Richard Jones' Log

Rachel, Abbey and I flew up to Bundaberg (my God it gets hot and sweaty up there) for Christmas. It was Abbey's first plane ride. The first leg to Brisbane was in a 737 (no photo) and then to Bundy in a little Dash 8. Both flights were very exciting and Abbey couldn't sleep for the rest of the day when we arrived.

We were there for 7 days and on Christmas day itself we drove to Hervey Bay for lunch. After the excitement of present opening in the morning, Abbey slept most of the way in the car.

Abbey also got her first swim (we did go deeper and get quite wet ;) and sand-castle building at one of the really nice beaches up there (down here in Melbourne you have to fight the seaweed for beach space). All up, Abbey had a helluva time!

Unfortunately, my week was dampened by a cold that just didn't want to go away (I've still got it). Also, when we got back to Melbourne we found that our 5-year-old car battery had given up the ghost during the week. The nice people at the long-term car-park have a special jumpstart battery they lent us (they do so about 20 times a day, apparently) which got us home. Got the nice car club people to drop over a new battery the following day. Turned on two computers that evening only to find that my desktop's (used for work and serious play) video card decided to die (I've even dissected it a little) and then the HTPC downstairs that we use for TV etc. also decided to go funny - the case fan wasn't running, which has happened before. On reboot the fan started up OK though, but by the end of it I was left feeling that my karma was way out of balance.

My OSDC 2005 presentation, Rapid Game Development in Python is now in the Bruce (, the Presentation Tool) source repository.

For those who saw the presentation, the little bit with the OpenGL UFOs has been removed as Bruce is no longer an OpenGL application. It was quite unnecessary and complicated the code.

The paper is also online if anyone's curious. It makes a sorta reasonable tutorial, I suppose.

Bruce had a little bit of a work-over on the train this morning as I tried to pummel him into some semblance of reusable code. The "bruce-play" script is gone. The "data" directory is gone. All for the better, I think. The result is version 1.1.

Bruce, the Presentation Tool has a project home over at python-hosting. Anyone interested in extending the software is welcome!

The 1.0.1 release I just made mostly clarifies the usage under Windows.

Due to popular demand, I've released Bruce, the Presentation Tool into the wilds. Be free, Bruce!

I've got a request in for a project site to manage Bruce. All are welcome to join the fun once that's going.

I'm running KDE 3.5 now (have been for a week, but a conference distracted me from posting this). Mostly it's a good improvement - ad filtering finally in Konqueror, some UI improvements around the place. Incremental, generally worthwhile stuff.

Sadly, the old whitespace bug still isn't fixed, and there's a new annoyance that I can't seem to find any information about. Every time my IMAP account is pinged, I get an error dialog box. The box doesn't affect my ability to read any IMAP mail - except that I have to cancel it every time. My sysadmin has no idea what KMail is on about.

Some of my best memories:

• There seemed to be a lot more cross-pollenation and willingness to talk across languages and environments.
• WSGI and Twisted are making sense now. Nufox is very cool and I need to do something with that.
• POWER CORE looked pretty damned good up on the Big Screen during the lightning talks :)
• My presentation went really well. Feedback was positive, and Bruce* didn't crash.
• Seeing the OSI 7-layer cake and explanatory poetry in under 5 minutes.
• Catching up with people was great again - though as usual there never seems to be enough time.

Next year can only be bigger and better.

Yes, Bruce the presentation software will be released after I catch my breath.