MSC Malaysia OSCONF 2009

In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from May 31 - June 3 there will be the inaugural MSC Malaysia OSCONF. This conference is designed to bring together Government, Business, Open Source Developer and User communities to showcase and expand Open Source's contribution to the IT industry and socio-economy. The conference program consists of a one day hackathon, followed by the three day main conference. The main conference has three tracks:

• Executive Download - Panels and presentations to introduce Government and Business to Open Source.
  
• Developer - Modelled on OSDC, presentations by Open Source developers for developers.
  
• Community - Presentations for users of Open Source software.
  

The tentative schedule can be viewed here. There is a broad range of international and Malaysian speakers.

As a developer who spends some time each year in Malaysia, and has seen some of the interesting things the Open Source community is doing there, I would recommend this event as a great reason to visit Malaysia.

OSDC 2008 Earlybird Registration is now open!

Earlybird Registration for The Open Source Developers' Conference 2008 is now open.

OSDC 2008 is a conference run by open source developers, for developers and business people. It covers numerous programming languages across a rangeof operating systems, and related topics such as business processes, licensing, and strategy. Talks vary from introductory pieces through to the deeply technical. This year we have an exciting selection of presenters andkeynote speakers including:

* Larry Wall, the creator of Perl
* Chris DiBona, Open Source Progams Manager for Google
* Andrew Tridgell, Founder, Samba Team
* Anthony Baxter, Python Evangelist
* Pia Waugh, Consultant, Waugh Partners

Check out the draft program: http://www.osdc.com.au/2008/papers/

Please visit http://www.osdc.com.au/2008/registration/ to register.
Earlybird registration closes 27th October, 2008.

For more information about this event, please visit: http://www.osdc.com.au/.

OSDC 2008 - Sydney - Call for Papers

The Open Source Developers' Conference 2008 is a conference run by open source developers, for developers and business people. It covers numerous programming languages across a range of operating systems, and related topics such as business processes, licensing, and strategy. Talks vary from introductory pieces through to the deeply technical. It is a great opportunity to meet, share, and learn with like-minded individuals.

This year, the conference will be held in Sydney, Australia during
the first week of December (1st - 5th). If you are an Open Source
maintainer, developer or user, the organising committee would
encourage you to submit a talk proposal on open source tools,
solutions, languages or technologies you are working with.

For more details and to submit your proposal(s), goto:
http://osdc.com.au/2008/papers/cfp.html

If you have any questions or require assistance with your
submission, please don't hesitate to ask!

We recognise the importance of Open Source
in providing a medium for collaboration between individuals,
researchers, business and government. In recognition of this and
ensure a high standard of presentations, we intend to peer-review
all submitted papers.

OSDC 2008 Sydney (Australia) - Key Program Dates:

30 Jun - Initial proposals (short abstract) due
21 Jul - Proposal acceptance
15 Sep - Accepted paper submissions
13 Oct - Reviews completed
27 Oct - Final paper submission cutoff

For all information, contacts and updates, see the OSDC conference
web site at http://osdc.com.au/2008/

Also if you are interested in sponsoring, please see:
http://www.osdc.com.au/2008/sponsors/opportunities.html

Silverlight 2 SDK, Mac OS X and Mono

John Lam has posted two introductory articles [1],[2] that use the Dynamic Silverlight SDK . It came as no surprise that only Microsoft operating systems are officially supported for the SDK. So after downloading and installing it onto a VMWare image running one of the supported operating systems, I decided to try installing it on my Macbook Pro. I copied the SDK directory structure across, installed the Mono 1.2.6 for OSX, and John's demos. Then in a terminal session, started chirod, the SDK local web server in the flickr_start root directory.

mono ~/Silverlight/v2.0/Tools/Chiron/Chiron.exe /b

and was presented with the following:

Microsoft(R) Silverlight(TM) Development Utility. Version 1.0.0.0
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Chiron serving '/Users/mark/swdev/demos/flickr_start' as http://localhost:2060/
mono(2077,0xa000d000) malloc: *** Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x14f5b4; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug
23:44:00 200 2,340 /index.html
23:44:00 200 2,397 /assets/stylesheets/error.css
23:44:01 200 552,610 /app.xap


The error didn't affect the functionality of the Silverlight demo.



