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PyCon US 2012 videos status

, Will Kahn-Greene | Tweet this

What is pyvideo.org

pyvideo.org is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it, watch it, and share it with pyvideo.org.

PyCon US 2012 status

Just got back from PyCon US 2012. It was really great conference this year. If you weren't there, video from the conference is being posted to YouTube and indexed at pyvideo.org.

There were a lot of really great sessions. Here are ones I liked and/or were really proud of.

  1. Stormy's keynote: http://pyvideo.org/video/625/keynote-stormy-peters-mozilla-corporation
  2. GNU MediaGoblin poster session: http://pyvideo.org/video/725/40-media-goblin-the-road-to-federation
  3. Erik Rose's Speedily Practical Large Scale Tests: http://pyvideo.org/video/634/speedily-practical-large-scale-tests
  4. Jess and Asheesh's Diversity in Practice: http://pyvideo.org/video/719/diversity-in-practice-how-the-boston-python-user
  5. Karen's Improving Documentation With "Beginners Mind": http://pyvideo.org/video/713/improving-documentation-with-beginners-mind-o

There are lots of others, now that I'm skimming through the list.

I reindexed the site just now, so search should work for PyCon US 2012 videos again (thank you Stormy for the heads-up!). Carl's still posting things, so it's possible if something that you're looking for isn't there now, it'll show up soon. Also, all these videos are wrapped in Universal Subtitles widgets---if you have some spare time and wanted to tackle a video, that'd be awesome!

If you find problems with the site (it's not hard--they're everywhere), send me email and let me know.

The plan

I just got home and I need to catch up with work. My immediate plan is to fix the software and deployment scripts so I don't epically screw up the site again. (I'm really sorry about that.)

After that, I want to implement feeds---that's a much requested feature (and for good reason).

After that, I'll be fixing the myriad of other issues with the software and the site. I'm tracking issues in the pmc issue tracker and the richard issue tracker ("pmc" stands for Python Miro Community and is the github repository I've been using for the site for a while now---now it covers pyvideo.org stuff---and "richard" is the software that runs pyvideo.org).

Python Miro Community status: January 30th, 2012

, Will Kahn-Greene | Tweet this

What is Python Miro Community

Python Miro Community is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it and share it with Python Miro Community.

Status

Kuma sent me an email pointing out that the download url for one of the PyOhio 2010 videos was kicking up an HTTP 404. We have this problem semi-regularly with the blip.tv urls. A while back I wrote a script to go through a category of videos on Python Miro Community and verify that the urls were good.

I ran the script on the PyOhio 2010 videos and 16 of 20 of them had bad download urls. That sucks.

Between moving things around and changing their interface in a way that makes our uses for blip.tv painful, I'd like conferences to stop using blip.tv. Maybe YouTube is a better venue.

Amongst other things, Universal Subtitles works better with videos posted on YouTube than blip.tv. In fact, if we switched to YouTube, it'd make it _so_ much easier to add Universal Subtitles support and I wouldn't have to use Ogg Vorbis which doesn't work in Safari or on Apple devices.

That's all I have to say about that.

I haven't worked through my queue of conferences, yet. The queue of oustanding tasks is maintained in the PMC GitHub issue tracker. I'm pushing to catch up with things so that it's in a better state for Pycon 2012.

I'm going to PyCon 2012, though this time as a Mozillian. Looking forward to Erik's talks on Parsing horrible things with Python and Speedily practical large-scale tests, Asheesh and Jessica's talk on Diversity in practice: How the Boston Python Meetup grew to 1000 people and over 15% women, Karen's talk on Improving Documentation with "Beginner's Mind" (or: Fixing the Django Tutorial), and others, too.

Python Miro Community status: October 20th, 2011

, Will Kahn-Greene | Tweet this

What is Python Miro Community

Python Miro Community is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it and share it with Python Miro Community.

Status

I've finished posting DjangoCon 2011 videos.

They're all set up to be transcribed and translated. If you have spare time, please think about taking the time to transcribe your favorite presentation. If it's transcribed already and you can translate it, please translate it.

I'm keeping track of transcription/translation status now.

I fixed the RSS links for categories so that if you subscribe to that RSS feed, it has the complete category in it--not just the most recent 30 videos. If you're using a podcast client and are subscribed to one of the category feeds, please fix the feed url in your podcast client.

I've got PyCon AU 2011 in the queue. In fact, I have an actual queue now maintained in the PMC GitHub issue tracker. That includes other things that need to be fixed in the site or in my scripts that help me maintain the site.

Python Miro Community status: September 23rd, 2011

, Will Kahn-Greene | Tweet this

What is Python Miro Community

Python Miro Community is an index of Python-related videos on the Internet. For the most part, it's a collection of videos from Python-related conferences. Saw a session you liked and want to share it? It's likely you can find it and share it with Python Miro Community.

Status

The last month and a half have been pretty banal. There have been several conferences (DjangoCon 2011, PyConAU 2011, ...), but I haven't had time to pull in video, yet. I started to look at things earlier this week and was met with a bunch of Miro Community problems.

