[Edu-sig] Looking back on Chicago (Python workshop)

[kirby urner]

I had a good workshop in Chicago.

Two of the attenders worked assiduously on developing a native Linux
installer for Visual Python (the latest) that wouldn't depend on Wine.  The
one guy brought his junky laptop (his "other" computer) and it overheated
compiling all of wx (the latest Vpython integrates with wx).

My schtick involves a mythical Python5, an add-on to my current courses,
wherein we adopt a Model-View-Controller approach, as start with really
simple views (i.e. ASCII art), knowing in advance the visualizations will
be upgraded, using both render-time and real-time pipelines.  The Model is
of "tractors in a field", the controller being the user via interactive
Python i.e. a very generic idea of MVC).

Rather than sound too specialized and unable to talk about art or
architecture, I focus on making this stuff friendly to humanities teachers,
art and architecture teachers especially.  The squares of our tractors' XY
field could become hexagons and in 3D I mention the "octet truss" as good
scaffolding (tetrahedrons + octahedrons), along with standard XYZ cubes.

An ASCII character has "bit depth" (similar to "pixel depth") and with
Unicode we go from 128 or 256 "colors" to "millions of colors" (an analogy
with how our video displays evolved in a previous generation).  The Unicode
bridge takes me to both Russian and Chinese, where I mirror "tractor art"
in various ways (North Americans were into tractors too).

I did the slides in i-Movie and in true "bumbling professor" fashion needed
audience participation to get the ball rolling, full screen etc.  I invited
other forms of audience participation and we did have some good
conversations.  They didn't want to "draw Django" though (I was inviting
depictions of Django using imaginative graphics, versus a staid / stale
"stack" -- the standard rectangular type "layered sandwich" of the
engineering type magazines).

Thanks to doing it in i-Movie, I should have a Youtube version shortly.  It
won't truly capture the talk, as I was also sampling other presentations
when it came to Python5.

Much of my content is autobiographical, but then I've been snaking around
in Python world for awhile and have a good angle, my own front row seat (we
all get one).  I talk about various conferences, summits, meetings, meetups
plus invite people to join us here on edu-sig.

After the Monday workshop, I attended the speakers' dinner, hosted by
PostgreSQL experts.  The PostgreSQL community is quite fond of Django.  The
meal was in an Italian sports themed room and featured a full Italian meal,
one of the top ten I've ever had (and that's from someone who lived in
Italy for six years).

The next day I took off on a pilgrimage to visit O'Reilly School's regional
headquarters in Champaign-Urbana, hosted by a co-worker, and then to visit
my daughter at her college in the neighboring state of Indiana.  This was
all by Alamo rental car, picked up and returned at O'Hare.

Chicago is a fantastic city.  Expensive though. I think the Django
community will settle for a 2nd tier city next time.  A luxury hotel right
in downtown Chicago on Michigan Avenue, is one tough venue to pull off an
event in, affordably.  I was happy to take it in.  Talking about art and
architecture in Chicago makes so much sense, whereas the surrounding plains
are all about rows and columns (of corn and soy), and tractors (and trains
-- which are like tractors, but on tracks).

Kirby
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