Sessions at Open Source Bridge 2011 about Python on Wednesday 22nd June

In 2009 I inherited a poorly documented tsunami evacuation simulator and used it to study the impact of proposed city planning on tsunami survival in Longbeach, WA. Half of the project was to learn how to use the pile of hacked-together proprietary software and script I was handed. The second half was to baby-sit a Windows machine on which the simulator would reliably take extended naps.

In 2011 we expanded the study into a new community. Facing new data formats, bit rot, mysterious crashes, expired software, and imminent project failure we re-built the simulator using open-source technologies in two weeks. In addition to simply completing the project, this change has liberated us from specific operating systems and per-seat software licensing.

Outcome? Faster results, less expensive setup, and a transition from a per-simulation pricing model to one focused on finding the best possible result.

Come learn how the time we spent prying ourselves open (and free) allowed us to deliver a better analysis in less time, guarantee future users less pain, and change the dominant paradigm from proving preconceptions to exploring alternatives. I will even run an exploratory simulation live, so we can all experience the power of asking good questions.

"Ganeti":http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/ is a robust cluster virtualization management software tool. It’s built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as "Xen":http://www.xen.org/ and "KVM":http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page and other Open Source software. Its integration with various technologies such as "DRBD":http://www.drbd.org/ and LVM results in a cheaper High Availability infrastructure and linear scaling.

This hands-on tutorial will cover a basic overview of Ganeti, the step-by-step install & setup of a single-node and multi-node Ganeti cluster, operating the cluster, and some best practices of Ganeti. Finally, deploying and using a web-based management tool called "Ganeti Web Manager":http://code.osuosl.org/projects/ganeti-webmgr.

If attendees want to participate in the optional hands-on portions of the tutorial, there will be virtual machine "images available online":http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/osl/ganeti-tutorial and at the tutorial itself. It’s recommended you download the image prior to the tutorial to save on setup time. We’ll be installing Ganeti on an Ubuntu VM and deploy instances using the "LXC":http://lxc.sourceforge.net hypervisor.
Outline:

This tutorial will cover the following:
# Introduction
# Installing the base system and components
# Setting up the environment for Ganeti
# Operating a Ganeti cluster
# Deploying Ganeti Web Manager
# Conclusion

Have you always wanted to write more python, but you feel lost in the syntax, style and semantics? Well, Python hackers like to toss many phrases around to describe the style of their code; "Pythonic" being one of the most popular. But what does this really mean?

In this talk, we will go over:

• PEP8 - The python style guide
• Using the Standard Library by example
• Setting up a development environment
• Code efficiency
• Documentation
• When to use python vs. other languages

Dive deep into the suffocating postmodern ocean of data and come out alive on this interactive tour of low-hanging-fruit data mining tools. Learn to make R graphs both pretty and pretty informative; crunch numbers quickly in high level languages, like a boss; even get your Google on with some maps and reduces. It is widely known: Data scientists have all the fun, so join us!

As part of the talk, we plan to make available a data set of historical Reddit front pages, to plumb the very depths of nerd humor evolution.