Richard Jones' Log

PyWeek 6 is all done. The entries are in and rated. It's been another great PyWeek with continued growth in participation and games produced at the end. So many games that I'm considering extending the two weeks for judging!

Greg Ewing has proposed that there be an additional Pyggy Awards challenge which encourages developers to take games produced during the latest PyWeek and improve on them over three months. At the end we run a new round of awards.

python -m bruce presentation.rst

The 6th Python Game Programming Challenge starts this weekend. Theme voting is underway and there's still plenty of time to sign up. Come along and join in the fun!

I'm unwinding from PyCon in my cousin's apartment in Pittsburgh. Mostly this involves catching up with Nat, trying to get some sleep (unsuccessfully - I seem to have some sort of delayed-jetlag insomnia), catch up on email (partially successfully) and dump a bunch of photos from the camera. Photos have been updated and I now have a new title image on my blog page (thanks Toby for the old one :). I've compiled all the panoramas that were worth it and I think there's some nice ones in there. I got some nice photos of Evelyn and the PyAr guys from our downtown touristing (somehow Gui managed to dodge the camera... will have to wait to see Lucio's photos).

It's snowing outside.

Can't wait to be home.

The conference itself met and exceeded expectations. I saw some enlightening talks had some great conversations with some bright people. As already mentioned pyglet was a hit. Bruce was too, which was fun. I think I may have a contributor in Brian Dorsey, who was really nice and had some ideas and made the "python code" (in a presentation page write/edit a python program and hit F4 to execute it) Bruce page work.

Well, the pyglet talk's done. The pic above is a little panorama I took about 10 minutes before the presentation (a nice man turned off the incredibly bright spotlight down the other end of the room). The room filled up a lot more as we got closer to the start time with people sitting in the aisles.

The talk went really well, with only one Bruce problem -- I couldn't see the projection screen from the podium. I intend to code up a facility to show the contents of the projection screen on the second screen (ie. laptop) alongside the notes but I just didn't have time. This combined with a very cheap mouse that didn't always click when it was supposed to meant sometimes I was talking to the wrong slide content. Oh well. It was well-received.

Oh, and I couldn't show off the t-shirt I had specially printed and organised delivery to Phil Hassey so I'd have it for the presentation. I was wearing a pullover because it was so damned cold in the presentation room :(

And then there was the BoF afterwards during which I just answered more questions for about an hour.

pyglet's got a considerable buzz here :)

(I have another panorama on flickr that I took during Guido's plenary)

Update: I've uploaded the HTML presentation notes.

I'm at PyCon. It's been a pretty busy time so far - have seen a bunch of great talks, have talked to a bunch of great people and have been almost totally let down by technology. My EEE now refuses to charge up, so I'm really glad I brought the work laptop too. Though it's having problems - I can't get onto the wireless network using it, so I've been running in Vista. Fortunately pyglet (and hence Bruce) runs just fine in Vista, so my presentation is going ahead as planned. My work phone isn't working for some reason.

It's good to be here though :)

ps. if you're at PyCon and care, there's going to be a pyglet BOF at 2:45 today, right after the presentation. See the board downstairs.

Bruce project hosting has moved to Google Code.

Thanks for the free lunch, WebFaction :)

I've just put up beta 2 of Bruce the Presentation Tool. I'm not really sticking with the "alpha"/"beta" thing very well as I've added some more features and changed a couple of small things ;) There's some useful stuff in there though like scaling of fonts for the actual fullscreen viewport, fixing up the config/flags confusion, getting plugins working and a bunch of other stuff. See the PyPI page for more info.

I got my EEE PC back from Asus today. The problem with the trackpad / buttons went away which is both a good thing (I can pack it for PyCon) and a bad thing (no-one actually did anything to make it go away).

Bruce runs just fine on the EEE :) The scaling I mention above is really handy to accommodate the EEE's 800x480 screen (Bruce's default res is 1024x768).

The RSS auto generation was dropped during some mad editing trying to make diary entry creation work. It's fixed again, and may make up a little for the terrible job I've done promoting PyWeek 6.

I've released Bruce 2.0 beta 1, yay.

On the project site you can see some screenshots and sample presentation source that was used to generate the screenshots. One of the goals of Bruce is to make it really easy to knock up a quick presentation in a plain-text format. The most basic presentation consists of:

--- text
=This is a title
This is a new line

--- text
=Another page, another title
.You can have bullet points
.If you must
..Even nested ones
...And nestedier ones
.I call this BrucePoint

--- video foot_stomp.mpg

--- py
    sound=spanish_inquisition.ogg
# generates an interactive Python session (with intro sound)

--- image kitten.jpg
# displays a kitten (and this is a comment)

Note that the above BrucePoint style stuff relies on some post-beta1 changes only in SVN.

Because it's using pyglet it's got some really nice features I've already implemented like the video and audio stuff. Also the screen control is nice too -- have it display the presentation on one screen (projector) and in the other screen (laptop) have the presentation source being displayed (along with your notes embedded in the source). It can display pages of HTML (though it's a little slow), and will be able to display pages of ReStructuredText soon. Hell, if you're on a Mac it can also display PDFs :)

It also generates some nice HTML running notes (which include the "#" comments for reference) which print up quite nicely.

I'm still working on it, and there's some bugs but nothing show-stopping. Still to do transitions, but they're not high on the priority list.

Bruce is being updated for another reason - it's been confirmed that I'll be giving the pyglet presentation at PyCon in Alex's place.

