making apps, making webs.

Stick a fork in it, it's baked... nice and toasty. Pygame 1.8.1 is now available for download . Many bug fixes and improvements, including: BLEND_RGBA_* blitters and blenders to go with the BLEND_RGB_* blend modes. documentation updates (mainly for new sprite classes released in 1.8.0) sound fixes, and streaming some music from file like objects image saving fixes greatly expanded tests Pixelarray, and surfarray updates and fixes. Enhanced Color class, reimplemented in C for speed. New Windows and Mac binary installers. See the WHATSNEW for a full list of changes. Many thanks to Marcus, Lenard, Brian, Nicholas, Charlie Nolan, Nirav Patel, Forrest Voight, Charlie Nolan, Frankie Robertson, John Krukoff, Lorenz Quack, Nick Irvine, Zhang Fan and everyone else who helped out with this release.

Ludumdare 48H is coming - Aug 8 - Aug 10. Ludum Dare(ld48) is a regular community driven game development competition. The goal is, given a theme and 48 hours, to develop a game from scratch . Ludum Dare aims to encourage game design experimentation, and provide a platform to develop and practice rapid game prototyping. Here’s the time-horizon: - July 19 - July 25: You may submit themes to the wiki - July 26 - Aug 2: Themes will be edited for awesomeness by the #ludumdare regulars - Aug 3 - Aug 8: Various rounds of voting. Check back daily so you don’t miss any! - Aug 8 - Aug 10: Ludum Dare #12 !!! (Starting at 8pm PST) www.ludumdare.com - the super awesome website, refresh hourly irc://irc.afternet.org/ludumdare #ludumdare - the compo IRC channel, waste your time here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ - the compo blog, be sure to sign up here http://www.ludumdare.com/wiki/ - the compo wiki, submit themes & read rules here http://www.ludumdare.com/planet/ - the compo planet, ...

Here's a small example of how to use cherrypy and zodb together. It just adds what ever you pass into the /put url as arguments into the db. easy_install ZODB3 easy_install cherrypy You can see the website here, once you run the script: http://localhost:8080/ import cherrypy import cgi from ZODB import FileStorage, DB import transaction class MyZODB(object): def __init__(self, path): self.storage = FileStorage.FileStorage(path) self.db = DB(self.storage) self.connection = self.db.open() self.dbroot = self.connection.root() def close(self): self.connection.close() self.db.close() self.storage.close() def ehtml(s): return cgi.escape(s) class HelloWorld(object): def index(self): # list everything passed, and allow adding more. r = "" for k,v in dbroot.items(): r += "k:%s: v:%s:<br>" % (ehtml(k), ehtml(v)) r += "<form action='put' method='post'>...

Finally wordpress has revisions on posts. Which makes it a lot easier to share writing between people -- since you can save your copy, and the other person can see what you changed. Also you can revert to previous revisions of posts you've made. Very nice. Theme preview, so you can try out themes before others. But most importantly they have made images easier to use. 2.5 was seriously 'special' when it came to uploading images. A lot of people couldn't upload images in 2.5 because of they way the interface was not-designed. It also has partial support for google gears (to serve some parts from a local cache). Which apparently speeds up loading the admin section. Full details of wordpress 2.6 release . ps. Also pygame 1.8.1 release candidate 2 was released, with 1.8.1 release planned for this weekend.

So I was spinning some webs in late 1884, like many others in this time of industry. Everyone is doing it these days(spinning webs). With the lantern hanging over my carbon fibre 100% macrobiotic desk -- the soft flickering light cast a long shadow through my webs. I stared into the webs, and something struck me!! It was a blow to my head brain. Most people in 1884 have made the wrong abstraction for HTTP At some point most web code decided to use a dictionary for GET and POST variables. Like a leaky boat, a leaky abstraction is bareable, but also annoying. I hate leaky boats so mostly get around on horse back or by horse and carriage. I also enjoy a brisk walk through the country side in the morning, and I love to scuttle through dark alleyways at night in the exciting colourful parts of the townships slums. [Editors note*1: my friend wants me to try out one of his chain powered Pull Bicycles. I told him he is crazy and that his Pull bicycles will never catch on. Saying that ...

Hacker artists in Australia looking for arts grants? http://artsgrantsfinder.com/ is a fresh site to find grants... if you're in Australia.

See what's new for the release candidate for what's new in pygame 1.8.1. It's what will most likely be pygame-1.8.1release. Mostly it will be a bug fix and polish release, but there's a few new goodies that were sneaked in. I think we'll release 1.8.1 next week, unless there's any fixes that need to go in. See the recent mailing list post for download links, or subversion/trunk if you would like to test it out. Thanks to Marcus, Lenard, Brian, Nicholas, Charlie Nolan, Frankie Robertson, John Krukoff, Lorenz Quack, Nick Irvine, and everyone else who helped out with this release. Next up for pygame 1.9.0 will be a lot of changes... a camera module with computer vision algorithms, extensive tests, new drawing code, a physics module, a new movie module, an improved mac osx port amongst other things.

It seems google is claiming their protocol buffers are faster than xml... without any proof. Consider AsmXml , which can process xml at over 200MB/s on old machines. The protocol buffers from google also generate wrappers for different languages, and other nice things. But for loading structures into and out of memory, xml can be very fast. Before claiming things like that, I think proof in the form of benchmarks are needed. I don't doubt they thought that xml was slower, since many implementations are slower. Maybe xml is slower, but there is no proof yet. Also I'm sure the other nice features of protocol buffers make them perfectly suited for their task. Url encoding could have been used nicely too.