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Discovering Colman's mustard

If you already knew Colman's Mustard then you would be laughing right now, because you can imagine what I'm going to tell you. Anyway, knowing it or not, just keep reading...

I've a lot of stories to tell from my trip to Birmingham last week and this is one of those stories.

It happened in the Heathrow airport, while I was waiting for the flight back home on Friday. It was 14:00 and I was hungry so, after searching for a good place to have lunch within the airport I ended in a steak-burguer-whatever restaurant. I ordered a chicken+bacon+cheese baguette with chips and a pint of Stella.

I only had to wait a few minutes until the food arrived and then, a beautiful waitress brought me some sauces, a fork, a knife, etc.

Among the sauces where ketchup, spicy sauces and mustard. I love mustard, I really like it with chips, so I put some of the mustard into my plate, to have it with the chips. I never tried Colman's before so I just put some in a chip, a little bit less than usual, but I still was generous.

OMFG - Was the first I could think of - WTF IS GOING ON!!

That mustard is terrible hot!. I've to say that I even had once Wasabi as is without soja or anything, and even if Wasabi is terrible, this Colman`s thing had almost beat me!

It was like having a huge ball of fire going from my mouth to my nose, then going out of my nostrils each time I did breathe...

Funny thing is that I almost drank the pint of stella in two shots, because I couldn't get rid of that sensation. I think an old lady sitting on the table side-by-side with mine couldn't resist to smile...

So, my friends, be careful when reading Colman's on the label of anything you are going to eat!

Europython 2010: back home

I've just finished to post everything in my blog some minutes ago. I've added the last 2 posts with the date/time when I wrote them, instead of the date/time when I published them.

I really wrote the posts offline every night, but I had to wait to post them because the lack of internet access in my ETAP room and the fact that the wifi connection in the conference didn't work most of the time. The first two days I went down to the hotel lobby, but even that wifi connection didn't work most of the time, so I decided to wait until being back home to publish the posts.

I didn't have a lot to write about Friday, I just spent the day traveling from Birmingham to Lugo, and I'm not going to bother you with it. I arrived home later than expected (once again there were some problems with the flight from London to A Coruña) and I was tired enough to crash on my bed and sleep like a baby on saturday. Today I took my time for going back through the week, learn some lessons and put everything in place.

I really enjoyed europython 2009, and europython 2010 was even better. I can't wait to see what will be europython 2011!

Europython 2010: last conference day

The last day of europython 2010 began early for me. I got to bed earlier yesterday so I didn't have too much problem to wake up today. I finished some work on the presentation of my lighting talk and then I left the hotel.

The last day of any europython conference is different, there are less talks (because there is some reserved time for the lighting talks) and there is some time in the end of the conference for announcements, thanks and a raffle.

Today's Keynote - Guido Van Rossum

This europython's ending Keynote was courtesy of Guido Van Rossum. It was a Q&A session and Guido answered a lot of questions both from the online q&a moderator from google (where we were able to write questions since the beginning of the europython and even vote for the best ones) and from the audience.

There were some real good questions (and some stupid ones) and Guido took his time to answer as many as was posible within the 45-minutes keynote

Europython 2010: Third conference day and conference dinner

So, this was the third conference day. Due to the party yesterday I missed today's Keynote. Not that I arrived so late (I was there at 09:15) but, as the keynote already began when I got to the Conservatoire, I just choose to go to the new lecture room (where the first talk on my schedule was going to be). I was alone there and that meant peace of mind and spirit (which I really need after so-many-pints last night) and the wifi connection working smoothly. Afterwards, a lot of people told me that the keynote was quite good (so, I'll have to wait for the online video!)

Talk: Organise a Python code dojo!

As soon as the keynote ended, people began to come in the room and the talk began. Nicholas Tollervey explained what is a coding dojo and shared his experience organising the London python coding dojo. I found the idea of the coding dojo quite interesting, even more if I think that is very similar to what we've been doing in Lugo for quite some time now, only with the differences that we call them bunkers (instead of dojos) and that coding dojos have a predefined set of rules. Nicholas is a really good speaker and he surprised us all when we went to the piano that was in the talk room (hey, this is a conservatoire!) and he played the piano, using it as a metaphore to explain something from the talk. It was quite amazing and a lot of people wrote tweets about it :).

Europython 2010: Second conference day

After going to bed a little bit late yesterday I woke up at 07:45. I had a shower and I left the ETAP at 08:15, just to join Antonio Cuni on my way to the conference.

Today's Keynote - Bruce Lawson

The Keynote today was really a good one. Bruce Lawson (from Opera) talked about web standards, accesibility and HTML5. He showed us some incredible examples of the <canvas> and <video> new tags, as well as some real stories about how important web standars and accesibility are. Bruce is quite a good speaker, and that's nice to find in someone giving a Keynote.

europython 2010: TinyHTTPProxy and troublesome wireless

I would like to write some lines about a small (but really useful) script Antonio Cuni showed me yesterday. It is not a script he had written by himself, and probably you could find it in the Internet (UPDATE: In fact it is called TinyHTTPProxy ;D).

