Last weekend we went to attend the PyCon PL’09 conference. This year it was located in Ustroń. The most positive change was comparing to last year was to accommodate everybody in one place, as it made it easier to integrate with the python folk, and talk/have a beer after/between the talks. There were a few interesting talks. I liked Wesley Chun’s “Python References and Memory Model”, although I knew most of the material. “Pair programming & TDD in practice” by
Konrad Deląg & Krzysztof Goj was also cool because it involved workshops (nevertheless nothing new to me there). Marcin Mierzejewski’s “Python and Orange – how to predict the future” about data mining using python was very interesting. I was actually surprised that there is no market for this stuff in Poland. The talks were OK, but not revolutionary. In my opinion the crowd (well perhaps excluding the two physicists there) and the talks were dominated by web development (Django). I would very much like to see more non web related talks.
This year’s pros and cons.
Pros:
- common accommodation
- good food
- international speakers
- better organization
- lots of lightning talks
Cons:
- problems with the power for computers
- really bad WiFi
- too little non web related talks
Since most of the cons can be worked on, I’m really looking forward to the next year’s edition.
I’ve recently ecountered a problem with freezing java platform gems in a Rails application I’m working on. The problem was, that the Rails::GemDependency class would assume that a gem’s version is the last part of it’s directory name:
directory_name_parts = File.basename(directory_name).split('-')
name = directory_name_parts[0..-2].join('-')
version = directory_name_parts.last
result = self.new(name, :version => version)
For java platform gems, directory names often look like e.g. RedCloth-2.2.2-universal-java. In this case we would end up with the version variable to be set to ‘java’, and the attempt to create a new object would result in an error. Since I really needed those JRuby compatible gems, I’ve prepared a small patch and filed a ticket in the Rails project. Both can be found here: https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/tickets/3356. I hope this helps somebody with unpacking the java platform gems into the Rails’ vendor directory.