I've spent the last week or so re-writing Bruce, the Presentation Tool using the new features in pyglet 1.1 and it's been quite a fun and easy experience compared to the old Bruce. It also proved to be a good test case for some of the new features. The new Bruce (which will be released any moment now - I just have some tweaks to make in the Python interpreter) has more features, and is easier to use than the old Bruce. I believe it's also more extensible too.

pyglet 1.1 alpha 1 adds more features than any previous release, including fast graphics routines, formatted text layout, animated GIF support, resource loading, and even some bug fixes. If you're not working in a production environment and can afford some instability, go straight to the download server to grab a source or egg release, and start reading up on all the new features.

This is a pretty exciting release for Alex and myself as it represents the beginning of the added value we wanted to see in pyglet beyond the basic OpenGL + other stuff that appeared in pyglet 1.0 (even though pyglet 1.0 "basic other stuff" like video playback was pretty darned cool.)

ohloh tracks open-source projects and amongst other things has a neat set of tools that allow you to compare languages, projects, etc.

You can look at the relative number of commits to projects for Python, Perl, Ruby and PHP with C/C++ and Java or just just Python, Perl, Ruby and PHP. Python's doing pretty well with a popularity about the same as PHP. Also quite interesting are the plots of contributors and active projects (Java and C/C++ in decline). Then there's the huge dive in C/C++ commits in the last 6 months as seen in the plot of the number of commits per language.

Interestingly C# (about the same popularity as Perl or Ruby) hasn't made nearly the same splash in open-source as Java did.

Via the Python language statistics page you can also find out that Fred Drake is apparently the most experienced contributor of Python code. I'm not sure how they calculate that one since I'm listed as the 7th most experienced Python contributor but there's got to be others with more - Guido for example ;). The Recently Active Contributors list is also interesting to find out about active Python-based projects.

I've really enjoyed having my EEE PC during my commute. I've even gotten quite used to having it just balanced on one leg while hacking away on some random pyglet project or other (I think I have about 4 in play ;).

Unfortunately, the trackpad has just died. Actually, it's the trackpad and buttons. Something in the innards is telling the system that whatever button I press (whether the rocker button or a single tap on the trackpad) is held down. Once when I power-cycled the machine the trackpad didn't respond at all. I've tried resetting the software to no avail.

I'll be taking it in to the shop for a warranty claim tomorrow. I'm really hoping they'll just give me a replacement - otherwise I'll be lugging a full-size laptop around PyCon (amongst the 755-and-growing other registrants OMFG). Boo.

PyWeek number 6 is coming...

Alex and I gave some presentations at the gaming miniconf at linux.conf.au yesterday.

The first bit was a pyglet walkthrough / tutorial sort of thing - I spoke and Alex typed and after 40 minutes we'd implemented a simple 2d shoot-em-up game. There'll be more about that on the pyglet website later, but the basic files are there now (well, except for the actual game source code but it should appear in the next 24 hours).

Alex then gave a 20-minute talk about pyglet's history and immediate future development. And also demoed some cool games / apps that have been written already. I gave a 15-minute spiel about PyWeek. More on that in another post :)

All up it was an interesting day and I think our presentations went pretty well, even if I was a little lax in preparing the PyWeek presentation and forgot some stuff.

In other news, I'm booked for PyCon 2008. Alex will hopefully be coming along too, but that's dependent on funding. I need to book flights once I've sorted one other detail out. I will be there for the conference and sprints. I'm hoping to see a little of Chicago too...

Rachel and I saw Cloverfield on Friday. I liked it (I'm not alone) but Rachel really didn't like it (she's not alone either).

We also watched the first two episodes of the new Terminator TV show. Before seeing it I was dubious about the premise (oh, it's another teen high-school drama but with Terminators ... wow) but I'm less dubious now that I've seen it. I am very, very frustrated with the sloppy writing though. They took great pains to explain the Terminator universe (the war, Cyberdyne, how time travel doesn't let machines or even clothes through) and then bam, at the start of the second episode they break one of the fundamental rules of time travel that they'd just explained to us.

Spoiler: the bad terminator's head is sent through time with the Connors with no living flesh covering. The Connors (and terminator pal Cameron) arrive all nekkid and sans "not quite nuclear" gun (and also healed up of serious wounds!?) but so does the bad terminator's head -- apparently intact! And why the hell was the terminator's body in a scrapyard?? After all that fuss about the arm in the second movie?

The first stable/production version of pyglet has been released.

Find it at pyglet.org.

pyglet provides an object-oriented programming interface for developing games and other visually-rich applications for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Some of the features of pyglet are:

• No external dependencies or installation requirements. For most application and game requirements, pyglet needs nothing else besides Python, simplifying distribution and installation.
• Take advantage of multiple windows and multi-monitor desktops. pyglet allows you to use as many windows as you need, and is fully aware of multi-monitor setups for use with fullscreen games.
• Load images, sound, music and video in almost any format. pyglet can optionally use AVbin to play back audio formats such as MP3, OGG/Vorbis and WMA, and video formats such as DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, WMV and Xvid.

pyglet is provided under the BSD open-source license, allowing you to use it for both commercial and other open-source projects with very little restriction.

... but if you keep accusing me of being being a virus or spyware when I do searches I'm gonna use another search engine!

Also, my home Optus broadband connection is not in Germany! I should not need to be a web developer to figure how to convince you I'm not in Germany either! I still haven't figured how to convice you I'm in Australia, but the US will do for now. I miss localised searches though.