While having some beers at the Walkabout last night, we tried to connect to the Internet using my laptop and the Walkabout free wifi, but (after many tries) we found out that it didn't play well with the https protocol. Each time a website (like twitter or gmail) was redirecting us to a secure https connection the connection just got stucked.

My first solution was quite a bit dirty. I opened an SSH connection to one of the machines I've at home, setting up a tunnel like this:

ssh -L 443:twitter.com:443 user@myhost

That will cause that each request sent to https://localhost on my laptop will be forwarded through the tunnel to my box at home, and then it will be forwarded to twitter.com. Then I added a line like this to the /etc/hosts file (yes, that works in OSx too ;D):

127.0.0.1 twitter.com

It mostly works (the Walkabout wifi was a little bit troublesome anyway). From time to time there were timeouts and it was not so usable.

The solution Antonio provided was, indeed, by far more elegant. He showed me this python script which is a fully-functional http proxy in only 123 lines of code!. Amazing, isn't it?

All you need is download it and execute it, for example, in your home box (or any other box out there you can reach):

python proxy.py

It will listen on port 8000 on that box:

Any clients will be served...
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 ...

Then you only have to modify your browser to use a proxy connection with http/https/etc requests using the hostname/ipaddress of that box as the proxy address. We tried that and it worked just perfectly fine, but with the limitations of the flaky wifi inside the pub.

It is even more useful, as it will send to stdout a lot of useful messages about the connections managed by the proxy:

78.41.210.130 - - [19/Jul/2010 22:42:08] "CONNECT mail.google.com:443 HTTP/1.1" 200 -
        connect to ocsp.thawte.com:80
78.41.210.130 - - [19/Jul/2010 22:42:08] "POST http://ocsp.thawte.com/ HTTP/1.1" - -

You can even notice when there are connection problems between you and the proxy (even if this is a little bit ugly and should be handled properly through a try...except catch):

----------------------------------------
Exception happened during processing of request from ('78.41.210.130', 49507)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/SocketServer.py", line 558, in process_request_thread
    self.finish_request(request, client_address)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/SocketServer.py", line 320, in finish_request
    self.RequestHandlerClass(request, client_address, self)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/SocketServer.py", line 615, in __init__
    self.handle()
  File "./proxy.py", line 20, in handle
    self.__base_handle()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/BaseHTTPServer.py", line 329, in handle
    self.handle_one_request()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/BaseHTTPServer.py", line 323, in handle_one_request
    method()
  File "./proxy.py", line 46, in do_CONNECT
    self._read_write(soc, 300)
  File "./proxy.py", line 93, in _read_write
    out.send(data)
error: [Errno 32] Broken pipe
----------------------------------------

So, the final solution could be a mix of both approaches. I'll try to do this tonight if we go again to the Walkabout, because I think the problem was that the wifi was causing some kind of trouble with http/https requests. So, what if you use the proxy python script to set up a proxy at home (just like we did before) but instead of setting up the proxy like in the previous example, you do open an SSH connection home, creating a tunnel to forward requests to the proxy?, just like this:

ssh -L 8000:localhost:8000 user@myhost

Then you do not need to modify your /etc/hosts file, you don't need to open port 8000 at home and you do send all the http requests through the ssh tunnel, which in the end is an already established connection (it shouldn't close) while http requests from the browser are going to be multiple requests sent through the wifi link.

Imho, this would be an almost-perfect approach, but I'll try tonight and check if there is any difference.

europython 2010: First conference day

Let me advice you, if you ever come to this part of UK (if you've never been here before) that the dawn is near 05:00 in the morning. If the light does bother you when sleeping, search for a hotel with courtains of some sort.

I woke up at 07:15, I had a quick shower and I did some clean-up of my stuff (I put everything back in my travel bag). I left the hotel at 08:00. Just after leaving, I met Denis Bilenko on my way to the Birmingham Conservatoire. Denis is going to give a talk on thursday about the gevent network library and we talked a little bit while walking to the conference building.

I got some problems entering the conference, as they didn't find my identification badge (WTF, next time I'm going to use Wu as my real name, as this happened to me back in 2008 in the djangocon in San Francisco and last year here in birmingham too :(). Finally I managed to find the badge myself, so I could get all the goodies (A nice black t-shirt, a mug from bytemark hosting and the usual list of atendees and advertisements of all kind).

With everybody seated in the Adrian Boult Hall the opening event started and the crew was introduced to everybody (just like last year):

europython 2010: The road to Birmingham

I'm writing this lines seating on the bed, in a room of the ETAP Hotel in Great Colmore Street, Birmingham, UK. Now it is 23:24 (GMT+1 or BST, Brittish Summer Time as they call it here in UK) but let me get back some hours ago, where the journey began.