October 31, 2009

Google Mail Weirdness

I'd be delighted if somebody could explain what the hell's going on here. I switched mail for the holdenweb.com domain to run through Google's Gmail for Domains service. Things had been going quite nicely, and the spam levels had reduced amazingly without me having to apply any external filtering (which makes me wonder just exactly why Google Groups is so clogged up with the output of asshole spammers, but that's another post).

Recently I have started to receive replies to emails sent out from my holdenweb.com account in the Gmail mailbox I have used for years. At first I though this might be Thunderbird (or me) getting my email accounts and personalities mixed up, but it appears this isn't the case. Here's a test message I sent to myself as an experiment, as it looks in my Sent folder:
So it definitely looks as though it went out from holdenweb.com. And here's the same message as it arrived in my Inbox:
So it goes out from my holdenweb.com address, and arrived at the recipient from my gmail.com address. That's pretty evil, Google - or is there some obvious way I am shooting myself in the foot? It's making my mail conversations pretty hard to track right now.

PyCon is Coming


Kirby Urner suggested that the PSF should advertise PyCon at airports. I though this was a great idea until I looked into the cost of hiring the billboards. Thanks to the wonders of modern web technology, however, we can all now see what it would be like to advertise PyCon on buses.

My slogan is probably pretty feeble. Can you do better?

October 16, 2009

Pyticipate: Interpret Your World

Well, Grig Gheorghiu just posted the list of invited speakers for PyCon 2010, with their chosen topics. It's a doozie:

Ian Bicking: On the Subject of Source Code
Jeff Rush: Interfaces, Adapters and Factories
Jack Diederich: Python's Dusty Corners
Mike Fletcher: Debating 'til Dawn: Topics to Keep You Up All Night
Raymond Hettinger: Mastering Team Play: Four Powerful Examples of Composing Python Tools
Bob Ippolito: The Other Kind of Testing
Alex Martelli: Powerful Pythonic Patterns
Joe Gregorio
: Threading is Not a Model
Ned Batchelder: Tests and Testability
Holger Krekel: The Ring of Python
Ted Leung: A Survey of Concurrency Constructs

More details on the PyCon web site. If PyCon only had those talks it would make an amazing one-day event, but of course there will be three days of talks, with four tracks, so in practice it will be completely impossible for anyone to attend all the talks that they would like to.

That's where the Pycon videos come in - high quality recordings of every scheduled talk will be available. It's nowhere near as good as being there, but if you were at PyCon it's a great way to fill in the gaps, and if you weren't then it's a good reminder of exactly why you should be next time around.

PyCon is a great conference. I'm looking forward to it already!