Portable Python 2.7.3.1 has been released based on Python 2.7.3 with the biggest set of included libraries in the history of Portable Python.
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Portable Python 2.7.3.1 relased
Python News17 May 2012 | 7:51 pm -
NumPy on PyPy progress report
PyPy Status Blog17 Apr 2012 | 11:52 amHello. A lot of things happened in March, like pycon. I was also busy doing other things (pictured), so apologies for the late numpy status update. However, a lot of things have happened and numpy continues to be one of the main points of entry for hacking on PyPy. Apologies to all the people whose patches I don't review in timely manner, but seriously, you do a lot of work. This list of changes is definitely not exhaustive, and I might be forgetting important contributions. In a loose order: Matti Picus made out parameter work for a lot of (but not all) functions. We merged record dtypes… -
PyGotham Deadline for Proposals
Python News18 May 2012 | 9:51 amThe deadline for proposals for PyGotham II, June 8-9 is May 30. Please submit proposals to the pygotham.org site. -
My (very shallow) thoughts on Dart
Coder Who Says Py13 May 2012 | 11:11 pmBeing the language nerd that I am, I actually find it fun to learn new programming languages. Now typically this is nothing more than me reading all of the official documentation and writing some toy examples that give me a very shallow, quick-and-dirty feel for a language. Since I have been involved in language design for nearly a decade (started participating on python-dev in June 2002) and have done toy examples now in 18 languages (17 actually still run; I have never bothered to get Forth to work again after a gforth change broke my code), this is actually usually enough for me to… -
Steve Holden steps down as Chairman
Python Software Foundation News7 May 2012 | 7:30 amThroughout his time with the Python Software Foundation, starting as the informal chair of the first several PyCons, the Python community has enjoyed the friendly face of Steve Holden at the helm and around the community, exemplifying the open source ethos. Through his 8 years as a Director, two of which he spent as Vice Chairman, and the last four spent as Chairman of the Board, Steve's hard work and countless hours of effort have helped shape this community and foundation into the great state we have in 2012. While Steve isn't leaving the community or even the foundation, where he'll remain…
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Python News
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PyGotham Deadline for Proposals
18 May 2012 | 9:51 amThe deadline for proposals for PyGotham II, June 8-9 is May 30. Please submit proposals to the pygotham.org site. -
Portable Python 2.7.3.1 relased
17 May 2012 | 7:51 pmPortable Python 2.7.3.1 has been released based on Python 2.7.3 with the biggest set of included libraries in the history of Portable Python. -
Third alpha for Python 3.3.0 released
1 May 2012 | 1:00 pmThe third alpha release for Python 3.3.0 has been released for testing. -
python.org DNS zone now hosted using DynECT
16 Apr 2012 | 4:00 pmWe would like to thank Dyn for hosting the python.org DNS zone. See all infrastructure sponsors at our League of Awesome. -
Python 2.6.8, 2.7.3, 3.1.5, and 3.2.3 released
11 Apr 2012 | 4:00 pmPython 2.6.8, 2.7.3, 3.1.5, and 3.2.3 have been released. They include several security fixes.
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Python Software Foundation News
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Steve Holden steps down as Chairman
7 May 2012 | 7:30 amThroughout his time with the Python Software Foundation, starting as the informal chair of the first several PyCons, the Python community has enjoyed the friendly face of Steve Holden at the helm and around the community, exemplifying the open source ethos. Through his 8 years as a Director, two of which he spent as Vice Chairman, and the last four spent as Chairman of the Board, Steve's hard work and countless hours of effort have helped shape this community and foundation into the great state we have in 2012. While Steve isn't leaving the community or even the foundation, where he'll remain… -
Indianapolis Python Workshop - April 13-14
6 Apr 2012 | 8:00 amIf you're in the Indianapolis, Indiana area on April 13-14, join the locals from IndyPy as well as the Boston Python Workshop and OpenHatch in a weekend workshop. The groups have joined forces to create a beginner-friendly environment with a focus on involving women of the community and introducing computer programming with Python. There's no prerequisite knowledge required to attend, as the weekend is planned for true beginners not just to Python but to programming in general. For the full details, see https://openhatch.org/wiki/Indianapolis_Python_Workshop.One of the weekend's stated goals… -
User groups: the PSF can help cover your meetup.com fees
21 Mar 2012 | 8:02 amDid you know that the PSF has a budget to cover Python user groups' meetup.com fees?Well, we do! The PSF can:reimburse user group organizers for fees paid to meetup.com in the past year prepay annual fees for meetup.com Python groups You can read the comments on the proposal that established this budget in the PSF board meeting minutes from April, 2009. To get a grant to cover your user group's meetup.com fees, please submit a proposal to psf@python.org. Here is a sample proposal:Grant Proposal: $144 to cover the cost of the Boston Python user group’s meetup.com subscription for six… -
Armin Rigo Receives PSF Community Service Award
6 Jan 2012 | 7:00 amThe Python Software Foundation has presented a Community Service Award for the fourth quarter of 2011 to Armin Rigo for his outstanding work on PyPy. The Python Software Foundation is pleased to recognize Armin's contributions to the community. -
Mike Müller Receives PSF Community Service Award
5 Jan 2012 | 7:00 amThe Python Software Foundation has presented a Community Service Award for the fourth quarter of 2011 to Mike Müller for his outstanding work in bringing Python forward in the science world, through the organization of the first two EuroSciPy conferences and for heading the new yearly PyCon DE conference, which gives the large number of German speaking Python users a platform for interchange and discussion. The Python Software Foundation is pleased to recognize Mike's contributions to the community.
