Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: March 24, 2005

  • Python for Series 60 BoF

    We held a small BoF session in one of the Open Spaces this morning for Python for Series 60. Jukka demoed some oneliners, excercising the native widgets and excercising some of the available APIs. I was also able to take a look at someone’s FOMA phone running a Final Fantasy-like MMORPG running in Java on his phone.

    One attendee had questions about cross platform development. The SDK tools that allow you to run code on the emulator are win32 only, but the bluetooth console works on Windows, OSX, and Linux. More information can be found on the wiki.

    I haven’t seen a huge number of Series 60 devices (aside from Erik’s 7610, Jukka’s Charlie, my Taco, and a few others). Hopefully more people will come out of the woodwork after hearing Erik and Jukka’s talk tomorrow.

  • Profiling and Visualizing Python Program Behavior

    This morning I sat in on a session by Derek Jones and Richie Saunders who have developed tools for visualizing and profiling applications written in Python. Their company does a lot of work in digital signal processing. Python is great for productivity, but isn’t always fast enough for everyones needs.

    There are two libraries available for profiling Python: profile, written in javaPython and hostpot, written in C. They did some cool stuff by using the profiling hooks available to them. For example, they have created a python top that mimics the unix version by showing what is being executed and how much time is being spent in the various parts of your program.

    They are working on making the source code for their visualizations available, but have not been able to do so yet. There is no source availble (yet) but hopefully we’ll be able to see some of these tools down the road.

    Update: Drew pointed out the obvious mistake above that profile is written in Python. What can I say, I needed more sleep when I wrote this post.

  • PyCon DC 2005 Day 2

    I managed to sleep in this morning after a great first day of PyCon. I missed Guido’s State of Python talk, but I’m catching up by reading the excellent SubEthaEdit notes on his keynote. I hopped on the metro and made it for the tail end of the Chandler session. It looks like Chandler is definitely worth revisiting as it has improved significantly since the last time I looked at it. They had a slick demo that utilized flickr and it sounds like they also have the ability to bring in data from del.icio.us.

    Stay tuned to this post for links to all of my day 2 coverage. Other entries from today: