Richard Jones' Log

PyWeek #3 has now finished with the judging results coming in and declaring the winners to be:

Individual - Bouncy the Hungry Rabbit*
Team - Typus Pocus

Congratulations to everyone who entered!

The next PyWeek will be in March, 2007.

*: yes, that's my entry! Yay me :)

Two people I know have now been burnt by iTunes / iPods and their policy of restricting access to data they own. In both cases, they've suffered a disk failure and have been unable to get their songs back off the iPod. They were both under the mistaken impression that their iPod was effectively a backup of their song library. A reasonable position to take, I would've thought. My MP3 player can be treated as such a device - why can't an iPod? But they can't copy their music back off the iPod into iTunes.

More recently I've suffered an annoyance at the hands of iTunes. It turns out that when you edit song meta-data iTunes doesn't edit the ID3 tags in the actual MP3 files. When I copy the MP3 files to my other computers and devices, the songs have none of the track/album information that I entered for them. These are freely-available tracks, by the way. I'm not breaking any copyright in copying them around.

So, what can I replace iTunes with on OSX? Something that supports Ogg files out of the box would be nice too. If only Amarok worked...

The week is over, the 33 entries are in. Those of us who put in an entry now get to judge the others. Whee!

So one of the PyWeek 3 games uses Python 2.4, PyGame and PyOGRE.

1. I'm running Ubuntu, so Python 2.4 is already installed and active
2. "apt-get install python-pygame" installs a bunch of additional dependencies for me, no sweat
3. PyOgre. No Ubuntu package. The tubes tell me that I can install it from its project site. So now I need to get psyco and "PyOgre (Media + PyOgre)". There's two "media files at the download site, "demo_media.zip" and "demo_media_1.2.0.zip" both with the same datestamp. The former has more downloads, so I go with that.
4. "apt-get install python-psyco"
5. In the PyOgre source, "python setup.py build". I realise it doesn't bundle OGRE. There's no README and no indication of this on the download site. Ho hum. "apt-cache search libogre" turns up "libogre5c2a". There's a vague reference to version "1.0.6-1.1ubuntu1" in the apt-cache "show" output. The current version on the Ogre3d website is "1.2.2p1" Not wanting to push my luck, I download the source from the Ogre3d website.
6. The prerequsites list for Ogre3d is impressively long, so I go with only the required libs. I already have some installed.
7. "apt-get install libzzip-dev"
8. "apt-get install libmng-dev"
9. "./configure --disable-cg && make install"...
10. (during build) "apt-get install libxaw7-dev"
11. (during build) "apt-get install libxxf86vm-dev"
12. (during build) "apt-get install libdevil-dev"
13. (during build) "apt-get install liblcms1-dev"
14. The build then breaks saying "/usr/bin/install: cannot stat `.libs/libOgreMain.lai': No such file or directory" which was anticipated by the build instructions page. Followed instructions and "make install" completes.
15. Back to pyogre.. "apt-get install swig"
16. "python setup.py install" spits out a ton of messages about CEGUI configuration. I eventually figure that it's got an undocumented dependency on the optional Ogre3d dependency "cegui", so...
17. "apt-get install libcegui-mk2-dev"
18. Back to Ogre3d and "make distclean" (which actually breaks, so I remove the whole dir and unpack the tarball again) and "./configure --disable-cg" again.
19. Back to pyogre.. "python setup.py install". It failed, spectacularly, starting with the line "gcc: : No such file or directory."
20. Based on the advice here (though my error is different), I discover I have swig 1.3.27, so I download swig 1.3.29 and...
21. "apt-get remove --purge swig"
22. "./configure && make install" for swig
23. Back to pyogre.. "python setup.py install". Based on the link above I re-run the build a few times, but unlike the results "hiasl" got, I do not end up with a successful build. I'm working on filing a bug report with the PyOgre project, but I'm currently waiting for the berlios system to email me my signup confirmation email...

... e's just on the wrong channel.

I posted my PyWeek underway message on the wrong channel here, so a bunch of Python people won't have seen it...

I usually post when PyWeek actually starts but this time around I was distracted because I actually had a game idea within minutes of the starting gun going off. I spent an hour or so working it through and pretty quickly had my first model in a game which could hop around the screen. I won't tell the whole story here - that's what the challenge diary is for.