There were a few questions about the choice of Python as a language, and whether and what languages would come next, comparisons to other existing containers, and so forth.  Guido van Rossum said it was partly because Python is one of the three big languages at Google, and because it was (relatively) easy to harden the VM.  Kevin Gibbs said they had to start somewhere, and that they were committed to others.  Paul McDonald said that the two most voted-for issues on the issue tracker are language-related, and that there were teams (ie, more than one) currently actively working on languages (ie, more than one).

A couple of questions around "maturity" - the team says they'll make it clear when it is no longer a preview, and that this will probably happen when they have the billing set up and offline processing.  They expect billing to be available "toward the end of the year".

Question about HTTPS/SSL and access to encryption within GAE code.  Answer is that it's something they want to do, but don't know when they'll get to it.  Data is "strictly" partitioned between apps in the store (BigTable).

A common thread in answers were that the Google App Engine team were very interested in people being able to get their data and code out of GAE, and they're working on making it easy to bulk output the data.  They hoped that a standard would emerge for BigTable-like storage (CouchDB, SimpleDB) so that people could write code and host it on GAE or elsewhere.   And people are already working on compatible APIs to make it possible to run on other storage systems (but may not be too efficient).

Some interesting news was delivered during the Google I/O keynote.

In terms of Google App Engine, the announcement that got the biggest applause was that it was now open to all signups - no waiting list and a few tens of thousands of developers.

Beyond that, the two new APIs were announced - the memcache API and the Image API.

Some pricing expectations for usage beyond the free chunk given to you were given:

• CPU: 5 million "average" page views free, 10-12c per core-hour thereafter
  
• Storage: 500MB free, 15-18c per GB-month thereafter.
  
• Incoming traffic: 5 million "average" page views, 11-13c/GB thereafter
  
• Outgoing traffic: 5 million "average" page views, 9-11c/GB thereafter
  

The Google Web Toolkit 1.5 release candidate was released today, which brings Java 5 language features.

In terms of OpenSocial, the 0.8 version specification was released yesterday, and that AOL has joined the OpenSocial initiative.

On Saturday (May 10th) the Cape Town Python User Group held a Python Sprint meeting as part of the Global Python Sprint weekend.  8 or so of us got together on and off from 10:30am until about 9:30pm at the SynthaSite offices around a table and worked through 10 or so issues in the Python issue database.

Thanks to The Other Neil and Simon for most of the organisation effort, and to them and Adrianna, Russell, Jonathan, Jeremy, Brad, and David for coming through and taking part.

And thanks to SynthaSite for coffee, coke, crisps, chocolates, and other goodies.

According to The Other Neil, we worked on:

• http://bugs.python.org/issue2736
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2809
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2742
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1491
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1343
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2776
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1777412
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2768
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2722
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1153769
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2746

Next week, on Tuesday 8th, the Western Cape Linux User Group meets to hear about dbus "and other freedesktop stuff".  Usual venue - Chemical Engineering lecture theatre at University of Cape Town.  18:30.  As is usual for CLUG meetings, everyone who attends is welcome to come have supper afterwards (there's a list of previous CLUG dinner venues on the wiki).

The next day, Wednesday 9th, the Cape Town Ruby Brigade has a meeting at the Bandwidth Barn from 19:00.  Currently known topics include the Yahoo! UI and working with it with Rails.  Don't forget to sign up

Saturday, 26th April, finds the Cape Town Python User Group Tenth Meeting (probably) at the Bandwidth Barn, probably from 14:00 as usual.  No set topics yet, but I imagine we might have a round of collaborative programming after the unplanned session last meeting which seemed to go down well.  (Unfortunately, I was working, so I missed out...)

Tuesday, 29th April, is the second of the twice-a-month meetings of the Western Cape Linux User Group.  No idea on the topic yet, though.

Another successful Cape Town Geekdinner, Garrulous Grape, has come and gone, marking the start of our second year.  Not much to say beyond great people, great vibe, and, at times, great entertainment (Brad Whittington doing Tania's Slideshow Karaoke was hilarious).

Others have more to say, though:

• Jonathan Hitchcock explains our "projector screen hack" and gives thanks
• Ian Gilfillan explains his wearing tie-dye for his "Geek/Hippy talk"
• Paul and Kerry-Anne posted a photo from the evening on Cape Town Daily Photo
  
• Jeremy Thurgood also reports back
• Marius Bock returns to the fold after a few months
• Beverley Merriman met a bunch of new people at her second GeekDinner

Special thanks to Perdeberg for the wine - I'm sure there'll be a bunch of new entries into their clink-to-win competition.

Plans for May Cape Town GeekDinner are already underway, and I might organise a GeekBrunch some Sunday or GeekPoker some weeknight in April for those who need an intermediate fix.

The GeekDinner Cape Town first birthday dinner is upon us - Garrulous Grape is our seventh GeekDinner (one year and three days after the first one), happening on Monday, 31st March from 7pm at Greens in Plattekloof.  Yes, we've finally headed north!

Before that, the Cape Town Python User Group meeting (aka CTPUG 9) at the Bandwidth Barn on Saturday, 29th March, from 2pm.

One of my favourite South African open source enterprises is translate.org.za - which, amongst other great things, is behind two good pieces of (Python) software - Translate Toolkit (a library of converters between different translation formats) and Pootle (a web app for people to do translations through).

Those two pieces of software are potential targets for those entering Google Summer of Code 2008 - they're one of 175 organisations/projects chosen out of 500 applications.  And looking at the high-quality project ideas page they put together, you can see why their application was successful.

The translate.org.za people are also looking to hire a Python developer in Pretoria - I doubt there are all that many opportunities to work full-time on an open source project in South Africa (let alone in Python), so hopefully they'll find a good match.

This makes South Africa being represented as both student and mentoring organisation in Google Summer of Code (and, I'm guessing, there'll be a mentor from translate.org.za this year too), as well as a finalist in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest all in the past year and a bit...

I'm a bit behind the times on this one (Tectonic had a story immediately), but FreeBSD 7.0 was announced two weeks back.  For more information, check out this interview with a few FreeBSD developers about FreeBSD 7.0 as well as this FreeBSD 7.0 preview presentation that contains quite a bit on performance improvements.

How cool is this - a South African (Capetonian, at that) student, Federico Lorenzi, placed in the top 10 of the first Google Highly Open Participation Contest.  Federico has good taste - he likes FreeBSD and Python - and worked on the MoinMoin wiki project for the contest.

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest is a way to introduce pre-university students to the world of open source, and to reward the contributions made by these students.  The winners get flown over to Google's Mountain View headquarters for a prize-giving.

In conjunction with Charl van Niekerk's Google Summer of Code participation, the fact that South Africa has a wealth of technical talent is probably reaching many more ears.  (I'm sure Google isn't surprised - I know a few South Africans doing good work there.)

When I started at SynthaSite and returned to doing some sysadmin-related work I discovered BackupPC and rdiff-backup, and I offered to give a talk at CLUG.  For my sins, I'm talking tomorrow from 18:30 onwards at the UCT Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre.  There will be the usual post-CLUG dinner for anyone who wants to continue chatting after the talk.