First, looks like either Blip.tv did something weird with their feeds or Miro Community decided to stop filtering duplicates, so there are currently over 500 videos in the review queue many of which are on the site already. I have no good way to figure out which are duplicates, though, so I'm going to write a script to make that possible/easier.

Second, videos from PyCon 2011 and PyOhio 2011 that had been "universal subtitle-ized" were exceeding the width allotted to the video. I've fixed this before, but I didn't remember how I did it and I decided this time around that I'd just change the layout of the page instead. Now the video can take up as much width as it wants (which is good for other reasons, too) and I nixed bits of the page that Python Miro Community doesn't use.

Irksome that things keep breaking, but that's the way it goes. I'm sorry I didn't catch the latter one sooner.

Universal Subtitles status

Carl was curious as to how many videos had been transcribed of the two conferences we've added Universal Subtitles support for. I wrote a script to go through the PyCon 2011 videos and PyOhio 2011 videos and figure out how many of them have been transcribed and translated with Universal Subtitles.

PyCon 2011: 3 videos fully transcribed, 1 video partially transcribed, some minor translation work
PyOhio 2011: 3 videos partially transcribed

I'm disappointed. It was a lot of work to get those videos working with Universal Subtitles. It sucked that it took me so long to post them and it's probably the case we lost some of the energy because of that. But I was hoping we'd have better results anyways.

Carl wants to try one more time with DjangoCon 2011 and this time be more proactive and email the presenters. If that doesn't work, then I'm not sure what we can do. I can't spend the time to transcribe all the talks. Neither can Carl. We could pay someone to do it, but that costs money and I don't think anyone is interested in paying for that. Thus if we con't share the workload as a community, I'm probably going to ditch the Universal Subtitles support for now because it's a lot of work to put together. Maybe we can try it again some day.

PMC in GitHub

I'm putting scripts, template fixes, and other Python Miro Community related things in Github: http://github.com/willkg/pmc

I'm not sure how interesting it is outside of PMC, but it's there if you're interested.

PyOhio 2011 videos being posted

, Will Kahn-Greene | Tweet this

PyOhio 2011 happened last weekend. I'm currently working with Carl at Next Day Video to get the videos they're posting to the blip.tv feed into Python Miro Community.

I'm using a similar process to what we used with PyCon 2011 videos, but we don't have to figure it out on the fly this time around, so things are going much smoother.

As of now, there are three videos posted with more coming as they're uploaded and work their way through the workflow.

If you have some spare time, please consider helping out with subtitling the videos. Whenever a video is subtitled, it becomes accessible to a much wider audience. If you help out with subtitling, please let me know so that I can thank you.

Python Miro Community status: July 16th, 2011

, Will Kahn-Greene | Tweet this

It's been a while since the last status post on the status of Python Miro Community. The reasons are many, but mostly because I've been blocked on other things and hadn't really finished anything. Boo.

To recap, Python Miro Community is a curated index of Python-related video from around the Internet including Python-related conference sessions. Catch the sessions you missed, show sessions to your colleagues, and remind yourself why you really want to be attending these conferences in person.

Anyhow, it's been a slow few months. Most of the PyCon 2011 videos are posted with the exceptions of the lightning talks which I still have to watch and fill out the descriptions for.

Miro Community released 1.2.1 which allows me to do rss feeds that exceed the 30-video maximum they have. That allows me to run my script which verifies download urls. The PyCon 2011 category was fine.

The PyCon 2010 category was not fine. Of the 120 videos in the category, over 60 of them had bad download urls. This really bothers me. I don't know why the urls are going sour. I've fixed all the ones in the PyCon 2011 category and will monitor them going forward periodically.

I still need to go through the other categories.

Carl kicked me into using GitHub for PMC related things. That's at https://github.com/willkg/pmc. I'm slowly (very slowly) adding scripts I use to run the site as well as documentation covering workflow and other things. Going forward, I'll be using GitHub to coordinate and organize everything.

The other thing I need to do is move my todo items from my org-mode file over to the issues tracker. That'll make it easier for other people to help if they're so inclined.

That's where things are at.

PyCon 2011 videos going up

, Will Kahn-Greene | Tweet this

The Ogg Theora versions of the PyCon 2011 videos are posted on the PyCon blip.tv channel now and I'm slowly pulling them in to Python Miro Community.

I'd do them all in one big batch, except that it takes a minute or two to approve each video and also the Miro Community feeds are limited to 30 items, so if anyone is using a podcast client and watching the PyCon 2011 feed they'd miss any that fell out of the 30 maximum. That's bug 15177 and I'm hoping to fix it soon.

PyCon 2011 had some really great sessions. If you haven't already seen the ones you were interested in, I encourage you to keep an eye on the PyCon 2011 category as videos get posted.

These videos are being posted with Universal Subtitles support. If you presented at PyCon 2011, please take the time to caption your video. Captioning makes it easier to provide translated subtitles, makes it accessible to people who don't speak English and those who are hard of hearing, and also will make your video less opaque for search technologies when we add support for that.

Again, I really apologize for it taking this long to post them. I hope to have faster turn-around on future conferences.

Questions, comments, concerns--just let me know.