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The PyCon blog
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Apac PyCon 2012
16 May 2012 | 1:11 amApac PyCon 2012 is here. Be sure to register for it at http://apac.pycon.org and come experience the wonderful talks from our keynotes and speakers at Singapore! -
PyGotham II
11 May 2012 | 9:08 amPyGotham II: "Mostly Python, some random, all awesome", will take place June 8th and 9th, 2012 on the Hornblower cruise ships moored at Pier 40 in Manhattan, NY. Our second year promises to be a blast, with quality tracks for all skill levels, after-conference sprints and parties, keynotes and Q & A panels, and some amazing sponsors. Join us this summer, learn, and have a a geeky-great time. -
PyCon DE 2012 - Call for Proposals for Talks and Tutorials
9 May 2012 | 12:16 pmIn ShortThe second PyCon DE, October 29 - November 3, 2012 in Leipzig, Germany is inviting you to submit proposals for talks and tutorials.Give a TalkTalks should be, obviously, Python-related:Python as a programming language (implementations, core development, Python 3)Web applications with Python (frameworks, best practice, CMS)Usage of Python in science, industry, finance, teaching, and system administrationApplications with Python (GUI, database, mobile, hardware control etc.)Software development (testing, agile development, algorithms and… -
PyCon 2013 -- Get Ready!
9 May 2012 | 9:07 amEven though PyCon 2012 happened only a month and a half ago, it's never too early to start thinking about next year. In fact, the wheels are already in motion for planning PyCon 2013, which will be taking place in Santa Clara, CA for a second year. The dates to hold are Wednesday March 13-21, which include the tutorials through the sprints. The conference talks will begin Friday March 15 and run through the 17th. In the coming months we'll be announcing several intermediate dates, such as our Call for Proposals and the one you're all waiting for, the opening of ticket sales.The Call for… -
PyCon Australia 2012's Call for Proposals closes this week!
2 May 2012 | 8:14 pmThis week marks your last opportunity to submit proposals to present at PyCon Australia 2012, the national conference for the Python programming community, to be held on August 18 and 19 in Hobart, Tasmania.The deadline for proposal submission is Friday May 4, 2012, and more information can be found at http://pycon-au.org/cfpPyCon Australia is an excellent opportunity to share experience and knowledge with like-minded Python developers from all walks of life -- we attract professional developers from industry, government, science and education, along with enthusiast and student developers.
