Europython, Day 1, Afternoon
Keynote Speech
Great talk about the dangers of DRM and the traditional media on the average hacker. Used example of a student who maintained software to index all the files on a shared network; he was brought down because like everyone he had some copyright infringing material on his computer. It was a very broad talk, but essentially the main ways to protect the rights of a hacker is to join groups such as the Open Rights Group, or to provide better support for crypography. Help develop encryption implementations, encourage our friends and family to encrypt their communications.
Twittering with Python
With a lot of our work focusing around Twitter at the moment, this talk should give a good outline of what can and cannot be done using Python and Twitter.
Further evidence to support that Twitter is not a website, its a database (on a complete tangent... why is a database of 140 characters so popular, especially as its centralised?). More can be done through its API than can be done on the website.. There is a list of libraries for many languages on http://apiwki.twitter.com/Libraries. Most Python require simplejson.
It was really interesting to see monitoring software start to use Twitter to send notifications along side the likes of traditional email/sms/logfile etc. The potential to get Twitter updates from my logfiles sort of kills two birds with one stone. 1) notify myself to fix, 2) notify my users so they don't pester me.