Python Miro Community status: 01-22-2011

, Will Kahn-Greene | Tweet this

I haven't posted the PyCon 2011 videos to Python Miro Community, yet. First, I was waiting for Ogg Theora versions of the videos to get posted. Then I was waiting for Miro Community 1.2 to get released. Now I'm waiting for duplicate Ogg Theora versions of the videos to get removed so that I can successfully pull in all the videos without fear of them getting moved around and the urls to get stale.

A month ago, I knew we were doing some things we hadn't done before and therefore it was going to take longer than it usually does. But I never expected it to take this long. It's sort of been a perfect storm of things to block on.

Regardless, the Miro Community released 1.2 and it includes a bunch of fixes to the admin side of the site that make some things doable again. Additionally, it includes a few fixes I submitted upstream--these are my first contributions to Miro Community to fix issues I was working around with Python Miro Community. I look forward to fixing some more things especially now that I have a working Miro Community development environment. Congratulations to the Miro Community team on a successful release!

That's where things are at. I haven't forgotten about PyCon 2011--it's just taking a lot longer than I expected it to.

PyCon 2011

, Will Kahn-Greene | Tweet this

Last week I got back from PyCon 2011 and it was flabbergastingly awesome. This was the first PyCon I'd ever been able to go to. In previous years, I just read blog posts and watched session videos online.

Now that I've been, I realize how little of the conference is captured in blog posts and session videos. Honestly, Doug and others are right and the talks are maybe 1/5 of the conference if that. There's also:

  • tutorials
  • sprints that allow for in-person group collaboration
  • giving lightning talks about things that are important to you to an interested audience of 800+
  • talking with people whose code you use
  • talking with people who use your code
  • talking with people who work on libraries that solve the same problems but in different ways
  • poster sessions
  • the expo hall where a bunch of companies were hiring and a bunch of groups are showing off what they're doing
  • talking with people about non-Python things
  • free t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and bottle openers (which turned out to be very handy)!
  • looking over peoples' shoulders and watching them use tools you've never heard of
  • meeting other people who also wrote a mocking library, micro web framework, blogging system, or enum library (which covers at least half the attendees)
  • ...

Being part of the video crew, there was some talk about how videoing the conference sessions reduces the number of people who go. Honestly, if you don't go to PyCon because you think you get the same experience from watching the videos that get posted online, you're horribly mistaken.

I thought of some analogies to help understand:

  • It's like seeing a 4x6 picture of a peach pie vs. having a slice sitting in front of you that was just taken out of the oven and it's got a nice honkin scoope of vanilla ice cream that's melting as you watch.
  • It's like hearing a 15 second muzak-like ring tone of your favorite song vs. listening to it being played live at a concert.
  • It's like looking at a JPEG image saved with a quality of 10% of your birthday party vs. being there. (You wouldn't skip your own birthday party, would you?)

I don't want to belabor the point beyond that. There are other reasons people don't go to PyCon that are perfectly valid. Not going because the conference sessions are posted online and that's equivalent to going to the conference is not one of them. I hadn't gone previously because of money, classes, work and family issues. I regret it now.

While at PyCon, I was on the video crew and ran the camera in room 5 on Friday and Saturday. When I wasn't running the camera, I was watching Carl, Ryan, Dave and others coordinate the video-recording side of the conference. The amount of work, technology, and calamity-preventing know-how that goes into videoing a conference is awe-inspiring. Carl even took a moment to teach me how to coil cables correctly.

The Next Day Video crew have all the videos currently posted on http://pycon.blip.tv/. They're working on encoding them in Ogg Theora so that I can post them on Python Miro Community with the Universal Subtitles embed code making it possible to caption and translate these videos. We've already worked out the workflow, so it's just a matter of finishing up encoding and posting them.

Carl and I gave a lightning talk about melding Python Miro Community with Universal Subtitles. I'm really excited about this work. It makes these videos more accessible which is really important. This work is funded by a grant from the PSF. (Thank you!)

PyCon 2011 was amazing and I met a lot of amazing people, ate some great food, participated in some great conversations, ...--it's hard not to slide into absurd amounts of rampant hyperbole when talking about it.

Thank you so much to all the people who made this possible. PyCon is a fantastic conference that's about people, building relationships, enabling conversations, and reinforcing the community and the work you put into it really shows.

I feel the need for the obligatory I'm *passionate* about PyCon.

Python Software Foundation Grant for Python Miro Community

, Will Kahn-Greene | Tweet this

A couple of weeks ago at Carl's urging, I applied for a grant from the Python Software Foundation. This would cover Miro Community service costs for the next year as well as work on a series of improvements to the site. Things like:

  • Universal Subtitles support
  • using transcriptions in the search corpus for videos
  • implementing an API in Miro Community allowing for automated data validation

I talked about all this at length in my call for funding.

I'm very pleased to announce that the PSF has awarded me a grant. I know how selective they are in their grant approval and I really appreciate this. It helps me a ton and I will work hard to make it money well spent.

I'll be at PyCon 2011.. I hope to spend some time with Carl, Asheesh and others working on Miro Community. I'm also hoping to talk with people who've used the site and what kinds of things we can make better going forward. If you see me, feel free to say, "Hi!"