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Happenings in Python Usergroups
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Leipzig Python User Group, Next Meeting Tuesday, May 8, 2012
6 May 2012 | 1:24 pmWe will meet on May 8, 2012, 8:00 pm at the training center of Python Academy in Leipzig, Germany (How to find us).Mike Müller will talk about matplotlib. This library allows to create 2D Plots of high quality with only a few lines of Python. The presentation will show the basic principles with examples and the possibilities to create animations and videos with matplotlib.Everybody who uses Python, plans to do so or is interested in learning more about the language is encouraged to participate.While the meeting language will be mainly German, English speakers are very… -
Leipzig Python User Group, Next Meeting Tuesday, April 10, 2012
9 Apr 2012 | 7:23 amWe will meet on April 10, 2012, 8:00 pm at the training center of Python Academy in Leipzig, Germany (How to find us).Everybody who uses Python, plans to do so or is interested in learning more about the language is encouraged to participate.While the meeting language will be mainly German, English speakers are very welcome. We will provide English interpretation if needed.Food and soft drinks are provided. Please send a short confirmation mail to info@python-academy.de, so we can prepare appropriately.The dates of our next meetings can be found in our calendar.Information… -
PyUGAT Python User Group Austria - Next Meeting: April 15th, 2012
8 Apr 2012 | 1:47 pmThe next meeting of the Python User Group Austria (PyUGAT) will take place Sunday, April 15th, 2012 around 6 p.m. at the Metalab in Vienna (how to get there).You can also find us on Meetup. The Agenda for this evening can be found in our wiki. This time there will be another Coding Dojo. Bring your projects or questions to discuss with the crowd! Afterwards there is time for chit-chat and a beer.If you happen to be in or around Vienna this Sunday, come and join us at the Metalab! We can accommodate non German-speaking guests by switching to English, so don't be afraid to drop by! You can also… -
Python Meeting Düsseldorf - 03.04.2012
23 Mar 2012 | 6:38 amPython Meeting DüsseldorfThe following text is in German, since we're announcing a regional user group meeting in Düsseldorf, Germany. AnkündigungDas nächste Python Meeting Düsseldorf findet an folgendem Termin statt:Dienstag, den 03.04.2012, um 18:00 Uhrim Raum "Clara Schumann" der DJH Düsseldorf EinleitungDas Python Meeting Düsseldorf ist eine neue lokale Veranstaltung in Düsseldorf, die sich an Python Begeisterte in der Region wendet.Wir starten bei den Treffen mit einer kurzen Einleitung und gehen dann zu einer Reihe Kurzvorträgen (Lightning Talks) über, bei denen die Anwesenden… -
PyUGAT Python User Group Austria - Next Meeting: March 21th, 2012
14 Mar 2012 | 11:34 amThe next meeting of the Python User Group Austria (PyUGAT) will take place Wednesday, March 21st, 2012 around 6 p.m. at the Metalab in Vienna (how to get there).You can also find us on Meetup. The Agenda for this evening can be found in our wiki. This time there will be a couple of small presentations. Bring your projects or questions to discuss with the crowd! Afterwards there is time for chit-chat and a beer.If you happen to be in or around Vienna this Sunday, come and join us at the Metalab! We can accommodate non German-speaking guests by switching to English, so don't be afraid to drop…
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PyPy Status Blog
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STM update: back to threads?
7 May 2012 | 2:58 pmHi again, Here is another update on the status of Software Transactional Memory on PyPy. Those of you who have been closely following this blog since last year know that, from the very first post about STM, I explored various design ideas about the API that we should get when programming in Python. I went a full circle, and now I am back to where I started (with, important difference, a very roughly working implementation of pypy-stm). What I realized is that the "thread" module is not that bad after all --- I mean, yes, it is a horribly low-level interface, but it is general enough to build… -
STM update (and thanks everybody)
27 Apr 2012 | 11:22 amA short update on the Software Transactional Memory (STM) side. Let me remind you that the work is to add STM internally into PyPy, with the goal of letting the user's programs run on multiple cores after a minor adaptation. (The goal is not to expose STM to the user's program.) I will soon write some official documentation that explains in more details exactly what you get. For now you can read the previous blog posts, and you can also find technical details in the call for donation itself; or directly look at how I adapted the examples linked to later in this post.I have now reached the… -
NumPy on PyPy progress report
17 Apr 2012 | 11:52 amHello. A lot of things happened in March, like pycon. I was also busy doing other things (pictured), so apologies for the late numpy status update. However, a lot of things have happened and numpy continues to be one of the main points of entry for hacking on PyPy. Apologies to all the people whose patches I don't review in timely manner, but seriously, you do a lot of work. This list of changes is definitely not exhaustive, and I might be forgetting important contributions. In a loose order: Matti Picus made out parameter work for a lot of (but not all) functions. We merged record dtypes… -
PyCon 2012 wrap up
13 Apr 2012 | 11:36 amSo, PyCon happened. This was the biggest PyCon ever and probably the biggest gathering of Python hackers ever. From the PyPy perspective, a lot at PyCon was about PyPy. Listing things: David Beazley presented an excellent keynote describing his experience diving head-first into PyPy and at least partly failing. He, however, did not fail to explain bits and pieces about PyPy's architecture. Video is available. We gave tons of talks, including the tutorial, why pypy by example and pypy's JIT architecture We had a giant influx of new commiters, easily doubling the amount of pull requests ever… -
Py3k status update #3
6 Apr 2012 | 2:06 pmThis is the third status update about my work on the py3k branch, which I can work on thanks to all of the people who donated to the py3k proposal. A lot of work has been done during the last month: as usual, the list of changes is too big to be reported in a detalied way, so this is just a summary of what happened. One of the most active areas was killing old and deprecated features. In particular, we killed support for the __cmp__ special method and its counsins, the cmp builtin function and keyword argument for list.sort() and sorted(). Killing is easy, but then you have to fix all the…
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Coder Who Says Py
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My (very shallow) thoughts on Dart
13 May 2012 | 11:11 pmBeing the language nerd that I am, I actually find it fun to learn new programming languages. Now typically this is nothing more than me reading all of the official documentation and writing some toy examples that give me a very shallow, quick-and-dirty feel for a language. Since I have been involved in language design for nearly a decade (started participating on python-dev in June 2002) and have done toy examples now in 18 languages (17 actually still run; I have never bothered to get Forth to work again after a gforth change broke my code), this is actually usually enough for me to… -
Thoughts on using function signatures as a DSL for CLI parsers
12 May 2012 | 3:02 pmI have no idea why, but this morning I thought about a decorator for delineating what function should be treated as the main function (e.g. using a decorator instead of the traditional if __name__ == '__main__' idiom). Now I solved it in my head on the spot, and then immediately realized someone had to have solved this already. Turns out various people have done things as nuts as examine stack levels to detect the __main__ name, but the most straight-forward solution I found doesn't do anything nearly as nuts or CPython-specific and is basically what I came up with. There was a red herring,… -
Playing with the Ninja build system
28 Apr 2012 | 10:21 pmWhenever I learn a new programming language I end up writing some toy examples to try to get a feel for what the language is about. This leads to the need to build code using many different compilers with their own flags, quirks, etc. Up until today I had used SCons for my build setup. But honestly, it always seemed like overkill to me. Because I only had about 5 programs to build per language with at most two files used to produce the program, a full-blown build system was never really needed. Add to the fact that I am building for languages that no build system would have built-in support… -
The re-launch of py3ksupport!
14 Feb 2012 | 5:29 pmThe reason the past few blog posts I have written have been App Engine-themed is because I have re-launched py3ksupport! I did a complete rewrite of the code to make it more efficient (since I'm paying $9/month for the site) and at the same time moved over to HRD so as to guarantee the site is always up. Before I discuss some unique features of py3ksupport, I want to point out that right now that 56 - 60% of the top 50 projects based on downloads of their latest PyPI release support Python 3. The reason for the range is that some projects had in-development support last time I looked and… -
How I bootstrapped importlib
6 Feb 2012 | 6:44 pmIf you have been reading this blog over the past five years I am sure you have read a post or five about my desire to bootstrap importlib into Python as the implementation of __import__. Well, as of today I'm willing to say that the difficult technological hurdles have been scaled! At this point the only thing holding me back from taking my code from https://hg.python.org/sandbox/bcannon#bootstrap_importlib and making importlib drive import statements are some small compatibility issues, integrating into the build process better, a code review, and python-dev sign-off. In other…
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Doug Hellmann
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cliff -- Command Line Interface Formulation Framework -- version 0.7
14 May 2012 | 4:50 pmcliff is a framework for building command line programs. It usessetuptools entry points to provide subcommands, output formatters, andother extensions.What's New In This Release?Clean up interactive mode flag settting.Add support for Python 2.6, contributed by heavenshell.Fix multi-word commands in interactive mode.DocumentationDocumentation for cliff is hosted on readthedocs.orgInstallationUse pip:$ pip install cliffSee the installation guide for more details. -
virtualenvwrapper 3.3
12 May 2012 | 1:48 pmWhat is virtualenvwrappervirtualenvwrapper is a set of extensions to Ian Bicking's virtualenvtool. The extensions include wrappers for creating and deletingvirtual environments and otherwise managing your development workflow,making it easier to work on more than one project at a time withoutintroducing conflicts in their dependencies.What's NewClean up file permissions and remove shebangs from scripts notintended to be executed on the command line. (contributed byralphbean)Worked on some brittle tests.Received updates to Japanese translation of the documentation fromt2y.Fix the test script… -
Determining the Name of a Process from Python
7 May 2012 | 7:00 amA couple of weeks ago at the OpenStack Folsom Summit, Mark McClainpointed out an interesting code snippet he had discovered in the Novasources:# nova/utils.py: 339script_dir = os.path.dirname(inspect.stack()[-1][1])The code is part of the logic to find a configuration file that livesin a directory relative to where the application startup script is. Itlooks at the call stack to find the main program, and picks thefilename out of the stack details.The code seems to be taken from a response to a StackOverflowquestion, and when I saw it I thought it looked like a case of someonegoing to more… -
cliff -- Command Line Interface Formulation Framework -- version 0.5
7 May 2012 | 6:49 amcliff is a framework for building command line programs. It usessetuptools entry points to provide subcommands, output formatters, andother extensions.What's New In This Release?Asking for help about a command by prefix lists all matchingcommands.Add formatters for HTML, JSON, and YAML.DocumentationDocumentation for cliff is hosted on readthedocs.orgInstallationUse pip:$ pip install cliffSee the installation guide for more details. -
cliff -- Command Line Interface Formulation Framework -- version 0.4
28 Apr 2012 | 6:44 pmcliff is a framework for building command line programs. It usessetuptools entry points to provide subcommands, output formatters, andother extensions.What's New In This Release?Add shell formatter for single objects.Add interactive mode.Expand documentation.DocumentationDocumentation for cliff is hosted on readthedocs.orgInstallationUse pip:$ pip install cliffSee the installation guide for more details.
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The Third Bit
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Why We Built It
14 May 2012 | 1:26 pmIf you want to know why we created The Architecture of Open Source Applications (now in two volumes), you need look no further than the descriptions of other books about software architecture on Amazon. Here’s part of the blurb of one that appeared last year: Specifically, the book shows you What software architecture is about and why your role is vitally important to successful project delivery How to determine who is interested in your architecture (your stakeholders), understand what is important to them (their concerns), and design an architecture that reflects and balances their… -
Teach Teachers What They Use, Teach Kids Where They Are
11 May 2012 | 3:11 pmGary Stager isn’t the first person to point out that we’ve been dumbing down computing education for the last 30 years—that we’ve gone from teaching kids how to program to teaching them how to use Excel to teaching them how to use iPads. (My five-year-old didn’t need to be taught…) What people mostly aren’t asking is why this has happened, but I have a theory. I think teachers are teaching the computing that they use themselves, because that’s the most economical thing for them to do: they use Word to make hand-outs, and Excel to manage… -
Tips for Teachers
9 May 2012 | 7:21 am -
Architecture of Open Source Applications: Volume 2
8 May 2012 | 12:50 pmWe are very pleased to announce that The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Volume 2 is now available from Lulu. A PDF version will go on sale in the next few days, and e-book will become available as soon as we can produce it. Many thanks to everyone who contributed, and to the indefatigable Amy Brown for pulling it all together. As always, all royalties will go directly to Amnesty International, so if you buy a copy, you’ll be helping to make the world a better place. -
Slide Drive
25 Apr 2012 | 1:44 pmI’m pleased to announce that Jeremy Banks has been accepted by Google Summer of Code 2012 to work on Slide Drive, a web-native presentation tool. You can follow Jeremy’s progress on his blog.
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Agile Testing
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The correct way of using DynamoDB BatchWriteItem with boto
14 May 2012 | 7:20 pmIn my previous post I wrote about the advantages of using the BatchWriteItem functionality in DynamoDB. As it turns out, I was overly optimistic when I wrote my initial code: I only called the batch_write_item method of the layer2 module in boto once.The problem with this approach is that many of the batched inserts can fail, and in practice this happens quite frequently, probably because of transient network errors. The correct approach is to inspect the response object returned by batch_write_item -- here is an example of such an object:{'Responses': {'mytable': {'ConsumedCapacityUnits':… -
Using DynamoDB BatchWriteItem with boto
25 Apr 2012 | 1:54 pmThis is just a quick note about the advantage of using DynamoDB's newly introduced BatchWriteItem functionality, which allows you to write multiple items at the same time to a table, with the write operation parallelized behind the scenes by DynamoDB. Currently there is a limit of 25 items that can be batch-written or batch-deleted to/from a DynamoDB table.I was glad to see that the boto library already supports this new feature -- the fact that Mitch Garnaat is now an employee of Amazon probably helps too ;-) You do have to git pull the latest boto code from GitHub, since BatchWriteItem is… -
Initial experiences with Amazon DynamoDB
12 Apr 2012 | 4:16 pmI've been experimenting a bit with Amazon DynamoDB -- the "fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability" according to Amazon -- in order to see how easy to use it is, and what kind of performance you can get out of it. My initial impressions are favorable, with some caveats.Defining tablesTo get started with DynamoDB, you can use the AWS Console web interface. You need to define a table by giving it a name. Then you need to define a hash key, which enables DynamoDB to build an unordered hash index for partitioning and… -
Dynamic DNS updates with nsupdate and BIND 9
26 Mar 2012 | 3:33 pmI first saw nsupdate mentioned on the devops-toolchain mailing list as a tool for dynamically updating DNS zone files from the command line. Since this definitely beats manual editing of zone files, I'd thought I'd give it a try. My setup is BIND 9 on Ubuntu 10.04. I won't go into the details of setting up BIND 9 on Ubuntu -- see a good article about this here.It took me a while to get nsupdate to work. There are lots of resources out there, but as usual it's hard to separate the grain from the chaff. When everything was said and done, the solution was relatively simple. Here it is.Generate… -
PostgreSQL dump/restore and client_encoding
8 Mar 2012 | 7:51 pmI started to look into EnterpriseDB recently. Pretty pleased with it so far. At first I launched the beta version of their Postgres Plus Cloud Database product, but since this version is in the process of being decomissioned, I've had to transfer the database I had already created to a newly created cluster in their DBaaS model -- which basically means that the cluster manager is maintained by them, and the cluster member servers (1 master + N replicas) are part of your EC2 footprint.In any case, I did a pg_dump of the database from the initial master, then I tried to load the dump via psql…
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Ned Batchelder's blog
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Coverage.py v3.5.2
4 May 2012 | 8:36 amSince posting v3.5.2 beta 1 last Sunday, no one has said anything about it, so it must be perfect. The exact same code is now Coverage.py v3.5.2. This release of the foremost code coverage tool for Python includes a number of small fixes. The full details, including links to the tickets that were closed, are in the coverage.py change history.May all your lines and branches be covered! -
Coverage.py v3.5.2b1
29 Apr 2012 | 3:50 pmI just posted Coverage.py v3.5.2 beta 1. This release of the foremost code coverage tool for Python includes a number of small fixes: The HTML report has been slightly tweaked. You can now provide custom CSS for the HTML report if you'd like to tweak it further. Source files with encodings declared at the top are properly handled in the HTML report in Python 2. They had always been handled properly in Python 3. Better error handling when a supposed Python file can't be parsed. Better handling of exit status for the coverage command. Better installation in PyPy. The full details, including… -
Two problems
26 Apr 2012 | 6:41 amOnce upon a time, Jamie Zawinski said,Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.BTW: Jeffrey Friedl dug into the history and found that someone said it about awk before jwz said it about regular expressions!I seem to have developed a fascination for new variants of this joke, especially where the concept being referenced is important to the structure of the joke. For example, last June I said,Some people, when faced with a problem, think, "I know, I'll use binary." Now they have 10 problems.The other day I… -
Python iteration presentation
25 Apr 2012 | 8:28 amLast night I did a half-hour presentation about Python Iteration, starting with the basics, and touching on generators and why they are wonderful. This was part of a night of Foundational Topics at Boston Python.I'm not sure I got the level of the material right, I think there were people there who wanted to learn more, but this went too fast, or over their heads. It's hard because there's no way to make it right for everyone. -
Unicode tidbits
17 Apr 2012 | 7:31 amSince writing Pragmatic Unicode, or, How do I stop the pain?, I've collected a handful of Unicode-related stuff: Unicode 6.1 came out last year, Andrew West's summary of the latest additions is a view from the trenches. The commenters on his blog are asking about the status of their favorite exotic script, for example. A PDF showing what is proposed to be added in Unicode 6.2. It's very clear that semantic distinctions are not important for new characters! Also, we finally get U+1F5D1, TRASH CAN! Michael Kaplan has a series of blog posts, Every character has a story, exploring some of the…
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Phil Hassey » python
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Dynamite Jack: The second prototype, post-post mortem
23 Apr 2012 | 10:09 pmSo about six months after I created “Escape from Anathema Mines” during the Ludum Dare game jam, I created a game called Dynamite in the PyWeek game jam. Theme So the theme of PyWeek #1 was “Power” .. I worked with my brother-in-law Tim on this game, and we spent a fair amount of time working with the idea of using a “mind control power” over the characters in game. So I wrote some A* code to navigate things around and whatnot. This was boring. So I made it so you could blow something up. This was exciting. We decided “the power of dynamite” was… -
Dynamite Jack: Seven Years Ago Today – the prototype post-post-mortem
16 Apr 2012 | 10:03 pmThe development of Dynamite Jack was a really involved and long-term project. The project started almost exactly SEVEN YEARS AGO. I’m going to do a series of blog posts over the next few weeks leading up to the release of Dynamite Jack highlighting both the features of the game, the development of the current version of the game, and the unique history that went into the development of this game. Seven Years Ago Today … The first prototype I created of this game idea was during the 6th Ludum Dare game jam. This was only my second game jam I ever participated in, and it was an… -
tinypy2 musings
2 Jun 2011 | 9:53 pmSo, my mind has been poking away at the idea of making a “tinypy2″ that would be a bit less like python, so probably even more confusing for end users. Being only one sentence into my proposal here, and it already sounds bad. Well, here goes: -1 All objects would be assigned and passed by value instead of by reference =0 There would be a dictionary of global variables +1 The VM state could be saved to readable JSON +1 The VM state could be loaded from JSON =0 The VM would be written in C++ +1 The VM would have super-easy interoperability with C++ code -1 The VM would be on the… -
Google AI Challenge featuring Galcon!!
10 Sep 2010 | 1:31 amHey, it’s been a long time in coming, but finally we’re having a battle of programming prowess for Galcon!! Go rev up your coding skills and let’s do this! .. You might be interested to know that I ported the iPhone bot from C code over to python code for the contest. It is currently hanging out in the upper portion of the ranks as “galcon”. Making a bot is a ton of fun! And I’m highly pleased that they have a kit available for python devs So get started and have fun! -Phil -
Ludum Dare 2010 Keynote (starring Cuzco the Goat!!!)
23 Apr 2010 | 7:51 pmSee the Ludum Dare 2010 Keynote: Inviting all python game-devs! Even if this notice is coming too late, we’ve got a compo coming in August, December, and mini-compos every month! Just check out the website and join the fun! -Phil
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Entity Crisis
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Micro Optimisation in Unity3D
7 May 2012 | 12:29 amNGUI caches the transform component in a member variable called mTrans, to optimise speed of access. I think this is UGLY, so I decided to do some benchmarks to see if the ugliness is worth the performance increase.In short, the answer is NO.My tests showed that using a local variable is always as fast as using a member variable, and usually faster.Here are some typical results.Cached: Time elapsed: 00:00:04.8086550Uncached: Time elapsed: 00:00:09.1058490Local: Time elapsed: 00:00:04.7870590They show that caching and accessing the target reference is twice as fast as just using the reference. -
Rendering HTML
5 May 2012 | 5:11 amRendering HTML in Unity3D sure is... tricky. It would seem simple enough, but page/text layout algorithms can certainly be challenging, even when supporting only a subset of HTML. -
Final Human: WIP
23 Apr 2012 | 4:26 am -
How not to spend your kickstarter funds...
