Richard Jones' Log

The date for the second PyWeek challenge has been set: Sunday 26th March to Sunday 2nd April (00:00UTC to 00:00UTC).

The PyWeek challenge invites entrants to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team. Entries must be developed in Python, during the challenge, and must incorporate some theme chosen at the start of the challenge.

Now all I have to do is finish the website...

There's some bug fixes and feature requests I'd like to get out soon but I've been distracted by getting the python-dev project tracker imported on one of the python.org machines. They're not so powerful, and over the weekend (and to a lesser extent yesterday) www.python.org was being hammered by nasty search engines*. I finally got it imported yesterday (the import took about 24 hours -- it takes about 20 minutes on my desktop), and it's mostly ok (I stuffed up and didn't notice that the sf.net XML export has issue messages in reverse chronological order, also I accidentally nuked the full-text index).

This morning I see a message in my inbox that pretty much kills Roundup-for-python-dev as an idea though. I don't think I can say much more, but I'm competing against a company, with extended resources in hosting, so my volunteer efforts seem pretty feeble really. If this other thing comes through, it'll be good for Python, but I think I'm justified in feeling a little bummed by it :)

Well, the sf.net import stuff was kinda interesting. I like working with ElementTree. And, you know, it was a problem to solve and I like that.

*: no, really, the engine creators actually have the gall to require us to put a special "Crawl-Delay" line in our robots.txt file so they won't just hammer us with a bazillion requests per second. Don't bother looking it up - "Crawl-Delay" is not a part of the robots.txt spec, and may in fact break the robots.txt file for other robots.

In a few months it'll be census time again here in Oz. I wonder how many Pastafarians there will be this time...

The gorillapod is pretty damned cool. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be strong enough to support an SLR, but then I've not used my SLR in a few years now, so I still want one :)

Roundup just had its 1.1.0 release. The very first release - four and a half years ago - was 0.1.1.

1. Ian Bicking is a smart cookie, and his roll your own web framework tutorial opened my eyes.
2. Microsoft Word's macro "security" policy is just f***ing stupid. We use Macs but are still spreading macro viruses and pissing off people. In what universe is a default (and apparently unchangeable) policy of allowing automatic macro replication a good thing? And we can't get rid of the viruses, not even on Windows (we're still looking, and if anyone has any hints, I'd appeciate it.)
3. Commercial TV. I watched some last night, on a whim, for the first time in months (it just so happened that it was tuned to The Simpsons followed by Futurama). Slightly less than an hour, with maybe 1/3 of that devoted to ads and promos, and I'd had enough. How do people put up with it?