So I’m getting the feeling I should host tinypy somewhere greater than just in my blog. What a pity, the blog suited me so well. I dunno, I guess some people have unreasonable demands. (If I were feeling clever, I’d link all the words in that last sentence to other people’s blogs who’ve bugged me about this. But I don’t think there are actually that many.)

Anyway, my options are as follows:

• use the project management software I’ve written for my health-care company. Pros: I wrote it, so it must be better than anything else. Cons: I’ll have to maintain it when I find out otherwise.
• use google code. Pros: People know how to use it, and it’s pretty clean looking and they host it for me. Cons: I don’t get to host it. But I guess I could set up the first few pages of the tinypy site on my own server to make myself feel good.
• use trac or something. Pros: I’d get to host my whole project myself. Cons: I’d have to host the whole project myself and learn some new software and maybe set up some stuff.

So .. all my aimless thoughts aside, since this isn’t really about me. (If it were, I’d just blog about it every now and again and leave it at that.) It’s about you, since there is interest in the project it needs to be easier for people to poke at. What setup do you think* would be the best?

* it probably doesn’t matter what you think, because after writing this post, I think I’ve already made up my mind. Writing down stuff like this helps me think things through. But since you’ve bothered to read this far, you might as well put in your 2c.

If you’re *not* in school, interested in tinypy, and want to help out, you can become a mentor!  I’m working via the PSF to get tinypy some SOC help.  Since I announced this a few days ago I’ve already got four students who want to do SOC projects on tinypy!

Reasons to become a SOC-python-tinypy mentor:

• you want to help out tinypy – if multiple projects get accepted, it would be great to have some people helping me out!  I don’t think I could mentor them all.
• you want to help out python – the more mentors python has, the more projects will be sponsored :)  This will increase the odds that tinypy gets some slots.
• you want to help out students – this is the Summer of Code, after all!  It’s a great opportunity to help new coders get some great experience.
• you want to help out open source – the SOC gets students involved in Open Source :)  Several of the students who have contacted me say this is the first time they’ve been interested in Open Source.

Qualifications for mentors:

• you aren’t a student.
• you know python and C reasonably well.
• you want to help out!

How to join:

• contact me, so I know who wants to be a tinypy mentor.
• join the python mentor’s mailing list.
• join the Google SOC mentors as part of the PSF.

Thanks!
-Phil

So I thought of an idea for pycon2009 … A GONG SHOW!  Here’s how it would work:

• People sign up for 5 minute slots.
• A panel of 3 judges preside.
• Each person gets 1 minute to get into their talk.
• After that point, the panel is free to “gong” the person any time it gets dull or uninteresting or for any other reason.
• Each judge will score each talk on a 1-10 scale.
• The winner will get a prize!

Good idea?  Comments?  I think it would be a fun thing to do in addition to the normal lightning talks.  Maybe I’ll propose it for a 45 minute talk space next year.

Yesterday and today I worked with Mike Fletcher and had a great time porting a couple of my games to the OLPC 🙂

Watermelons

Elephants (pic taken with an XO!)

I had a great time working on this – though a couple of odd bugs in the dev. environment proved to be a bit bothersome, we were able to get through them. The main product of this effort was the creation of the “port your pygame game to the OLPC” tutorial.

On a side note, I also gave an impromptu talk on networking games to help an OLPC group get some good ideas on how to write an easy to use networking API for their games. A fair portion of it explained how I implemented networking in Galcon. The other portion explained how “I did it wrong – and you should do it some other way such as _____.” Richard Jones and Mike Fletcher also attended and chipped to help explain the bits that I glazed over.

SyntaxError’: …… ‘(pypy.translator.flex.main:9)some_strange_function_
which_will_never_be_called’

True dat, yo!

If you’re a student who’s been following the tinypy project and you’re interested in working on it for the Google SOC, the PSF is willing to consider tinypy projects for submissions under their SOC mentor group.

I’ve put together some ideas for projects here.  You would probably want to combine a few of those ideas together for your project.  Please contact me to talk a bit about your idea.  Thanks and good luck!

We had a great tournament at pycon2008!  We also fit in some “Rustic Classics” (a set of oldschool games like pac-man made for multi-player gamepad play) and had a good times.  Here are some pics from the action.  A few of these people play Galcon somewhat regularly.  I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out who is who.

There will be a Galcon Tournament at PyCon on Saturday night from 8:00pm – 11:00pm in Ballroom II.

Galcon is an awesome high-paced multi-player galactic action-strategy game. You send swarms of ships from planet to planet to take over the galaxy.

Feel free to come even if you don’t have a Galcon license – they will be provided 🙂 It’ll be a great time to hang out and play one of the top 10 indie games of 2007 – built with python and pygame, of course!

Hope to see you there! If anyone wants to talk game development or Galcon or whatever, just look for the guy wearing a Galcon t-shirt 🙂

P.S. Just to be on the safe side, try to download and install Galcon well before the tourney so we don’t swamp the conference network.

I’m going to pycon next week, yah!  I’m planning on sprinting on PyGame on Flash.  However, if someone wants to sprint on tinypy, just find me and let’s talk!  There are loads of cool things that could be done:

• JIT
• improved bytecode generation
• LLVM or luavm backend
• add your favorite module
• that module could be pygame 🙂
• speed improvement
• general code review
• bug fixes / tests
• documentation
• ???

Hope to see you at pycon!  I’ll be wearing Galcon t-shirts all week, so I shouldn’t be too hard to find.  🙂