Europython wednesday lightning talks¶

Felix Wiemann - examples of security issues

restructuredtext had a couple of nice features, like including a file. Like /etc/password. Or a recursive include of test.txt to test.txt, which eats up all memory. Or remote include via http: include a debian iso.

The assumption was that users of the library would do something about that in their app. No. They didn't. They assumed that restructuredtext was neat and clean and secure.

Conclusion: think about security issues and mention them. Also, talk to the users of your library. Also, talk to the provider of your 3th party libraries if you use them.

Richard - python games

• Nelly, really funny.
• trip on the funny boat
• Assured destruction
• powercore

Aaron Bingham - Fixing "design by contract"

See his earlier talk

Andrew Maier - Ganga

Ganga helps with sending jobs to the computing grid that CERN uses for their completely rediculously large amounts of data.

The scientist can use his local machine for debugging or short tests, he can use a local batch system for small jobs and he can use the grid for the big jobs. Every one of them needs a different approach. Ganga helps them to submit their jobs in a uniform way to all three systems.

It has a text interface and they even use a python syntax for submitting the jobs j = Job(), j.backend = "local", like that.

Stefano Masini - Shell CS

Shellcs is a framework for making shells. Shells in this case is not something like bash or csh, but shells like used by for instance database managers. You can call "manager import xxx" on the commandline, but you can also just call "manager" after which you'll get an interactive prompt where "import" is one of the allowed commands.

The project will go live in a few days or so on sourceforge.

About the conference

Europython was in contact with the CERN guys and galls before europython 2005. Locations need to be booked well beforehand.

There were no webserver fights as they just used the standard CERN conference system. Which worked really well.

A possibility for next year is Vilnius, an alternative is Brussels, but that one is more likely for 2008.

Sylvain thénault - static type inference in logilab-astng

astng is a monkeypatch to the standard library's compiler.ast. It extends it to add some info and methods.

It is used for pylint (static checking of python code) and for documentation generation. The aim is to be good enough to point out possible bugs. It is not intended to be fully correct and to be used for code generation.

The inference is done on a local ast (abstract syntax tree) and not on the bytecode, so you don't need to actually perform an import.

Jean-Philippe Rey - teaching python at École centrale de Paris

ECP is a general engineering school with some 500 students per year. Just a small percentage will end up programming for a living.

Some of the things you need to teach them: How to talk to and how to understand programmers. To understand how a computer works.

They switched to python for their teaching: interpreted, so fast to try out. A simple syntax. Free and easy to install. Also usable by the more advanced students. Python is in use for 2 years now and it raised the students' interest in the course.

More info

Ignas Mikalajunas - Access control with Crowds

A crowd is a set of principals (a principal is a logged-in user). They use it for schooltool. A crowd is an adapter that gives back a crowd, so a list of users, that have a certain permission.

Afterwards, you can test if a user is a member of a crowd. myCrowd.contains(principal).

Felix Wiemann - restructured text presentations

With rst2s5 you can generate S5 presentations from restructured text files.

Steve Alexander - Launchpad

He thinks that launchpad is a good way of consolidating your project. It can help you manage translations by means of rosetta . It also has a bugtracker system. Support request management. Management of requested/proposed features. Etc.

Other blogs

• Maurits van Rees .
• oluyede
• Ah well, search for yourself