News You Can Bruise for 2003 June 26

My French is getting a little better; at least it seems that way now that I've met people whose English is worse than my French, such that it's most convenient to talk in French. I was able to ask for the check and to have a door opened, although the check was not forthcoming and the person I asked was powerless to open the door. My presentation went pretty well, but I'm very glad I omitted the jokes because the one I left in, thinking it had cross-cultural appeal, was not greeted with any hilarity at all.

I talked with Moshe Zadka a bit after my talk. I talked to some other people as well but I bring up Moshe because there were several talks he was going to give yesterday but he didn't get here in time. These include his "text steganography" talk and his "Writing web clients in Python" talk. I've asked him for copies of the notes for each, and they'll be part of the inevitable EuroPython roundup, coming sometime next week to this space. I was able briefly to recharge my battery, but it's only at 50% and I want to write another rambling, incomprehensible entry tomorrow, so I'll sign off now.

Best talk so far: a talk about PyPy, a Python interpreter written in Python, which is currently up to 20,000 times slower than the one written in C. Armin Rigo, author of PyPy, also wrote his own presentation softwareusing PyGame, which presented his presentation as a brainstorm diagram that he navigated as he gave his talk. It's only a matter of time until Steve Jobs steals that idea.