Feihong Hsu presented lessons learned on doing Unicode in Python. I love hearing real-world experience, and Feihong knows his stuff. After his presentation there was a discussion where other folks chipped in their notes and answered questions. The gist of it is that Python is good for Unicode, and in Python 3000 it’ll be great.

Ian Bicking is working part time on the One Laptop Per Child project and brought a prototype. I couldn’t get over how nice it is, it has a lot of thoughtful design touches like the antennae doubling as latches to close it. I’ve heard a lot of folks say they want one, but you really don’t — the keyboard is physically too small for adults to type on. Ian mentioned it’s currently fairly difficult to get started developing, but there’s a lot of attention on the problem and he’d like to set up a sprint to develop for the laptop after dev envs are easy to set up.

Ted Pollari took a few minutes to talk about how he and others worked to bring PyCon to Chicago in 2008. They’re finalizing the hotel contract this week, and planning for a thousand developers. Ted thanked everyone who helped, and encourages anyone who’s curious or might be able to volunteer to join the pycon-organizers mailing list.

Pete Fein presented Grassy Knoll a REST-style interface to PyLucene using JSON as the data format on the wire. REST is a natural fit for the document management and searching, so it looks like a good project. He’s looking for folks to lend a hand.

Around 150 people showed up, and I was the easily the most underdressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoodie. Oops. So I wrote “obviously a developer” on my nametag and nobody cared except the photographers, who I suspect liked the visual of the scruffy hacker-type chatting with guys in business suits because I noticed them taking my picture at least four times and, Keith, if a ton of your pictures are me being scruffy I’m sorry.

It was easy to visually divide the crowd — every under 35 was starting their first or second business and everyone over was either on their eighth or in finance. So I gave the Cambrian House elevator pitch about two dozen times and boy does a crowd full of entrepreneurs love the promise of CH. I also met 5 folks who’d already heard of us, three of whom had accounts on the site and submitted ideas.

After an hour of open mingling Keith and Eric presented the family tree of Chicago tech startups. The founders of three establishd local companies gave a little “if we were starting now” presentation with comments from a board of three random finance guys and Jason Fried. Then three young startups GrubHub, Inkling, and third startup doing training whose name I forgot and can’t find anywhere gave 62-second presentations to compete for a briefcase full of cash. GrubHub won handily to end the presentation and folks fraternized for a few hours longer (I wandered out at 10 PM).

All-in-all, a fun evening and a lot of neat startups. I especially enjoyed meeting the editor of the excellent Gapers Block and the CEO of Collectica, which seems like a clever idea.

TechCoffee

This morning I hopped up bright-eyed at 6 AM to go to TechCoffee and hacked on a personal Rails project I hope to post about in the next week or two. This was the first time I’ve gone to one of these and it was a good time. A half-dozen folks also showed up to code, though I spent a bunch of time chatting with Jason Huggins about a neat Selenium project he absolutely needs to work on and if you’re reading this, Jason, then ha, I’m pulling ahead and I’ll launch my project first and win our bet so there.

So, yeah, I don’t often drink coffee but it seemed like a good idea at 7 AM. Very wired still.

* I know it’s odd, but I just don’t like lots of things around to keep track of. I don’t feel like a happy consumer to be surrounded by posessions, it’s just more and more stuff to keep track of.

Just mail me to say what books you’d like. If you’re in Chicago this could be an excellent excuse to drop by for dinner, or if we just know each other from a local user group I’ll bring ‘em there for you. If you’re outside of Chicago and not dropping in anytime soon, send your current mailing address and I’ll ship them to you.

Five years ago I donated about 200 books I didn’t really care for to my to my then-local library. I got the idea for this giveaway when I realized that I only reread a few of my books on any regular basis. As soon as it occurred to me that I might be able to fit them all on my little blue bookshelf, I had to try. I’d have made it if I could give up my dream that someday I’ll write a comic, so I have another shelf with 50 or so books I’ve promised myself are “reference”.

One last note: I received some of the books I’m giving away as gifts. If you see a book you gave me on the list it’s not there because I don’t like you/it or didn’t appreciate the gift, it’s only that I want to reduce how much I own and I deliberately picked a difficult constraint.

2007-05-10: All of the books have been given away.

So to talk about the office: it’s a nice, if very deliberate space. It’s nice to see that someone thought about all the little decorative touches (like lava lamps) and useful touches (like an acoustic shell above where the projector displayed), but it didn’t feel very lived-in yet. Maybe it was just that having to sign an NDA to enter the office for a public meeting was an unpleasant surprise.

First up, Brian Ray gave a presentation on operator overloading in Python. He covered what operators are available, how Python picks which operand’s code is called, how assignment operators like += and -= are handled, and tips on good style.

