July 9, 2006 at 3:52 pm · tags: PyPy Python SummerOfCode Switzerland
My last sprint day was good but I lost a lot of time around some limitations and a bug that’s actually there (anyway unit tests pass) but I’m fighting to win, so I’ll win 
I had the chance to pair with Armin Rigo itself and I think that I learned a lot from him (and also from Anders of course). Pair programming with the guys like them it’s important to my knowledge of PyPy and Python.
We have been invited by Richard Jones, a pygame guru, to see a nice and funny presentation about pygame and its capabilities. He was using Bruce as the presentation tool and I’ll definitely try it because it seems awesome!
Other guys have started porting md5, random and zlib also so maybe we’ll managed to port all the Python standard library someday
In the evening Fabrizio and I played to Carcassonne with Armin, Richard and a really nice swedish summer student named Pauline. We italians didn’t know that game but Richard was very kind to teach us how to play. Obviously we lost but Richard, a master board game player, was defeated by Pauline
So that’s all from my first PyPy sprint.
If you want to follow my SoC/PyPy work you’ll find it in pypy.module.rctime (which probably will be renamed as time when completed).
Michael Hudson wrote a PyPy sprint report today to summarize all the work has been done in Geneva: PyPy Post-EuroPython 2006 Sprint Report
July 8, 2006 at 2:03 am · tags: PyPy Python SummerOfCode Switzerland
Today I continued working on the rctime module with the supervision of Anders. I’m improving my knowledge of rpython and how the interpreter level and application level works and how to make them communicate. This is not really documented in deep so you’ve to check out examples also.
Sad, a swiss boy, joined us and started learning how rctypes work. I think he’s porting zlib module by himself. Now he has a codespeak account so he can work on the live project.
We checked in the fix in format_somobject_error because it was needed by other people that encountered the same problem.
I now know the basics of the machinery of making tests pass and the translation process too.
You can’t use space.unwrap() directly in the interpreter level stuff that goes translated because it’s not supported at all (thanks Armin and Anders!) so you have to use XXX_w functions in the object space.
In the morning I also tried to make my stuff work on Windows but I gave up after installing the .NET SDK 1.1, .NET runtime 1.1, mingw compiler and do some hacking to work around the actual problem that python 2.4 is compiled against msvcrt71.dll but it’s part of the MS VC++ 2003 toolkit that is not available anymore. Visual Studio 2005 provides msvcrt80.dll so I didn’t manage to make it work. Windows is very unfriendly to developers not using all MS tools.
I completed time.sleep(), time.clock(), time.ctime(), time.struct_time, time.gmtime(), time.localtime(), time.mktime()
I have a problem using the translated module on CPython because I have a problem in checking the presence of an optional argument. So basically, if you don’t pass anything to, for example, time.localtime() it fails but if you explicitly pass None as the actual argument it works well. On py.py it works very well. Tonight I’ll try to translate all pypy.
After the sprint we had dinner and after Fabrizio, Alexander, Antonio and I joined summer students at a very funny Dutch party. Summer students here at CERN know how to have fun! They’re obviously physicists or computer scientists from all over the world. From Japan to New York City.
July 7, 2006 at 12:45 am · tags: EuroPython PyPy Python SummerOfCode Switzerland
This is the report of the first day of the PyPy sprint session here at CERN.
The sprint began in the early afternoon (1.30pm) because this morning there was the CERN’s visit.
They started doing a crash-course-tutorial-so-my-head-did-boom presentation. PyPy is really complicated but it’s an interesting challenge. If you want to know more about its architecture and its present capabilities google for PyPy…
After the intro we (about 20 people) decided the topics of the sprint and divided ourselves in pairs (almost). There are the actual topics: planning.txt
So we began working!
I paired with Anders and Brian (a smart south african guy who lives in Barcelona) and we got into deep of the extension compiler machinery and rctypes limitations to port my previous work. We started kinda slow because… because that’s how you learn things. We managed to write some tests and a little functionality (basically time.accept2dyear and time.time()). We also discovered a couple of bugs in the PyPy translation toolchain. One has been fixed: the problem was there because C macros (geterrno specifically) are not supported by rctypes so… we’ve simply wrapped it in a function.
At the time of writing this post I’ve just finished the whole PyPy -> C translation and it worked so we didn’t made it explode (we tested it, but you can’t be sure anyway.)
It took 53 minutes eventually. Nice, but I have a dual core 2Ghz CPU and 2Gb of ram…
The other problem is format_someobject_error in pypy.tool.error module. We had an empty block masking our actual block and a strange IndexError bug. So after some digging Anders came out with an hack (it’s not in the repository, only on my machine) to make it work in the translation process. We’ve to find the real reason behind this.
