The Third Bit

Oh My God It’s Django!

Guido just pronounced: Django is the web framework

• Won’t be part of the core, but will be as “standard” as PIL or NumPy
• This was not what I expected the outcome of my talk would be, but hey, I’ll take it
• He hopes that Django and TurboGears will converge

Eric Jones: Enthought Tool Suite

• Enthought does open source software and consulting for scientific computing with Python
  • One of the sponsors of this conference
  • Providing hosting for Software Carpentry
  • Walked through traits and other offerings

  Chris Mueller: Synthetic Programming with Python

  • A Python library for generating assembly code for the Power PC
    • Get rid of the many layers between Python and the hardware
  • Great performance for great effort (up-front about that)
  • Q: How do you debug? A: insert an illegal instruction, back up a few bytes, single-step in GDB
    • Interested in multi-language debugger, but interested in a lot of other things as well

  Prabhu Ramachandran: 3D Visualization

  • Author of MayaVi, a better (more Pythonic) wrapper for VTK
  • Impressive — hides as much of the guff in complex 3D scientific visualization as it can

  Andrew Straw: Realtime Computing with Python

  • The Grand Unified Fly: a computational simulation of a fruit fly
  • Use Python for high-level stuff, and real-time for sub-millisecond control of motors, etc.
  • Program $20 microcontrollers with Python
    • E.g., Flydra is a multi-headed camera+FireWire system to track fly motion

  Lightning Talks

  • Mike Ressler: Prototyping Mid-Infrared Detector Data Processing Algorithms
    • Classic data crunching with NumPy
  • Brian Granger: The State of IPython
    • Sales pitch
  • Travis Oliphant: Array Interface BOF
    • Please for people to help put together PEP for arrays in Python
  • Travis Vaught: Enstaller
    • Enhancements to Python Egg system (with GUI)
    • Worth tracking
  • Michel Sanner: The Current State of Vision
    • Update on a visual builder for image processing pipelines
    • Very cool — but lots of overlap (it seems) with MayaVi
  • Peter Wang: Quick Overview of Chaco
    • 2D plotting library
    • Repeat of slides from yesterday’s tutorial

  William Stein: Software for Algebra and Geometry Experimentation

  • SAGE bundles together lots of other packages used for algebra and exact computation
  • Very particular about getting his whole half hour, despite the late hour

  Alex Clemesha: Mathematica-like Plotting for SAGE

  • Slow cruise through SAGE’s graphics
  • As with web frameworks, Python has too many plotting packages for its own good

  Diane Trout: BioHub

  • There’s a lot of sequence data out there
    • And collection is accelerating rapidly
  • BioHub is a Python interface for large-scale genomic analysis
    • A database to link diverse annotation sources
  • I didn’t know that genes have version numbers…

  Greg Wilson: Software Carpentry

  • Last talk of the day — some locals had already headed home, but there were about 70 people present
  • Went well, but no one’s offering to teach the course at their institution this fall
  • Slides available online