Moderate Realism

Last night, the London Python Dojo were the guests of Mendeley on the Clerkenwell Road. I was pleased to discover while chatting over the pizza and beer that I wasn’t the only one to have wandered round the area a few times before hitting on the right spot. Although I had a map of some sort, I’d forgotten just how cluttered central London is: how many passageways, tucked-away building and unlabelled streets.

But it was worth it. Mendeley have larger offices than our usual host, Fry-IT. And while there were slightly fewer of us than normal (low 20s as opposed to the usual high 20s) it was still great to have a bit of breathing space. Thanks very much to the guys at Mendeley for hosting us (and providing pizza, drinks & snacks).

Jonathan Hartley was making his debut as compere and managed very effectively. Well… fairly effectively. (I shouldn’t laugh: it’s my turn next month). He’d lined up three “lightning” talks to kick off with. First up was Ian — who’d arranged for us to use the place. He explained what Mendeley does (a sort of social network for research students) and how they use Python (mostly as a scripting API) and demo-ed some fairly nifty visualisations and tools which people had built on top of their product. Jonathan himself spoke last to ask for help with a Django concurrency issue. Which he promptly got. In between was Robert Rees who showed-and-told very effectively the recently-added Heroku support for Python. This enlarged into a wider discussion of Heroku itself and of its competitors in the Django/Python world.

Then the Dojo itself. As usual, we had a whiteboard available beforehand for people to propose ideas which were then voted on. The Roman Numeral Calculator remained top of the list of unchosen ideas, but the surprising winner was Robert’s suggestion of an ASCII Art Streetfighter clone. (Chosen only after a second round of voting with a Multiple Transferrable Vote). Once this was settled, it was a simple matter of dividing into teams and hitting the editor.

Or almost. We initially failed to be able to count up to 5 in order to divide into teams. Having finally achieved this intellectual feat, we encountered the opposite problem to the one we normally face at Fry IT. There, the office is so small that you’re squeezing into space. At Mendeley, there’s so much space that you’re wandering around for ages trying to find the best spot. And then you’ve got to find the WiFi (which Ian had considerately explained about). And then you’ve got to manually set your DNS Servers to something (as the DHCP wasn’t handing out DNS). Slightly geekily, the WiFi password is mathematical making it easy to remember but still quite long.

And then, in our case, you had to find the Pygame curses emulation which someone knows exists but can’t quite remember the name of. Having got there (with about 20 minutes left now to do the actual coding) you basically scramble your way through a stunted version of Streetfighter (whatever that is; I have no idea), getting a basic solution on which you layer colour and fonts in the manner of lipstick and pigs :)

Finally, the endgame; and it’s the usual hilarious collection of imaginative approaches, stylishly-designed code, and desperate hackery. We saw: elegant ASCII art; flying bullets; gratuitous use of decorators; and many entertaining attempts to achieve an equilibrium between using classy and best-practice code and actually coming up with a solution within the timeframe!

I don’t know where we’ll be next month, but stay tuned to the python-uk list where stuff is announced.

I work in Camden Town in the north of London, a mecca for youngsters shopping for the more outlandish kinds of outfit, and one of the most difficult places in the known universe to park in. Jamestown Road, just off the Camden High Street, is a popular spot for parking with a good view of the pay-and-display machine. Of course, if you’re entitled to a disabled person’s badge then you or your driver can park without paying (within certain restrictions). Now there’s obviously nothing to prevent someone who’s disabled in some way from being the owner of a fast and expensive sports car. But when you see three or four of them a day parked along the road, proudly sporting their Blue Badge, you stop and wonder…

… and sure enough, there are periodic newspaper reports of a thriving black market in Blue Badges. Obviously, there are greater threats to humanity, but you do wonder whether the veritable swarm of traffic wardens which Camden Borough appears to employ for no better purpose than to maximise their income from parking revenues might not be employed to better effect by standing by Blue Badged cars and waiting with a video camera for the entirely able-bodied driver to show up!

Warning: this post will mean nothing to you unless you live or have lived in London. It may — and this is entirely the point — still mean nothing to you even if you do!

It boggles me how many people — including, apparently, professional sign-writers — still think that London is divided into two telephone codes: 0207 and 0208. Having lived through the 01/081/0181/020 debacle, I entirely understand where the misunderstanding comes from. But it’s been nearly ten years. And there are otherwise intelligent people of my acquaintaince who refuse to accept my explanation that all London numbers are eight digits long and have the exchange 020.

London Underground is undertaking a major transformation of many of its stations, involving retiling walls, relaying floors and generally sprucing things up. This has led, at Euston and other stations, to a surprising revelation. If you’re in the hall which separates the Victoria and Northern Line platforms at Euston, you can see some grubby posters on the wall, some torn some not. If you look closely you’ll see that they’re displaying phone numbers starting 01- and advertising albums which were (just about) fashionable 15 years ago.

The reason is that around the early 1990s, they replaced a number of these on-the-wall advertising spaces by more classy lighted boxes. Only they didn’t strip the existing posters back when they did it; they simply bolted the box on the wall over the top. It means that, as LU take all the fittings off the wall to re-tile, we’re given a glimpse of the adverts of 15 years ago (or less, depending on which station you’re looking at).

Keep an eye out; you might spot something you recognise.

A good turnout yesterday for the first of what Simon described as “the formal London Python meetups” — formal because at the Thoughtworks offices with some presentations. I was on first, talking about the Windows-specific WMI to an audience consisting almost entirely of *nix Pythoneers! (Went ok, despite my setting my font size too large and not realising that I could pick up my laptop and face the audience).

Chris Miles followed with his PSI lightning talk. Then we were back to Windows again for a double-whammy from the Resolver folks. First their head-honcho Giles gave an amusing view of the ups-and-downs they’ve suffered (all, I might add, within a general trend of success). And then Michael Foord gave some impressive demos of IronPython running under SilverLight within a browser.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to another one. And many thanks to Simon for organising and Thoughtworks for paying for the pizza — at least I hope they did because no-one asked me for any dosh!