Next, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman talked about how they’ve been working on Google Code, specifically the free Project Hosting for open source software. The highlight (and clearly Fitz’s favorite part of the project) was how they used Google’s BigTable as their svn repository.

Last, Jason Huggins demo’d Selenium, the browser-based website testing framework he developed. He had a nice demo showing how Selenium can be integrated into a continuous integration system so that browser tests are run on multiple OSs on every checkin, with screen-capture movies of the test process automatically checked into a repository.

All-in-all, this was a very fun meeting with lots of conversation that didn’t break up until security wanted to close up at 23:00 (5h after the meeting started). I had fun meeting and chatting with at least a half-dozen new folks. Mostly I yammered on and on about how Cambrian House works, but I swear it’s because folks kept asking and not because I’m turning myself into a mobile billboard.

Also, Jonathan Wolter talked me into coming out to San Francisco with him and a few others to attend Yahoo’s Hack Day in two weeks. Looks to be a good time.

I’d say Vox is basic LiveJournal aimed at an older audience. It’s a blog for people who hear blog and think “Oh, those things that the newspaper keeps mentioning as bad for business and the cable news is so scared of.” People who don’t want to share pictures of their kids with random internet strangers but find their cc list getting unmanageably long. Vox is a blogging site with a surprisingly nice user interface, the first I feel I can recommend to my mom without signing up to do a few hours of tutoring and answering questions.

It really is nice. Six Apart clearly learned a lot from LiveJournal and thought hard about how to make a blogging service to let you bring your relationships with family and friends online with minimal weirdness. Vox is not trying to be an engineering triumph, it just is a user interface triumph.

All is not roses, of course. They’re not fully launching until roughly October. You have to join an announcement list to get an account, I got the impression they’re adding a batch of a couple thousand people every few weeks. The site simply doesn’t work in Safari yet, and IE is iffy. There’s no public bug tracker, so I can’t even guess at how many features are missing or broken, so I can’t recommend anyone sign up until the launch in a few months. Also, if you happen to know any hardcore LiveJournal fans you’re in for a rant about how Six Apart wants to destroy LJ and Vox is some kind of weapon in this covert campaign.

The party was one of a series Vox is doing before launch ostensibly so that Vox doesn’t just grow out of California like most social websites. There was a blurry demo, open bar, and around fifty people at the MCA. I enjoyed chatting with four of the Six Apart employees present (out of seven or so) and around a third of the other guests.

I look forward to seeing launch, and web developers should learn from their very nice blog posting interface.

On Saturday I:

• Met two dozen geeks, so less than half the people there.
• Attended a presentation on mobile devices, specifically the GP2X. I like mobile devices, but find web coding way more interesting than the nebulous topic of pervasive computing.
• Insulted the unendingly rude Ron May.
• Attended “How to Burn Your Business to the Ground” by a guy from Intentionally. Very slick presentation on failure and how entrepreners can minimize the likelihood.
• Shook the hand of surprise guest Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia founder. When he walked in there was a lot of “Is that who I think it is?” and he later gave an impromptu talk on translating Wikipedia‘s success to politics with the Campaigns Wikia. I may go to the local meetup in two weeks.
• Started a hypercard-like educational programming system for the web with Michael, Ian, Andy, Rachel, and bystanders. I’ll give it a post of its own tomorrow morning when the sf project is up.
• Heard about a plan to build a hacker lab/living space to connect like-minded folks.

…and then I came home and crashed. It was an incredible day, constantly busy and engaging. There were at least 60 people there and between all the folks and the July heat, the air conditioning couldn’t even keep up.

On Sunday I:

• Met another dozen geeks.
• Attended Jason Rexilius’s talk on globally distributed web clusters but wandered away because I saw most of the content when he gave the talk to ChiPHPug (great talk, though).
• Attended Jason Jacobsohn’s introduction to the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, which helps startups and seems cool but has a Flash applet instead of a website.
• Attended Jonathan Wolter‘s discussion on using blogs in non-bloggy ways, sort of as a web development springboard. He gave a nice little example-heavy introduction and then threw the door open to a great discussion.
• talked more with Andy and Ian about the Hypercard-like app.

I may only have had two meals in two days, but it was a great time. Where TechCocktail was a noisy sardine can with lots of business guys, Bar Camp was almost all geeks and never too busy or empty. I only saw one tie, but that guy was also wearing a RailsConf badge so maybe he just had a paraphelia for neckwear.

To express the right note of enthusiasm, let me just say: A+++++ EXCELLENT, BIG THANKS – WILL ATTEND AGAIN.