Richard Jones' Log

Wow. There's a lot of activity in PyWeek land. People seem really inspired by the theme this time - there's a lot of really interesting games taking shape. There seems to be a much higher rate of entries actually getting results too, which is great to see. As of writing this, there's only 2.5 days left. My game's core is finished, and I'll spend some time tweaking and making it prettier.

I'm now on leave for a week. The week of PyWeek. And I have some cool ideas for games, so I'm really, really looking forward to hacking on a game for a week :)

Going solo this time, so I'm a little worried about the art & sound side of things. I'm going to be needing a lot of custom graphics too. Will be interesting to see how I end up :)

I started using my old film SLR again recently. It's been quite fun to move back from the "toy" that is the little digital camera we've been using since Abbey was born. I did the sums, and it works out cheaper to keep shooting film and getting it processed and burnt to CD than it is to buy a new digital body to suit the SLR lenses I already own.

So my first rolls of film went in for processing on the weekend, and I got the results back today. I leafed through the photos at the store, and didn't see anything amiss then, but when I got home and had a closer look some of the shots are kinda fuzzy. They look like there's this very slight noise through them (like you'd expect from a digital camera that's being pushed). Opening up the (JPEG only) digital scans on the CD it's even worse. There's noise all through the images, even the nice and bright ones. Where there's any darkness the noise is quite unbearable and ruins the photo entirely.

My boss has a scanner that I'll try when I go into the office tomorrow, assuming I can get it working (and it's still in Melbourne). Other than that - do any Aussies have recommendations for labs that scan negs well? I had some negs scanned years ago and I'm going to try to look up the lab that did that as the results were excellent.

The results from this scan are so bad I've even started thinking that perhaps it's a deliberate ploy to stop people from using film...

Update: I've used my boss' scanner (a rather nice Nikon Super Coolscan 9000) and achieved much better results

There's now one week left until PyWeek starts. I got to open the sealed envelope containing the themes list this morning, and it's a good set:

• Someone else's trash
• A fraction too much friction
• Mind the gap
• Doorways
• It runs on steam!

The next week sees entrants voting on the theme. There's still time to sign up if you haven't. And don't think that you have to take a week off to enter either - quite a number of people will just be working on the weekends and a few nights. Based on the 48-hour competitions, that's plenty of time to get a game together.

A government with a scandal on its hand that's actually (gasp) got the press asking hard questions about it. Wait, what's this I see in the paper today? Government's going to open up media ownership laws? Er, what was that scandal thing again? Ah, never mind, mate!

The core functionality for the PyWeek website is finished. There's quite a lot of individuals and teams signed up. I'm fairly excited. If I wasn't struck down with some sort of stomach bug today I'd have been playing with the latest PGU bugfix release to re-acquaint myself with it.

I'm downloading a 904.7 MB demo for a computer game at the moment. I'm just glad I'm getting 250+ KB/s transferring it...

Crikey.

<rant class="incoherent raving"> [deleted] </rant>

Due to feedback, I'll summarise the contents of the rant...

Basically, I've had a few sessions of sheer frustration. I'm convinced that the application I'm developing (pyweek) is not Django's target audience. Django seems engineered towards all-users-are-equal auto-admin-interface db management with some end-user views. The pyweek system needs fine-grained permission control allowing users to edit a variety of data.

The documentation for a number of elements of Django's magic -- and even some of the stuff that isn't magic (well, I guess if it's undocumented it's magic too) -- has large gaps and omissions.

Today's frustration stemmed from trying to implement file upload. I've also found I have to guess at what to pass model constructors sometimes. Some areas of the documentation seem to be documenting by examples, and limited examples at that. Again, I've posted comments so I hope the docs will be improved.

The "headaches" thing is a reference to that presentation by Sean Kelly wherein he points out that J2EE is full of development headaches.

I was curious, and a quick grep / wc later I discover that 1.1.1 is the 79th release of Roundup. I'm really glad I'm not using the Sourceforge file release system any more...