Pycon 2005

March 24:

So I'm in Washington, DC with my wife, staying with friends in Virginia. We've been taking the Orange Line into town the last two mornings. I get off at Foggy Bottom/GWU.

Yesterday I gave a talk on hypertoons during one of the open space periods. Dawn visited the new Native American museum on the mall.

Tonight I'll be going out for dinner with Dabo and Schevo people (hi Patrick) -- both emerging database-oriented Pythonic technologies.

March 25:

So we had good Vietnamese food on M Street in Georgetown last night. Conversation meadered, a lot about raising kids, especially teenagers. Turns out Prague is a major capital in FoxPro world (a world I share with the Dabo guys); maybe I'll get back there one of these days. Would Microsoft have let FoxPro die off if it hadn't been for heavyweight clients like the US military, which uses it in JFAST (home page)?

Speaking of the military, one of the interesting applications demonstrated this week, inside of which Python plays a major role, was for imparting Arabic language skills to soldiers (PDF). Python glues together speech recognition software and a game engine (Unreal Tournament 2003), and simulates a mission: approach some locals, introduce yourself and your team; ask who's in charge; get directions to the local leader's house; follow them (all in Arabic of course).

This morning, we're looking forward to a keynote about how Python is used at Google.

In the news: I see Bobby Fischer has finally gotten out of that Japanese jail.