making apps, making webs.

Thanks to @ntoll I had a chance to play around with the raspberrypi alpha board at the pyconuk conference (which was a great little community conference with a big heart). That is it on the pink bubble wrap.  It's hooked up to a monitor via the digital HDMI video port, with a keyboard and mouse connected up via USB. We only had a few hours to play around with it, but managed to try a few things out.  Whilst we were there playing around with it, a whole bunch of people popped there heads in to have a look and ask questions.  Lots of enthusiasm for the project, and also the machine, but also a bit of cautiousness about the project. In another room, there was a talk going on about how the BBC was going to help bring a programming education project into the schools of the UK again - like they did with the bbc micro.  Tweets started to fly around on the tweet projection screen about it, but then at the end of the talk we found out it was a hoax.  Haha....

Yesterday, I made the first release of shitsound. jquery.shitsound.js is a shit sound player for web browsers. Listen (demo): http://rene.f0o.com/~rene/shitsound Source code: https://www.bitbucket.org/illume/shitsound Used like this: $.snd.init({}, function () { // we are ready to play sounds! Brilliant. $.snd.play('hello'); }); shitsound only does a few things with sound:: play, stop, stopAll jquery.awesound.js might do: changing volume, pitch, playing with a different tempo, playing in stereo, 3d sound, etc. jquery.shitsound can not do any of this fancy stuff. It can just play sounds, and stop playing them. shitsound detects which implementation to use at init time. html5, using the html5 audio tag. embed, for using the embed tag. soundmanager1, for old flash 7. soundmanager2, for modern flash (8,9,10+). empty, pretend implementation that does nothing. It currently requires jquery, since I use jquery. However it could quite ...

There is going to be a pygame sprint at this years pyconuk . We're going to tackle whatever the participants who turn up want to hack on. That might be porting to a new platform like the $25 rasberrypi computer(there's going to be a couple at pyconuk), or improving the pygame android support. Or it might be polishing off one of the new modules like the new freetype font module, or perhaps implementing a brand new module.  Or maybe it's jazzing up the documentation, or working on a new import pygame.examples. I'm getting there on Friday, so I hope to do some hacking then, and we might be able to get some sprint space for the Friday(conference propper starts Saturday, but some people are getting there early) - otherwise it will have to be in a cafe or something. Also going on during the conference is the python core sprint and CKAN sprint.  It should be fun to join in on those sprints too.  Of course there will be talks, work shops, an unconference room,...

Let's put the Research into R&D. I guess it should be called Shit Research to go along with the name of this series (p1) of articles (p2) I started one year ago. It takes a lot of time to read over hundreds of thousands of lines of undocumented C++ and java code, so part three took much longer than expected. Let's explore existing JavaScript implementations. In this part we are going to take a small digression to look over other JavaScript implementations. I'll provide a short description of how each JavaScript implementation is made. We can use the Architectural knowledge from each implementation to inspire our own implementation. Another benefit of researching each implementation is that we can find all the different tools they use. For example different test suites. Make sure to read the URL's for each implementation to find out more information about each one. There is a list of ECMAScript implementations at wikipedia . We will not c...

As part of the pygame move to bitbucket, we are converting a bug database stored in bugzilla. Work is progressing on the issues migration: https://bitbucket.org/illume/bugzilla_bitbucket Bugzilla is more comprehensive compared to bitbucket. So not all things can be migrated from the bugzilla bugs to the bitbucket issues. Also, the bitbucket API is limited in what it can do. You can't add user comments or add attachments. To get around the attachments part, I made the migration script create a directory of attachments, and then link to them in the bug text. Then I've extracted the attachments from bugzilla and put them online. To hack around the lack of comment adding in the bitbucket API, I'm just combining all of the comments into the content text. Other features bitbucket issues API does not have are priorities, and platforms. The issues features _does_ support priorities, but it doesn't look like the API is set up yet. You can't add pl...

I'm starting to move most of my projects off launchpad onto bitbucket. launchpad just hasn't gone in the direction that is useful for me, or my projects. It still has some nice features, such as packaging farms (PPAs) and of course bzr integration. However, github and bitbucket have just been moving more towards making it easy for developers compared to launchpad which is more geared towards for distributors who work with an upstream. Last year I hoped launchpad would improve after it went open source, and it has improved. Just not really in the direction useful for my projects. Many people these days are able to use hg, or git... but still very many people have never even heard of bzr. I feel bzr+launchpad was holding one project back a little from gaining collaborators because of this. By that logic, I should be using svn for it... but I don't want to do that :) The documentation to convert repositories to mecurial is on the hg wiki. The conversion seems to mostly...

A couple of months ago I made a python port of the WebGL shadertoy . The shadertoy website is written in JavaScript and the opengl shading language. Here is the python port: http://rene.f0o.com/~rene/stuff/shadertoy.py Maybe it'll be useful for someone learning shading languages through python. Or not. It's a fun demo anyway. Press the 'Anykey' to change between shader. You'll find the 'Anykey' on your keyboard. If the Anykey you press is Escape, then the program will 'quit'. Requires 1 tsp of pygame, and a cup of pyopengl.