Mailman 3 January 2005 - pypy-dev

Leysin sprint / Squeak / CCC conference
by hpk＠trillke.net Jan. 6, 2005

Jan. 6, 2005

Hi pypy-dev, on the last chaos communication congress (CCC 2004 in Berlin) i thankfully got to know Markus Denker from the University of Bern in Switzerland. He is involved with Squeak (http://www.squeak.org) and gave IMHO one of the most interesting "pypy-related" talks at the conference. He also saw my "getting EU funding for a FOSS project" talk and so we stood together a lot during the conference, talking about PyPy, Squeak, higher level languages being faster than C, EU funding … [View More]and what not. (Btw, at http://codespeak.net/~hpk/2004-pypy-eu.pdf you'll find my Funding talk). However, Markus' talk was not only about Squeak, a smalltalk implementation written in a subset of smalltalk, but also about "Croquet" (http://www.opencroquet.org/) which is headed by Alan Kay, one of the fathers of object oriented programming. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay for more info). Many of the features of Squeak/Croquet have been discussed during PyPy development and i am sure both sides can and may want to learn from each other. So i asked Markus if he would like to come to the PyPy sprint in Leysin for an afternoon, as it is pretty close to where he lives and works. He does! So what do you (especially sprint attendants) think about inviting him and letting him redo the talk about Squeak/Croquet and then we can then go into some deeper discussion over a beer or so? I am sure you will enjoy it as it arguably presents a vision of programming that is something like 5 years ahead of the mainstream in some ways. I'd like to tell you not too much before the sprint to allow you the same kind of suprises i had during Markus' talk :-) It would be great though, to be able to have a beamer at least for that day. He would probably also go a bit into explaining "Seaside", a continuation based web-framework that received some publicity lately (also on c.l.py). OK, now i am going to tell a bit more about the CCC-2004 conference and my impressions, while i am at it. This is not directly pypy-related so you may stop reading here :-) *** personal impressions from the CCC 2004 conference *** This year's conference broke all records: around 300 talks plus all kinds of workshops and sessions and 3500 (!) attendants mostly from security/network/system related areas but also quite a number of people from FOSS-projects such as MySQL, Apache, PHP, Ruby and what not. (As always, not a lot from the Python world, though). Moreover, Wikipedia held their annual meeting at the conference and presented some nice background talks ("Scaling above 1 Million"). Various BSD and Linux communities gathered in the cellar, around 500 people with laptops, called the "tiger" room :-) The schedule. It usually started at 11am and went on to 4am (AM i say). Food, Drinks and network was there 24 hours. There were no real breaks whatsoever which made sense considering that having 3000 people going for lunch would presumably lead to race conditions. A central room with lots of video installations (done by "Video Jockeys" doing their own track) provided a nice meeting place. We also played the game of "Go" there. There were tons of interesting talks, here is a selection of the ones i visited: "Practical OSX insecurities", which presented some funny security holes. Apple mailed the speaker in the morning to prevent him to disclose the holes, but it was too late :-) The guy lastly presented the first workable Mail-Worm on OSX, fully equipped with a scripted SMTP-engine and hiding itself as quite regular PDF-document attachment. "Hacking embedded devices" dealt with reverse-engeneering a 3COM 3300 switch, which is 68020 based and has it's own custom scripting language (!), 4 MB of RAM, a small operating system and what not. A nice target for running PyPy in it :-) "OpenBGP / ntpd", Henning Brauer from OpenBSD-fame gave a very quick and thorough talk on how development of production-quality software in OpenBSD-land takes place. "Bluetooth hacks: full disclosure". Many of you may know that since a year or so Adam Laury and his co-hackers found glazing holes in bluetooth implementations in mobile phones. At the time, some 50-70 percent of mobile phones were completly hackable, including modifying the address book, making GPRS calls, listening to your calls and what not. At the conference Adam provided a full disclosure including source code. "Old Skewl Hacking: Infra Red". Adam Laury gave another talk about his experiences hacking infra-reds of garage door systems, hotel information/minbar/TV systems, cars and what not. Very simple, very effective, very funny. My favorite quote of his revealing talk was "presumably it's strange hearing the sound of a 100 cars opening at the same time". Meanwhile, the german championship in lock-picking took place and, along with the "physical security" talk, it became obvious that even a 2000 Euro lock is far from unbreakable. A 12 year old kid managed to visit his first lock-picking workshop and be so successfull that he directly participated in the championship :-) "High-Speed Computing & Co-Processing with FPGAs" dealt with how to dynamically program hardware to carry out specialized tasks, providing speedups of up to a 100-times of a modern PC. You can get simple programmable arrays as a PCMCIA card or a full-blown PCI card with multiple parallel engines. The talker, David Hulton, actually comes from a company that tries to connect OpenSource and FPGAs. Sure interesting stuff, maybe also as a target for PyPy. The chaos conference also saw a number of political talks, regarding e.g. biometry, software patents or general foreign politics. It was interesting to see that more and more geeks are becoming politically aware and active these days. Well, that's it for now. During January, the Chaos Computer Club intends to make all talks available as Video/Audio as all talks (not workshops, though) were filmed and recorded. have fun & a nice new year, holger [View Less]

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[hpk@trillke.net: [codespeak-ann] server move - thursday (6th Jan. 2005)]
by holger krekel Jan. 6, 2005

Jan. 6, 2005

Hi pypy-dev, i figure that a number of maybe-interested people are not subscribed to the codespeak announce list, so here i forward an announcement which talks about server-moves/works later today. If you want to receive such news then subscribe to http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/codespeak-ann cheers, holger ----- Forwarded message from holger krekel <hpk(a)trillke.net> ----- Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 16:33:40 +0100 To: codespeak-ann(a)codespeak.net From: holger … [View More]

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Think we can stomach some Perl?
by Laura Creighton Jan. 3, 2005

Jan. 3, 2005

Jordan Hayes has hacked together SWISH-E and Mailman. The result is Mailman archives you can search. I like this very much. He mentioned this on another list. There doesn't seem to be a way, currently, to restrict your search to between certain dates, but it seems an improvement on hunting through the archives by hand. Laura oh, yes: start here: http://infothecary.org/jordan/mailman.html Laura

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