Richard Jones' Log

Yes, but I want one shaped like a rocket-ship, thanks :).

When I first wrote it the front page of the Cheese Shop displayed 10 latest entries. Then we got more than 10 updates in one day so I bumped it (and the RSS feed) up to 20. I have a feeling that we're going to need to bump it up again very soon...

Thanks to Martin von L�wis the Cheese Shop performance has been significantly improved lately. There's still some issues (FastCGI seems to be dying randomly, and the performance still isn't quite fast enough for some applications that request many pages, but the catalog-sig are working on it). The browse interface is actually speedy now, which is cool!

This got lost in recent goings-on in my life, but I wanted to mention that I'll be lecturing the Python component of a course at RMIT starting in late August. It's only 6 lectures, but I have a lot of prep work because the lectures haven't been updated for years (they were written around 2001). Thus there's examples that use the string module for string operations, and missing data types, and so on.

I'm looking forward to it, and the course sorely needs the update, but it does mean that I've had little time to devote to the recent Cheese Shop goings-on, and I almost forgot to set a date for the next PyWeek, and I've been neglecting my responsibilities with The Python Papers (minimal though they are), etc.

Also, the lectures are all in LaTeX. I haven't touched that since I left university, over a decade ago. Fortunately, there's kile. I've toyed with the idea of translating them to Bruce but I need to update the content first and then see how much time I have left.

I'm about as excited about this game as I've been about any game for a loong time. Not only does it look gorgeous, but the potential for emergent gameplay, sharing, collaborative fun, creativity, etc. etc. are enormous. Also, look how darned cute it is!!!

Almost everyone in the office wants to play it, right now, and that even goes for the couple of people who don't play video games :)

PyWeek number 5 is coming. Warm up those game codin' fingers :)