure your GUI in such a way that it is possible to combine all small images in one, and so on.

Let’s take a look at Snakes & Rubies stats published on Google Video. But before that take a look at previous stats published on 1/27/2006. New stats include 5 more days covering 18 days of January 2006. Lessons: More people read Django Community RSS feed than the news group, which was used for previous announcement. Duh. People followed my advice and went to watch Q&A Session. Very good! I know you were not disappointed.

Now after two posts about Guido’s quest for the Right Web Framework (1st, 2nd) I am starting to feel like his relay station. But I want to share his comment made in Matt’s blog post on Python web framework shootout: Why criticize Django for claiming to be the best? Nobody has denied it, and yet it’s criticized as if it were somehow unethical. Frankly, the problem is that there are too many Python web frameworks and wannabees, and if we don’t start some kind of shootout, however subjective, we’ll never get to market dominance of a few good ones.

Finally Guido got some time to play with goods. The verdict is in: Django vs. Cheeta 1-0.

If you liked reading Guido’s previous post on Python web frameworks (Rails was mentioned too) and discussion that followed, you should read his second installment: Web Framework Redux. Don’t forget to voice your opinion in the forum.