So, that’s it. It’s not very much but believe me… it’s brain-exploding stuff if you are a pypy newbie like me
Anders was very kind to let us ask any kind of questions and provide hints and answers. I’m making progresses and that’s what counts. Hope to finish the all stuff before the summer of code deadline.
UPDATE: I also found myself in a toga party organized by the summer student at CERN so I met a lot of people and some nice girls :-P. Tomorrow night will be dutch-party time… so let’s roll!
July 6, 2006 at 12:24 am · tags: EuroPython Python Switzerland
These are my notes about the last day of the conference. Today was a more “relaxed” day because there were less tracks. I followed a bunch of tracks, mostly project management. We, the Italian maphia :-P, managed to take some pictures with Guido. I’ll upload them to flickr when the guy with the camera will give them to me. I had a great time attending the conference and the lightning talks are definitely interesting. 5 minutes sometime is all you need to get people know you. I also saw a very beautiful female scientist (I guess) around here but lost track of her 
I have 2 days to find her!
We were thinking of doing a lightning talk to do some jokes to the german guys here (cause of the soccer semi-final score) but we didn’t have time to arrange something funny. Armin Massa (as you can read down in the talks report) is reconfirmed as a great entertainer. I liked the day as it came. Very much.
Let’s see what I saw (!):
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July 5, 2006 at 12:41 am · tags: EuroPython Python Switzerland
Another wonderful day in the Python-land. Today I met a lot of other people and I had interesting discussion with Steve Alexander from Canonical. I also had the chance to ask a question to Guido about the “hated” buffer object protocol after his track about the future of our beloved language.
I had a wonderful evening in the CERN globe in front of the CERN facility where I had dinner with all the devs introduced by an amazing talk given by the head of the CERN IT Department, Mr. Wolfgang von Rüden. He talked about the history and organization of CERN and the importance of the IT in the CERN work. They have a massive huge grid computing infrastructure to handle the millions of sensor of LHC (the accelerator underground) and ATLAS (the under construction detecting system). A lot of data: speaking of petabytes a day. Yes, P-E-T-A-B-Y-T-E-S.
The grid is spreaded all over the world, mostly in Europe, but in USA and Asia as well.
Let’s see something interesting of today’s tracks:
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July 4, 2006 at 1:01 am · tags: EuroPython Python Switzerland
The first day here at EuroPython was definitely amazing. It’s the first time I go to a conference abroad and I’m stunned about the environment. You can meet people you only “dream” about, happen to talk with Guido Van Rossum itself around the building and do some other nice things.
I think I can’t remember all the people I met or saw today… Jim Fulton, Andrew Dalke, Guido, Armin Rigo, Michael Hudson, Beatrice During, Michele Simionato, Antonio Cuni, people from Canonical, Googlers, Moshe Zadka and so on. There’s a LOT of python super stars here. You can learn only by overhearing them speaking
I counted about 15 italians here for the conference but I think there are more around
I also did a lot of “chatting” with Google guys and Google recruiters, very nice!
The following is a summary of the talks (in order) I happen to follow today.
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July 2, 2006 at 11:27 pm · tags: EuroPython Python Switzerland
The first day in Geneva is over. This morning we left the beautiful Zurich to move to Geneva. Swiss public transportation service is far more better that the Italian one. Efficient, on time and clean. It seems basically normal to some but in Italy is not the standard service
Geneva is very nice and clean. I have a room (the place I am right now) at the CERN Hostel and he stays in a Hostel in the city centre. We got lucky to meet a couple of friendly Italian pythonistas. They have a car! This evening we went to Geneva to eat something (Tai-Chi restaurant) and drink something alongside the lake. Nice people there. I should try to know someone before leaving the city.
In the conference building I met Moshe Zadka, Michael Hudson and some other guys
Tomorrow at 9.00 the conference starts. I’m looking forward to meet a lot of people and “learn the learnable” around the massive amount of talks
July 1, 2006 at 11:45 pm · tags: EuroPython Python Switzerland
Just came back for our day in Zurich. Tomorrow morning we gotta catch the train to Geneva. Zurich is great. People is good, girls are damn pretty and there’s plenty of pub and places to meet people. I liked the city centre really much. It’s full banks, UBS is everywhere. The only problem is that I don’t know a word in german but english is spoken everywhere.
It’s a very good place and the lake remembers me the Como’s one (where Clooney has his house).
Ah! I forgot to mention I visited Google Zurich but I signed a NDA and I cannot say anything, just know it’s a wonderful office and the environment is so good that I know why everybody wants to work for Google
July 1, 2006 at 4:13 pm · tags: EuroPython Switzerland
I’m in Zurich now at my friend’s home.
There’s plenty of beautiful girls and the city seems great.
Tomorrow we move to Geneva to CERN for the pre-registration of EuroPython conference.
That’s us in Zurich at his house:
