making apps, making webs.

It's been really interesting to see VMs over the last couple of years. Now there are emulators, and virtualisers which are capable of running x86 really quickly. The processors themselves don't run x86 natively anymore, it's a VM. Now Apple are using x86, and x86 is getting more common in the embedded world too. So now, rather than creating a VM like python does it seems to make sense to use the standard VM, and that is x86. Of course x86 is really complex, and still fairly slow to emulate on slow hardware. So using a simpler VM still has its advantages. However writing directly to the most common VM has its advantages too. You can make software which is 400 bytes big which can do almost the same as a 8000 byte program. That's a 10x saving in program size. The same program will run in 12KiB of memory, instead of 1.7MiB of memory. That's a 141x memory usage saving. Because the code size, and memory size is so much smaller you can get a lot more done with the s

http://www.pyweek.org/3/ The theme voting has begun. Here are the themes for the week long python game jam. * Pick a card, any card * Watch me pull a rabbit out from this hat * Sawn in half * Spoon bending * The Disappearing Act A very short list of themes to choose from this time. Thanks to Richard for organising pyweek again! If you have some spare time coming up, and want to finish a game then you should enter pyweek . If you don't have much time, find a team and join that. Let's hope the server stays up mostly :) These competitions all ways result in a server going down. Lots of users, and wide spread attention amongst smart, young and demanding hacker types means it gets challenges lots of other websites do not get. Strain on the software, and on the hardware are two of the causes. Otherwise it is caused by a simple cracking in to the machine to take it down.

not a bit of good food for got home gut jill had her kill Oh, how I love bad poetry. I just had to share. You need to type it to appreciate how bad it is.

I replied to a blog post by Jason Huggins on his blog asking for a web frame work evaluation check list. I listed a number of common security issues, and finished my post with: "I can not see any python web frameworks that do not have a history of security problems. I also can not see one which was designed from the beginning with security in mind." Then James Bennett (a Django contributor) asked about problems with Django specifically. Saying 'if there’s some long bounding history of security flaws in Django, I sure haven’t seen it'. http://www.jrandolph.com/blog/?p=45 Unfortunately my reply seems to be caught up in the moderators queue, so I guess I'll have to put my answer below. A couple of posts after mine are there, so I am not sure why my post was not approved to be posted. ps. since my post on the 11th of August I have reported four security issues to the django project. Not one has even been replied to. Not even with a simple response like 'I go

The third pyweek competition is starting in September. You can have group entries, or go solo. It is a competition of sorts, but it is all just for fun really. You have a week to work on your game. Most people work on it in their spare time. Other people take a week off to do it. http://www.pyweek.org/3/