I then tried the flickr_end demo and discovered what error messages look like under the SDK environment.



This error also occurs under Windows so it would appear that John is using a newer version of Silverlight 2 and/or IronPython that handles the line of python code.

Anyway it looks like I will be able to use my Mac environment for Dynamic Silverlight development.

Google Code SVN interface improvements

I use Google Code Project Hosting for a number of my open source projects. It gave me a common place to store my code under subversion and the integrated wiki allowed easy creation of on-line documentation. The web interface to subversion was rather limited only showing the current version of the repository. So I have tended to use the subversion tools on my computer for viewing revisions etc. In the last couple of weeks I have been working on a new release of my ISAPI handler for WSGI (isapi_wsgi) and was surprised this morning to see the SVN web interface has changed dramatically and for the better.

Now when you access the subversion repository via the Source tab, you goto the Checkout view. This initially looks like the old view, until you notice that the Browse link has moved to a sub-menu and there is a new Changes link. If you select the Browse link, an explorer style interface is displayed. From this you can navigate around the repository. If you select a file, it is displayed with the code syntax coloured, with panels for the details of the last change, revision history and file info. This is a massive improvement over what was there before. Selecting the Changes link shows a view of the revision history. Viewing a revision allows access to either a nice colour diff view or side by side view.

So a big thank you to the Google Code Project hosting team for the improvements.

My OSDC 2007 talks

Today I gave my two talks at OSDC.

This morning I gave a talk on web testing using twill and selenium remote control. A pdf of the slides can be downloaded:

Testing Web Applications with Scripting Languages

And this afternoon I spoke about Moonlight, the Mono implementation of Silverlight.

Moonlight - Shiny, Pretty Things with XML?

I had intended to blog about the various OSDC sessions I have attended, but thanks to the lazy web, Alan Green has already done it for me

A sneak peek at mod_wsgi 1.2

Errata: Opps, the title should be "A sneak peek at mod_wsgi 2.0"

Today Graham Dumpleton announced the first release candidate of mod_wsgi 2.0. mod_wsgi is a simple to use Apache module which can host any Python application which supports the Python WSGI interface. The new features added are:

• 'Process' option for WSGIReloadMechanism to make it easier to restart an application running in a mod_wsgi daemon process when code changes are made. When this option is enabled, you only need to touch the WSGI script file and the application to be reloaded.
  
• Ability to hook into the Apache 2.2 auth provider mechanism
• Support for Python virtual environments
• Provision of hooks to be able to work with the internal Apache APIs.

Read the changes document for more information.

If you are in Sydney, Australia on Thursday 1 October you could find out more by attending the SyPy meetup where Graham will be talking about mod_wsgi. Details can be found here.

November 28, a busy day for me

Just been notified by the OSDC 2007 Program Committee that my two presentations are on the same day.

11:00-11:30 Testing Web Applications with Scripting Languages

14:30-15:00 Moonlight - Shiny, Pretty Things with XML?

The complete conference program can be viewed here. So if you want to spend an interesting 3-4 days in Brisbane mixing with open source developers, early bird registration is open until October 14th. Then full price registration will be available until October 31th.

Version 1.0 of mod_wsgi is now available

Graham Dumpleton announced on the mod_wsgi mailing list yesterday:

"Okay folks, official 1.0 release of mod_wsgi is now available from
http://www.modwsgi.org.

The only difference between this version and mod_wsgi-1.0c4 is the
version string and some minor changes in README file.

Now that this is out of the way, I'll be able to get onto implementing
all the nice new features I want to add to make it even better. You
can get an idea for what some of these might be by looking at:

http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/issues/list

If you have your own ideas, please post them here to the list and we
can all discuss them.

