Author archives: Mike

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Galcon Is Fun (Advertising the crack cocaine of games...)


Needed to unwind last night. Went to the Galcon tournament. We (well, I) had a lot of trouble with the networking setup, but it was extremely fun when it worked. I wound up with network timeouts on quite a few games, I'd have to exit, restart and jump back in, finding nothing left of my ...

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Booth Work (Long day's chatting into night...)


Spent the whole day in the OLPC booth today, didn't wind up seeing any talks at all (including the keynotes, though luckily that meant that I didn't wind up with a blood-pressure issue over the whole Py3K mess :) ).

After that needed some decompression. Had a pleasant dinner with Tony and Val. Took a ...

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Tutorial Is Finished (In the sense of presented, it probably needs love from you the reader...)


The tutorial went reasonably well, but had a rather hard time with the lack of networking (writing networked code sans network isn't very practical). We ran out of time due to the delays on getting everyone set up, so we didn't get to talk about Telepathy or what goes on in the packaging process much. ...

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Need Patch and Pygame for Tutorial (Xubuntu LiveCD doesn't have them...)


Will need to have users do an "apt-get install pygame patch" to be able to run on a LiveCD. Similarly on an XO you'll need to su and then "yum install patch". Got Productive's packing script updated so that you can play on an XO from a download.

OLPC meetup was exactly what I needed ...

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Centre of Attention Moving (PyCon in the focus...)


Have been doing a lot of PyCon preparations lately (mostly on the tutorial), working around the paying stuff. But some time this morning I switched to "PyCon Mode", with the work at home falling into secondary position. Got the Airline ticket printed, got the hotel information updated for my roomie, copied out the Hotel information ...

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State of the Games (Tutorial research...)


Have been working on the introductory presentation for the Tutorial most of the weekend. Decided against a "normal" presentation; after all, everyone there has already committed enough to pay for the tutorial, they are going to be more interested in the current project status, how the philosophical approach has emerged in practical code, and what ...

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Speed up PySNMP for Free? (Upgrade to Python 2.6, apparently...)


Apparently there *is* going to be some performance changes in CPython (though it's from the PyPy folks, so I suppose the "most of the recent performance-oriented work happens in PyPy" analysis stands). There's a patch that adds an __mro__ function cache. This is a pretty straightforward operation that caches the function-object lookup on types via ...

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PyOpenGL is Offline (DMCA takedown notice...)


For those asking, yes, PyOpenGL has disappeared from SourceForge. Gentleman sent a DMCA notice thinking that gle32.dll was his, it is actually just a compiled version of the (BSD licensed) GLE library for Win32. I've sent in a DMCA Notification Response, and the gentleman who issued the initial request has asked for them to rescind ...

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Unexpected 'free' day (More of an "I want to do something else" day...)


I got up this morning fully intending to work on billing/provisioning stuff for ACI all day... I only wound up doing 2 hours total work for them (well, so far), exhausted the stuff that can be done during the day (most of the changes need to be done after-close-of-business) and decided to brush up on ...

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Handout Finished (1 day early :))


Finished the handout for the Tutorial at PyCon. 20 pages, but don't panic, they're mostly for people who learn best by reading. You won't have to read it all while you're in the class, we'll be mostly looking at the code changes as diffs and resulting code so that you can see what we're doing ...

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