Free Webinar - Intro to OpenStack - by the Linux Foundation

By Vasudev Ram

I saw this news via the Linux Foundation's email newsletter.

The Linux Foundation is hosting a free webinar, Introduction to OpenStack Cloud.

OpenStack is FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for deploying public and private clouds. NASA and Rackspace were among the original developers of OpenStack. In a short few years, OpenStack has become what may be the largest open source project after Linux (as I've heard it said).

OpenStack

OpenStack on Wikipedia

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linus Torvalds, the original creator of Linux:

Linux Foundation staff

(I originally made a typo in the name of Linus above, wrote Linux :) Sorry, readers via Planet Python. Though I corrected it soon, it was already included in the feed. On the other hand, it might not be a bad moniker for him, considering what he's achieved :), along with countless others, of course.

Excerpt from the newsletter about the free OpenStack webinar:

[
Cloud Computing has taken the IT world by storm over the last few years. Advances in virtualization technology have made it possible to not only make much more efficient use of available hardware, but to offer it with previously unheard-of levels of flexibility. Furthermore, sysadmins and devops need not reinvent the wheel when deploying a cloud: a vibrant ecosystem has grown from the need for quality free and open-source tools to build such an infrastructure.

Due to the organized structure of OpenStack, rapid development, and flexible components, in just over three years, it has risen in the F/OSS community as the platform of choice for private and public cloud deployments. In this webinar, Adolfo Brandes, an OpenStack technical consultant for hastexo, will give an overview of why that is, including:

An overview of OpenStack and its components
A live demonstration of an OpenStack Cloud
Best practices on how to do a first deployment
]

Here are the webinar details:

Date: Wednesday, August 28th, 2013
Time: 9am Pacific / Noon Eastern / 1800 CEST

OpenStack is written in Python, and uses SQLAlchemy for database access.

SQLAlchemy is a database toolkit for Python, which provides both a "Core" Pythonic interface to the generic as well as specific capabilities of various relational databases, and also a higher-level ORM (Object Relational Mapper) built upon the Core.

Here is a video of Mike Bayer's Introduction to SQLAlchemy presented at the last PyCon 2013 in the US:



The list of members of the Linux Foundation is large, and colorful :) due to all the corporate logos.

Linux posts on jugad2

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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How to download PyCon US 2013 videos for offline viewing using youtube-dl

By Vasudev Ram


As Pythonistas would know, PyCon US 2013 happened recently.

While reading Python news on the Net, I saw that the videos of the conference were being uploaded to pyvideo.org.

I browsed the list of videos there. Since I had recently come across youtube-dl, a YouTube downloader tool, I thought of trying to download the PyCon videos using it.

When I went to the pyvideo site to do that, and played one or two videos available there, I was not sure at first whether they were from YouYube or not, so was not sure whether I could download them using youtube-dl.

A little experimentation showed that they were in fact hosted on YouTube, and I was able to find out how to download them, and then downloaded a few of them.

So I'm giving the steps for doing that below:

(Note: these steps worked for me - I could download a few videos using the steps, and none have given an error so far, but YMMV, depending on your OS, browser, Flash Player version, or other factors.)

Update: before (or after) reading these steps, you may wish to read the comments on this post. Some readers commented, and gave simpler methods of doing the same thing, in particular, some said that there is a direct link to download the video on some or all of the pyvideo video pages, and some said that the URL-fixing step is not needed since you can just right-click on the video to get the right URL without the extraneous stuff. Also, renaming the video to remove the extraneous stuff in the name can be avoided by using some command-line options of youtube-dl.

- Go to pyvideo.org in your browser.

- Select the category called PyCon US 2013 videos.

- Select one of the videos from that category and open the link to the video in another browser tab (or in the same tab).

For example, try Guido van Rossum's keynote at PyCon US 2013.

- Click the share video icon at the top right of the video screen; it looks like a V (with small knobs at its vertices), but rotated to the right by 90 degrees.

- The top left of the video screen will now show the URL for the video (along with buttons to share it on Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

- Hover your mouse over that URL and then right click it. You may have to right-click twice, or first click on the URL and then right-click on it.

- From the Adobe Flash Player pop-up menu that appears, select "Copy video URL".

- Now, open a DOS command prompt. I am using Windows in this example; adjust the steps for Linux or Mac OS X, i.e. use a bash or other shell and modify the steps for copy and paste below, to suit your OS.

- At the prompt (Windows), type the partial command:

youtube-dl -t (followed by a space)

- Then type Alt-Space, then E, then P.

- That brings up the Windows system menu for the DOS window, and then selects the Edit menu in it, and then the Paste option from that menu.

- So the video URL will get pasted to the end of youtube-dl command you typed earlier.

- Now, if you just try to run the command as it is, it may not work (for downloading by youtube-dl), because of some extra parameters in the URL, that youtube-dl cannot handle.

- For example, here is the copied video URL for the GvR keynote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=n6dUWXRdt48

- Edit the URL using arrow keys, backspace, delete key, etc., to remove the part from "feature" upto "embedded&"; in other words (using HTTP request terms), remove all the key-value pairs except for the "v=something" pair.

- Using the above GvR keynote example, the command-line should now look like this:

youtube-dl -t http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6dUWXRdt48

- Now hit Enter, and wait while the video downloads. The -t option to youtube-dl will add the title of the video as a prefix to the download filename. I typically rename the file to remove the cryptic characters after the title, like this:

c:\downloads> ren Keynote-n6dUWXRdt48.flv GvR-Keynote.flv

- Now you can play the video in VLC, MPlayer or any other suitable player.

Enjoy.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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plot.ly, fast plotting in the browser

By Vasudev Ram

I got to know about plot.ly via this PyCon blog post about Startup Row selections for PyCon US 2013.

Then I tried it out. plot.ly enables you to create plots in your browser. They support plotting data via entering it, importing it from a file, or programming the plot in Python - the Python method seems to be fairly simple, conceptually, at least for simple plots.

I first tried it out using the Python method, but it did not work. No error message, but not output was displayed. Then I tried it out using the method of copy-pasting some data into the screen, and that method worked; it instantly created a plot.

I wrote to them about the problem with the Python plotting method, and one of the founders, Jack, replied, saying they currently have some issue with that. They are working on it.

Once they solve the issue, it may be a useful way of plotting using Python in the browser.

About plot.ly

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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PyCon US 2013 talks

Conference Schedule | PyCon US 2013

Accepted tutorials for PyCon US 2013

Presentation Listing | PyCon US 2013

List looks interesting and shows the versatility of Python.

Tutorials are different from talks, which I blogged about recently:

http://jugad2.blogspot.com/2012/12/pycon-us-2013-accepted-and-interesting.html

Link title seems to be the same for both tutorials list and talks list - a bug?

- Vasudev
dancingbison.com

PyCon US 2013 accepted and interesting talks

Presentation Listing | PyCon US 2013

Above is a list of accepted talks.

Below is a *subset* of talks I personally find interesting, based on the abstracts.

YMMV, obviously.

https://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/presentation/43/

https://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/presentation/44/

https://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/presentation/50/

https://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/presentation/60/

https://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/presentation/58/

In no particular order, I've either blogged about topics related to some of the talks, tried out some  related libraries / tools, or am just interested in the areas.