Thanks to everyone who has helped test the release candidates."

mod_wsgi 1.0 Release Candiate Available

Today Graham Dumpleton tagged the SVN and has made available the release candidate of mod_wsgi. The mod_wsgi adapter is an Apache module that provides a WSGI compliant interface for hosting Python 2.3+ Python based web applications under Apache. Graham has written it completely in C code so it has a lower overhead than the mod_python or CGI adapters. It can be used with Apache 1.3, 2.0 or 2.2 and normally runs in 'embedded mode' where the application code is executed within the context of normal Apache child processes. If you run mod_wsgi with Apache 2.x on a Unix/Linux system, it can also run in a 'daemon mode' where one or more distinct processes can be dedicated to one or more WSGI applications. Graham has put together great documentation including instructions on using mod_wsgi with some of the common Python web frameworks and applications including Trac, Django, Pylons, MoinMoin and TurboGears.

Adal Chiriliuc has built Win32 binaries of the release candidate and these can be found here.

I have lucky enough to have been associated with the testing of mod_wsgi since it's inception and want to thank Graham for all his efforts in developing and releasing a WSGI adapter of high quality and functionality. Also thanks to other testers who kept Graham honest and busy. In my humble and most likely biased opinion, I think it will become the WSGI adapter of choice when serving Python applications under Apache.

IronRuby Pre Alpha Source Code Released

Today John Lam announced the first release of IronRuby source code. Of interest to me in the announcement was the following quote:

"We're also happy to announce that we will be accepting source code contributions into the IronRuby libraries."

This policy is what many users of IronPython have been wanting since it's first release. Since both language implementations are released under the same license, hopefully Microsoft will see fit to change their policy for IronPython as well. And once the DLR reaches 1.0, hopefully we will be able to contribute to the IronPython compiler codebase as well.

So congratulatons to the IronRuby team on the progress to date, great to see dynamic languages getting more exposure in the .NET world.

Sydney traffic chaos disrupts SyPy meeting

Update: It would appear the Nine News website doesn't have permanent urls so removed their link. Try this one for more background.

Yesterday I hosted the July SyPy meetup at my work. Since the office is North Sydney based, many pythoneers would need to travel to the meeting using Sydney's rail network. It doesn't have the best record for reliability, and yesterday was a classic example. A panel was ripped off a CityRail train as it crossed the Harbour Bridge resulting to commuter chaos for many hours. The good news is that python programmers are a hardy bunch and ten overcame the chaos so we still managed to have a great meeting.

Tim Churches gave a talk on the NetEpi Project which is open-source, network-enabled tools for epidemiology and public health practice. It is consists of two components:

1. NetEpi Collection, a Web-based outbreak data management tool, written in Python and using open-source components and infrastructure, including the PostgreSQL database.
2. NetEpi Analysis, a tool for interactive exploratory data analysis of large (10-100 million rows) population health/clinical data sets. It is mainly written in Python, uses Numeric Python (NumPy) and the R statistical environment.

It is good to see that at least one NSW government department is making an investment in open source.

Nigel Tao talked about the Gnome Deskbar Applet, which is written in Python and can be extended using python scripts. He also introduced us to YubNub, the commandline for the web. Something else to distract me, thanks Nigel.

Dyan Jay, web designer, and entrepreneur did a lightning talk about AGX which is a code-generator for CMF/Plone Products based on the Archetypes framework. The design is done in UML, saved in XMI-Format, and AGX parses the saved model, producing the python code.

Submitted a talk proposal for OSDC 2007

Yesterday I submitted my talk proposal for OSDC. If accepted, the talk will be about web testing using scripting languages.

The submission deadline for proposals is 30 June, so why not submit one as well. So in no particular order, Alan, Keith or Ben take this as me rattling your cages.

Google Developer Day tomorrow but not in Malaysia

Tomorrow is Google Developer Day and if I was in my normal country of residence I would be attending. But since I have been working in Malaysia for the last week, I will just have to wait for the Google videos. Very interested in the GData stuff as I have been working on some things with the Google Spreadsheet Data API. Expect some blog posts about it soon.