We describe how Python is used in a large astronomy project to automatically process data from several telescopes in both the hemispheres. We introduce the general problem and discuss challenges and lessons learned.

In this talk, I'd like to talk a bit about Mercurial. This will not be a beginner-level talk on DVCS or hg; it aims to be a higher-level discussion of the concepts employed in Mercurial. After having discussed these, I'd also like to compare Mercurial and git based on UI, performance and underlying concepts.

There is a fair amount of unnecessary animosity between developers about version control systems, especially between Mercurial and Git users. In reality, these two systems are very similar and can actually cooperate pretty well. In this talk we will show just how similar Git and Mercurial are, look at some of their technical differences, and see how they can work together by looking at hg-git, the bidirectional Git/Mercurial bridge, implemented in Python.

Since the dawn of concurrency research, there have been two camps: shared everything, and shared nothing. Most modern applications use threads for concurrency, a shared everything architecture.
 
Actors, however, use a shared nothing architecture where lightweight processes communicate with each other using message passing. Actors can change their state, create a new Actor, send a message to any Actor it has the Address of, and wait for a specific kind of message to arrive in it's mailbox.
 
We will discuss the benefits of using the Actor architecture and strategies for implementing an Actor system in Python.
 
http://bitbucket.org/fzzzy/python-actors/

Seattle [1] is an open-source platform for developing and deploying networked
applications. Core feature of Seattle is that it allows safe execution of untrusted code
on end-user systems. In our talk we look at how we used Python to build a safe,
restricted code execution environment for Seattle that not only provides
execution safety but also enforces strict resource consumption limits. In addition,
Seattle includes a high-level API to hide inconsistent OS-specific behaviors
from developers. What results is a platform that welcomes the participation of
end-user machines for general-purpose distributed programming and creates new
possibilities for developers.
 
[1] http://seattle.cs.washington.edu/