making apps, making webs.

Pyweek , finished recently, and was a real blast... as usual. Congrats to everyone who took part, pyweek was really fun! I look forward to playing everyones games (I've only got through around ten so far). 'Eye stabs' was our team name. We didn't post a final entry. Our game isn't really at the stage where we'd like it to be... There's still a number of core features required before it's a 'game'. At the moment, it's kind of a fun intro, and a demo of what the game could be. For me, recently these competitions have been about experimenting, rather than finishing a game. Getting a buzz off everyone else's energy as they create something in a small amount of time. These competitions are also really good for 'finishing' a game... since they have a finish built in. When the week has ended it's finished. So we'll make a release some time in the next few weeks. Because we want to show everyone... but not before the basic ele...

We are moving to including the tests with an installed python package... pygame. >>> import pygame >>> pygame.test.run() Why? Why include tests in pygame? Rather than only with the build process? More people will run the tests. people can run the tests to see if everything works in their own programs. Can run tests on a persons computer to see if everything in pygame+ your program is working. Which driver/function combination works, or works fastest? Run tests and find out. Testing a py2exe/pyapp generated binary is much easier. Reuse of our testing enhancements for their own tests. Reporting bugs would be easier. Since everyone could run unittests, since they will be installed everywhere pygame is installed. Result submission of unittests easy. This would result in a much larger base of computers running the unittests and submitting problems. This would be opt in of course. Make the testing stuff more a library, than a framework. Allow people submit unitt...

The Lonesome West is a play running from September 3rd - September 21st in Melbourne Australia. The Connor brothers fighting. "The Connor brothers live modest lives, gleaning joy from simple pleasures: drinking, joking with the foulmouthed Girleen, tormenting Father Welsh, and fighting with each other…constantly and brutally. When, in an attempt to salvage their relationship they confess all to each other, the results are explosive." This play has a lot of comedy and violence in it. One of the interesting technical aspects of the Tiny Dynamite production of it, has been coming up with ways to smash dozens of religious figurines, and blowing up an oven every show. Foul mouthed Girleen.

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.