No man is an island

Well, i think it went quite fine so far (considering that there were nearly 30 people sitting around me at the start, my god) though i quickly noticed i couldn’t stop talking about pyhton and zope. They inquired me about solutions for versioning, undoable stuff, integrated user authorization, workflows and, and, and. I was originally quite open about what to propose and you may have already guessed it - we ended up talking about ZOPE. One of the final question was if it’s possible to talk to LDAP as a user auth source. Well, yes! Hell yes!

Anyway, another thing i realized is that i know my way around in the zope world and flirted with other frameworks but i should really get some stuff done with them and get my hands dirty.

So i pledge to myself to code a minimal application in every popular python framework (except Zope 2.x which i know quite well)

• Pylons
• Turbogears
• Django
• Quixote

I also stumble upon more and more new python packages that i never heard of before. Each one reads better than the other. I wonder why there are suddenly such a lot of web related packages/frameworks popping up? Well, part of the answer is certainly Ruby On Rails and honestly i think it’s one of the best things to happen to python on the web.

Things to look at as well:

• Paste (should have done that a long time ago. I was aware of that but the last year was nearly exlusively daemon/oracle/python/imaging stuff)
• Routes
• Mochikit
• Kid
• CherryPy
• SQLObject
• Pudge
• Cheetah

Since they want to operate on a lot of binary data as well maybe i should throw cx_bsdiff into the discussion as well (versioning a 460MB movie several time hurts a lot)

Ah…hehe - it was also a big showoff for my shiny new MacBook Pro. I didnt brag to start with or anything. Martin just asked me if i got my new MacBook with me. After my confirmative answer he shouted around “Anyone wanna see an intel based mac notebook?” lol

Tomorrow i’ll visit a local company here in Berlin to present my skills regarding all CMS. Just until yesterday i was extremely confident to just walk in and talk on. Today it’s a totally different story. My god.

I know a LOT about CMS stuff and all the non-technical aspects as well. So where is the problem? I am quite good at speaking in front of other people. Well this time those are real professionals (maybe this is the problem?). There will be no space for dodging around. My thoughts so far are okay but i simply don’t think i can keep talking for 30 min + unless i start talking about Zope, which is okay in that context, but i can’t only talk about zope. I even cannot say a lot about non-python cms. I’m a python guy and that’s it. 30 min QA. I really hope it will be a little more informal and that the audience is relaxed enough to engage in a dialog. I am great in a dialog.

Anyway, lets hope it works out and we like each other. That would give me another customer

Recently i started a gaming project with my flatmate. I do the coding part and he does the design part. Game design is done by both.

The idea is to get a feel for what it takes to make a game.

After reading nearly all Post Mortems on gamasutra i have the impression that creating games can create a whole list of issues, especially in bigger projects but also on smaller projects. I am curious how our little project turns out.

We did not yet decide on a name or even a codename for that matter. So far i can only state the following:

• The game will be open sourced (probable not as viral as GPL, maybe CC)
• I will use python, pygame, pyogre and maybe twisted if we decide on multiplayer
• I will create a developer diary so i can track later on what happened and maybe write an article about it
• The game will be in 3D (as you may have guessed from the pyogre part)
• It will be about trading in a fantasy world (the whole game concept is already much more detailed but that should give you a hint on the direction)

I suspect the project will need at least 6 months to be in a presentable state. We will try to keep the game concept modular so that we can start small without selling our vision on future ideas. Certain restrictions certainly are wise as well. We will not incorporate an action component. The game will give as much time for your decisions as you want at any point. This certainly indicates that it will be a turn based game. We will not target for economic realism as well as graphical realism. A working economical system certainly is necessary to keep the game balanced but realism is not our goal.

So far we are in the phase of building the infrastructure for that (wiki, svn/cvs, a sort of buildbot or at least scripts to easily freeze the python sources into a binary). since we do a 3D game we will use Blender for modelling and probably also as a small game level designer (dived deeply into the blender python and it is very nice).

…to be continued

Well, finally i got myself to start a blog. After struggling with that weird fucked up SuSE installation on my root server and then struggling with Wordpress permissions on that directory without breaking the Confixx software package (which is a joke in itself anyway) took me nearly two hours.

But now i am good to go

Wordpress is quite nice so far and i like the software itself. The whole writing entries thing though is new to me. I consider myself as a moderate writer at best and by reading some of the other blog entries out there i fear that my style is not really appropriate for blogging. Well, only time and feedback can show.

Lately a few exploits that were called viruses popped up on the apple OS X. All that prophecies about the mac being the target of hackers now is just so overhyped.

First of the term hacker means something completetly different. What those reports wanted to say is cracker. Secondly all those viruses/trojans (there is a debate going on what those really are) all require user interaction and entering of an administrative password. Who works as administrator on a mac? Never seen that one.

Thirdly one of those programs tries to use a security hole that was fixed by apple in June.

The whole thing about those malicious programs is not worth all that hype of the now finally being the target of criminals.

I am not saying that Mac OS X has no security issues and i am not stating anything like that for any OS or program, but the pure fact that there popped up a few programs that have the potential to behave virus-like doesnt mean we will now see a flood of those. Just wait and see.

This Wednesday i got my new MacBookPro delivered. Since i worked a lot that day and got home only late i was nearly happy to be too tired to be really excited. This gave me the opportunity to calmly get that thing up and started.

Well, we all know what is inside and what we were promised and in my opinion so far the MBP is a fine device and well worth having the apple logo on it, except on little annoyance that my MBP sadly also got (read here)

The first moment that whining sound got my attention i couldn’t stop noticing it. I was already thinking about returning the unit when i discovered a few simple steps to make that thing quiet (besides shutting it down ): (more…)