Developing Upwards

Off And On Again is a series of light puzzles. You must turn all the lights on, but you must do so by flipping them in patterns. If you turn one light on or off, you'll be flipping lights around it, too. If you can find the right combination, you'll brighten up the board and move on to the next challenge. This was more than just a game. This was a public project in putting light on the hobbyist game development experience. Created over 25 hours, every single minute of the development of Off And On Again is available as part of a YouTube series Let's Make A Game . If you're interested in learning from this process and seeing what came out of it, you can watch the entire creation of Off And On Again and then play the game for yourself. The Series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlFKDVs9l3Q&list=PLg8XhO9Ilwl9Bw9h5wimuRgx5VrK3D-Kb The Game: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stonebirdgames.OffAndOnAgain

Tracerlib is a set of utilities to make tracing Python code easier. It provides TracerManager , which can allow multiple trace functions to coexist. It can easily be enabled and disabled, either manually or as a context manager in a with statement. Tracer classes make handling the different trace events much easier.   class TraceExceptions ( Tracer ): def trace_exception ( self , func_name , exctype , value , tb ): print "Saw an exception: %r " % ( value ,)     Tracer is also easily capable of filtering which events it listens to. It accepts both an   events parameter, a list of trace events it will respond to, and a watch parameter, a list of paths it will respond to in the form of package.module.class.function . This can easily wrap a trace function, or you can subclass Tracer and implement one of its helpful trace_*() methods. And, a helper class FrameInspector which wraps a frame and makes it trivial to inspect t...

New Project Announcement: I'd like to announce a new project, based on straight.plugin, a command framework that provides a declarative way to define command-line options, sub-commands, and allows plugins from third-parties to expand commands. This is all very early, I'm calling this version 0.1a1 and lots of things are missing, but here is an example (which works) of a small todo application built with this. #!/usr/bin/env python from __future__ import print_function import sys from straight.command import Command , Option , SubCommand class List ( Command ): def run_default ( self , ** extra ): for line in open ( self . parent . args [ 'filename' ]): print ( line . strip ( ' \n ' )) class Add ( Command ): new_todo = Option ( dest = 'new_todo' , action = 'append' ) def run_default ( self , new_todo , ** extra ): with open ( self . parent . args [ 'filename...

I am announcing the release of Django Better Cache 0.5 today. This release includes a move to sphinx as a documentation tool and a new component, the bettercache.objects module, which provides a lite ORM-like interface for caching data. Please read the full, but short documentation over at Read The Docs for details on the bettercache {% cache %} tag and the bettercache.objects ORM, and have a much easier time with your caching needs. Here is just a quick example of the new cache models, from the docs: class User ( CacheModel ): username = Key () email = Field () full_name = Field () user = User ( username = 'bob' , email = 'bob@hotmail.com' , full_name = 'Bob T Fredrick' , ) user . save () ... user = User . get ( username = 'bob' ) user . email == 'bob@hotmail.com' user . full_name == 'Bob T Fredrick'

Erik Youngren contributed the loading of packages as plugin modules, which should be useful to a number of users who have module needs that don't fit in a single .py file. This release also includes .egg packages for Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2 versions. Enjoy! Get the new release here  http://pypi.python.org/pypi/straight.plugin/1.2 Or, go straight to the source at http://github.com/ironfroggy/straight.plugin

My Month-Project for June 2011 was the 2.0 release of the JournalApp tool I built during PyCon. I'm going to give a quick overview here, but I really hope anyone with the least bit of interest in what I do will go and look for themselves. I also think you should give it a try, but I don't think its for everyone. I think there are ways to sort your thoughts that work for us and we have different methods that will work best for us. This works best for me. If it works for you, great. If not, I hope you find something for you. You can try it out now at GoJournalApp.com . The easiest way for me to summarize it is to just copy-paste the help page right here. Write.   Write  #awesome  things and tag use hashtags to find them later.   Find things by hashtag by typing only the tags you want to search.   #likethis   Have something to do?   TODO:  write todo's in your entries.   DONE:  and click them to check them off....

Hashtrack.js 0.2 includes a number of bug fixes and enhancements, and I'd like to start doing official releases that really show off what the tool is capable of. I've been using this for a few years in projects both personal and professional, and I always merge improvements back into it. Hopefully, I can start making an effort to polish it up better, because in this day and age we all are finding ourselves in need of stateful web applications, and we need to handle this gracefully. Take a look at the github repo for hashtrack if you like the sample code below, or take a look at the very sparse but informative docs . hashtrack.onhashvarchange("background", function (value) { $('body').css('background', value); }, true); ----- <a href="#?background=green">Make the background green</a>

Tonight I uploaded straight.plugin 1.1 to the Python Package Index. This release includes a new loader, straight.plugin.loaders.ClassLoader and adds an subclasses parameter to the simple load() API to invoke class loading, opposed to the default module loading. The classes are filtered by type and are looked up in the same modules that would be loaded by the ModuleLoader available in straight.plugin 1.0. This release has been testing on Python 2.7 and 3.2. You can check out the source at github or the packages at PyPI .

So this is my obligatory start-of-2008 post. I know I haven't written much lately, but work was busy and then there was the holidays, and I'm making a commitment to really revitalize my blog. Part of that may be that my adsense, after years of blogging, as only hit half the required minimum balence for payment . But, I'm not in it for the money. Not unless there was a lot of money in it! For 2007 this means... that I need to wrap up the last year We moved back to North Carolina when the Pennsylvania winter cleared up, and I'll admit that the summer was a bit rough. I lost my most steady contract when funding went sour, shortly before the movie, but you know what? Staying home with the family was great without a lot of work to be done, and we got by OK. I enjoyed the time. After a while, I started CharPy, the Charlotte Python Group. We're still small and growing, but the first meeting gave me a lead on a full-time position at SocialServe.com, where I'm now happil...