ARRRRRRRRGGH!

Yeah, it’s arrived.  Check it out at www.brawndo.com!!!  In the meantime, maybe you should SHAVE YOUR CHEST WITH A LAWNMOWER!

Hey, more fractal fun tonight as I attack PyPy! I must admit, this effort was more challenging – PyPy is pretty big and scary, but I found the folks in #pypy to be quite helpful. exarkun helped me quite a bit in working out the details. (Apparently PyPy doesn’t use ctypes anymore, it uses rffi .. which is sparsely documented.) Anyway with exarkun’s help I got a crude SDL wrapper put together!

Initially I just implemented my julia demo again, but I figured it would make for a boring blog entry to have the same pictures two days in a row. As it turns out, the julia was about 30% faster in PyPy than in shed-skin. Both shed-skin and PyPy appear to have similar limitations. shed-skin’s error messages are less cryptic than PyPy’s. Both FFI’s were somewhat challenging to work with, though I think I prefer shed-skin’s.

If you want to give it a whirl, download PyPy and my junk. The NOTES.txt file lists the command I used to build the executable. Sorry if the mouse interface is a bit lousy, but it was the best I could do in 2 minutes.

Marshie Attacks: Halloween Interactive Driveway Activity

Some really cool game dev going on there.  They used python, pygame, pysight, lasers, bedsheets and potato canons to create an interactive Halloween game!

Watermelons was a pygame game made in about 8 hours one evening on the #ludumdare channel. Since then I’ve ported it to flash using haxe. This past weekend I integrated it into the facebook API. You can check the app out here. My server-side high score system was written with PHP.

The integration was somewhat challenging, since I was using a language not supported by facebook (haxe) and my integration involved using flash, which has some restrictions when used within FMBL. To work around these things, I had to embed my flash object within an iframe and then pass high scores back through my main web script in the browser window (instead of as a background request) in order to be able to use all the facebook notification features.

So far (after about 5 days) the app has about 160 users, which isn’t very many. But I suppose it’s not bad for my first shot at writing a facebook app.

The time has come for us to begin living our lives! Check out www.summersausagefestival.com for the MOST EXCITING thing that is going to happen in 2007!!!

-Phil