Live from beautiful (and rainy) Addison, Texas, it’s Pycon 2006. Or as we used to say when I lived here, “Sure, it’s cold, plastic, and heartless. But it’s not bad.”
The conference is actually pretty good, with its usual high geek quotient. My talk yesterday on teaching programming to 8th graders was well received. I got laughs in the right places and had several good chats with people afterwards. A relatively huge bunch of us then went to dinner and after that stayed up late trading ideas on how to use Python in education.
This afternoon, Nathan presented on using elements from Zope 3 for desktop applications, which was good and well received.
The highlight of the afternoon for me came at the “Lightning Talks” (5 minute presentations) where one of the developers of subversion, who now works for Google (those guys were all over the place here) explained how he wrote an IRC bot in Python to replace himself on IRC… and no one noticed!
I also decided to trade in my cute, tiny, insanely thin little Sharp notebook for a Dell X1. I got to play with one a guy here had, and I’m convinced. More RAM, more hard drive, more processor, and more screen, with about the same amount of weight. Of course it’s slightly bigger and definitely thicker, but it looks like it’s worth it. I’ll miss the Sharp, but it’s starting to show some signs of age.
So, do you think that IRC bot passed the Turing Test?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
Actually, the guy himself (it was Ben Collins-Sussman) argued that either the bot passed the Turing Test or he (Ben) wasn’t nearly as interesting as he once thought….