For the sake of this post, I’m going to pretend to know what metaprogramming* is.  Yeah, so tinypy** totally has that.  At least, since the parser and compiler in tinypy is written in tinypy, you are able to modify those modules on-the-fly and add new features into the tinypy language.  (Not that you’d want to, but certain other languages get so uppity about being able to do that, I figured I’d plug for tinypy here.)

For example, (at present) tinypy doesn’t have support for decorators.  I’ve always liked decorators, so I made this code (a zip of main.py, deco.py***, and test.py) so that if you have a main.py:

import deco
import test

When the deco module is loaded, it cleanly**** adds decorator support into the tokenize, parse, and encode modules of tinypy.  Then when the test module is loaded, it is able to use decorator syntax.  Yay!  This mostly thanks to the top down operator precedence implementation in tinypy.

So now, if say, you have some crazy idea for how the $ operator should be used in bigpy, you can go ahead and use metaprogramming to add it into tinypy and show all your friends how awful your new syntax looks and have a working proof-of-concept!  Yay!

* feel free to enlighten me
** it’s got a mailing list now, join in on all the fun!!
*** only 611 bytes :)  They were pretty simple to implement, since they really just mean: “given ‘@a \n def b …’ do ‘def b … \n b=a(b)'”
**** Since all the language features are stored in dictionaries, it’s “pretty easy” to add new symbols / operators.  (Or remove features, or whatever!)

$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
269   ls
253   cd
182   kate
50   cp
48   svn
43   mkdir
23   mv
21   grep
16   gqview
13   python

A client of mine hosted with cihost recently had an outage.  (Which hasn’t ended.)  They want to move their dedicated server elsewhere.  Any suggestions?  I’ve done plenty of googling for stuff, but really, personal rec’s carry way more weight for me.  We want a host that:

• linux (LAMP stuff)
• e-mail server
• has excellent uptime
• can manage backups
• has excellent support
• can manage security
• is able to deal with a crisis (say, a backhoe digs up their fiber, they are able to get your server running somehow within half a day)

Which I suppose aren’t really extravagant demands, but anyway .. I’d appreciate any recommendations you can offer.  The hosting is for a U.S. based company, so we’ll want a host with data centers here.

Please don’t bother responding with a rec if you haven’t personally been with said host for at least 3 years.

1. The only bit I remember from that conversation is all the stuff about Canadian global domination.  Let me tell you, if Mike Fletcher has his way, we’re doomed!  (Maybe we’re doomed either way, but be sure your passport is ready when we have to head north!)
2. I remember peaking into the pycon-dev room at one point and Doug was giving a lecture on menu structures in websites.  He said the pycon navigation was stored completely independently of all the modules used by pycon.  I think that’s great.  I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
3. I do most all my dev at home on my linux system.  My laptop last year was loaded with XP and I found it painful to do work on at pycon.  So this year, the day before pycon, I loaded it up with Ubuntu.  Which was a mistake.  It *sort* of worked, in a kind of the network didn’t exactly always work and the video driver didn’t always work .. and then it got worse .. but I won’t name names 😉
4. Which brings me to two happier points, which are points 5 and 6 in this list.
5. Sean was quite swell and set me up a personal hard-line during the sprints when I needed to get some work done :)  Yay!
6. I was told about PyPE, which is a nifty python editor for windows :)  I’m having to do some win32 dev lately (see previous post), so having that on hand is great!  I like it.  I was able to do about 5 hours of dev on it this evening, and I think the main complaint I had was I was using a laptop keyboard.  If you like kate, this is the editor for you.

Hmn .. maybe someone did ..

Yep, that’s python+pygame alright .. 🙂

Yay!  Go to tinypy.org and spend the rest of your day basking in the glow of the new tinypy website!  Yipee!  Thanks to everyone who told me not to re-invent the wheel on this one.  I spent a large bit of the week thinking about doing that, but eventually I gave up the idea because I was feeling kind of worn out.  So I just threw together a google code and google group and slapped a website in front of it all.

If you’re interested in tinypy in any way, be sure to go to the site then navigate to the google group from there and join in the fun.  I suppose I could have direct links from this post, but then you’d miss out seeing my new swell site 🙂

Share and enjoy!
-Phil

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.