16 Apr 2012 | 7:30 pmHaving just read What the Hell These Game Developers Did with Your Kickstarter Money I have to respond to this particular point:In a recent update post on their Kickstarter, War Balloon breaks down where all that money's gone and it's a revealing portrait of what kinds of costs an indie dev team can face.The revealing costs in question?After that, we had $22,000 remaining. From there:Music - $6,000Attorneys, startup fees, CPA - $4000Poster art - $2000iPads - $1000PAX East - $3000TOTAL: $16,000Now, I don't RANT often (LOL), but here comes my squinty-eyed-viewpoint from 30000 feet...$6000 on… -
(Python + Unity3D) == MMO
11 Apr 2012 | 9:47 pmThis is something I've been helping build for quite some time now, and it is almost done.It is an educational MMOG. It is powered by Python out the back, and Unity3D at the front. The Python server(s) are running Python 2.7, with Greenlets :-) and ZeroMQ for IPC. We had to design our own ORM, because SQLAlchemy (our first choice) didn't play well with the asynchronous Psycopg2 extension. The backend is loosely based on an Entity Component architecture, which is quite elegant and a joy to work with. It has been so easy to modify and extend, that I think I'll be using this architecture for most…
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For Some Value of "Magic"
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Swan Song
6 May 2012 | 2:51 amWell, I don't really know where to begin. Finally, and somewhat unexpectedly, there is an end to the tunnel entitled “Chairman of the Python Software Foundation.” When I stood for election to the board this year my manifesto included a declaration that by the same time next year I would no longer be chairman. The board at my request asked for nominations for a Vice Chairman to prepare to take over from me at a planned point in the future. As the inauguration of the new board coincides with the unfortunate necessity of consulting orthopedic surgeons I am availing myself of the… -
Links for 2012-05-05 [del.icio.us]
6 May 2012 | 2:00 amDelicious.com - Discover Yourself! You know, it would be really nice if bit.ly and delicious were better friends. -
To My Followers
6 Mar 2012 | 9:26 pmWow. Didn't even know I had any. Sorry about that. Been busy. Should get a few posts out during PyCon. -
Help Wanted
3 Jan 2012 | 7:44 amIf you are here because you think this post might be advertising a job, please accept my apologies. If, on the other hand, you are looking for work, this might be the very place for you. If you don’t see the difference between “a job” and “work” then there might be something to learn here. “Hold hard,” I hear you say (I have a very vivid and somewhat eighteenth-century imagination). “Surely that is a contradiction in terms?” (My New Year’s resolution to be less pedantic stops me from pointing out that you have ended a non-interrogative sentence with a question… -
Nothing Stranger Than This?
16 Dec 2011 | 12:02 amI’ve just been reading Stack Overflow’s Strangest Language Feature thread, where I discover that (at the time of writing) the highest-voted Python complaint is actually about Java, but the complainant claims that JavaScript and Python are the same. So after I've got this off my chest I'll perhaps go back and look for the top complaint specifically about Python. In Java the complained-of code looks like this: try { return true; } finally { return false; } This naturally translates into…
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Will's blog
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Letting it run out
10 May 2012 | 1:05 pmA couple of years ago I applied and was granted membership into the GNOME Foundation. At the time, I was helping out with GNOME Journal and running GNOME Miro Community. Since then, GNOME Miro Community fizzled out and stopped because it didn't find a compelling reason to exist (wasn't interesting for marketing, didn't do a good job of indexing conference video, ...). GNOME Journal fizzled too and I stopped working on it. Also, in September, I left PCF where I was working on Miro which uses a lot of GNOME technologies. Given that, I decided not to renew my membership. I'm a little bummed, but… -
webdev workweek thoughts
2 May 2012 | 9:57 amI'm at the webdev work week in Santa Cruz, CA, USA this week. It's great to meet people I've been talking to for the last 6 months. It's also kind of nice to take a break from the SUMO sprints. I've been spending the time lifting my head and seeing what's been happening while I wasn't paying attention. List of three things on my mind: I wish I had more time. There are so many people doing exciting things that I'd love to work on, too, but I just don't have enough time. It's hard to suppress the, "Wow---that looks awesome! I'll help you on that project!" reflex. I just don't have… -
from identi.ca
19 Apr 2012 | 11:39 pm"it's dark. the only light available is coming from my monitor. time to switch to white-background themes." [ alternate | ostatus:conversation | self | edit ] [Comments] -
from identi.ca
19 Apr 2012 | 1:01 am"@greg thanks! it's nice to have a nice interface for it." [ alternate | related | ostatus:conversation | ostatus:attention | mentioned | self | edit ] [Comments] -
from identi.ca
19 Apr 2012 | 12:34 am"fiddling with hotot after taking a long hiatus from micro-blogging." [ alternate | ostatus:conversation | self | edit ] [Comments]
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alcides python
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Reading the Source
18 Apr 2012 | 7:45 amThere has some buzz about Reading the source code on the interwebz lately. As someone who teaches Computer Science, I find that most students finish their degrees without having read a single line of code that was not written by themselves, group partner or professor. And given the huge amount of good-quality open source code on the internet this is a very disappointed fact. In fact, when they find an error on a 3rd party software (being a dependency, middleware or just a library) they simply block and cannot advance. For instance, when debugging a stack-trace in a Java project, once the…
