The PyCon Argentina experience

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Last weekend took place in Buenos Aires the first PyCon Argentina. It was a really great event, well organized, where many interesting and nice people shared their passion to Python. I enjoyed it a lot.

I attended a lot of talks. Here a brief comment on each of them:

• Python as a hacking language by Andrés Riancho

Andrés introduced people to several tools to audit software, particularly web applications. He showed some scapy examples (a really interesting tool to manage the packets going through the wire), an introduction to Peach (a Python fuzzer) and also presented his Python developed w3af tool for web attacking and audit.
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• Byte Twiddling: Optimizing the management of (maaaany) bytes by Alejandro Cura (Alecu)

Alecu showed us how to optimize performance while making computations with a large amount of data when processing images and audio. It was an amusing and well exposed talk.
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• Do electronics snakes dream? by Fernando Russ and David Weil

These Core people is working on a Python module capable of suspend and resume a Python program execution, dreampy. They talked about the development of the idea and the problems they are facing. Very interesting.
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• Pycasa Inside: PyGTK on Glade by Natalia Bidart and Matías Bordese

I participated in this talk that was mainly presented by nessita. People seemed interested in the techniques explained during the presentation and also in the Pycasa project. we got several interesting questions and suggestions to go on with the development.
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• Understanding Unicode by Facundo Batista

This was a really clarify talk about how to work with strings, encodings and what is Unicode, and how to manage all this.
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• PyQt + wxPython + PyGtk: a partial and balanced comparation by Roberto Alsina and company

Speakers presented their chosen GUI toolkits, and showed what they found are the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Very informative to get an idea about some of the existent alternatives.
Download slides PyQt – Download slides wxPython – Download slides PyGtk

• Emesene 2, a multiplatform im client by Mariano Guerra

Mariano explained how his Emesene project has been evolving and gave some hints about how to lead a software “libre” development.
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• Python 3000 by Facundo Batista

Facundo presented the changes, updates and improvements coming with Python 3000. Interesting, we should be already thinking our projects with a Python 3 structure in mind!
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• Behind the scenes: Python bytecode by Matías Bordese

This was my talk! I think it was an interesting topic and although I should have practiced my presentation abilities a little more, I’m glad with the result. I presented some details about how Python compiles the code, described the .pyc file structure and then manipulated the bytecode through Python code objects, using the dis module and other interesting tools (byteplay, bytecodeAssembler, UnPyc).
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Besides, there were two great and international speakers too:

• The state of Django by Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Jacob stated the challenge frameworks web and Python will be facing soon and what he thinks about it. An excellent talk.

• Unladen Swallow by Collin Winter

I found this talk very interesting. Collin briefly presented the Unladen Swallow project, a Google initiative to speed up Python. He talked about the ideas and approaches they use to get Python run faster. It was great.

All these presentations were nice. However, I also would have liked to listen a couple of talks I couldn’t, and that I heard were very good too:

• Training your favourite reptile: Reinforcement learning in Python by Ricardo Kirkner and Lucio Torre
• Hacking Django, same framework, different paradigms by Nubis Bruno
• Hacking MIDI with Python by Anthony Lenton
• Taint Mode in Python by Juanjo Conti
• Multiprocessing in Python by Claudio Freire

I invite you to take a look at the slides, available at the PyCon site!

String to hex bytes

Today, having some talk to +NCR and Yibam, they were needing that given a string, get its hex byte representation. Here I leave a simple way to do it, that you sure can tune depending on the case:

def str_to_hex(data):
    """Given a string, return the string
        representing the hex bytes of the original"""
    return map(lambda c: '%02X' % ord(c), data)

and the inverse:

def hex_to_str(data):
    """Given a list of strings representing hex bytes,
        will return its corresponding converted character string"""
    return ''.join(map(lambda b: chr(int(b, 16)), data))

Examples:

>>> data = '\xacR\x07\x00\xc8]\x07\x00\xd0]'
>>> str_to_hex(data)
['AC', '52', '07', '00', 'C8', '5D', '07', '00', 'D0', '5D']
>>> hex_to_str(['AC', '52', '07', '00', 'C8', '5D', '07', '00', 'D0', '5D'])
'\xacR\x07\x00\xc8]\x07\x00\xd0]'
>>> hex_to_str(str_to_hex(data)) == data
True

PyCon Argentina!

The first Python Conference in Spanish, and in Argentina. For this edition, two great guests will be participating: Jacob Kaplan-Moss (Django creator) y Collin Winter (Python core developer, Unladen Swallow).

There are more than 30 talks about Python. It will be great. See you there!