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Showing posts from February, 2018

Why can't we turn off HTTP?

Currently, I'm sitting in a library not able to access HTTPS (probably... I guess it depends when you're reading this) for a particular website. I like to spend time in libraries. Especially libraries in exotic far off places. Surrounded by book-smell, and curious people learning. Unfortunately some libraries have shockingly bad internet. Some of them decide they will filter which websites people can look at so that they are safe from viruses and nasty stuff which damages their computers. It's exciting that 60-70% of internet connections to some websites are encrypted these days. But why not turn HTTP off and force everyone to use HTTPS? Indeed. Why not turn off HTTP completely? I'll try to answer that here (for pygame.org; your website may be different). Unfortunately these filters in libraries are sometimes pretty terrible and ancient. And when you travel, and spend time in libraries and use hotel internet you begin to notice that the internet that you

#RaspberryPi binary #pygame wheels for pip rolling into a #python cheese shop near you.

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It seems there's some sort of giant build cluster for Raspberry Pi that builds binary wheels (python package files, that don't need to be compiled). Automatically. We live in the future. Feels like progress. Now it's compiling pygame nicely. So ` pip install pygame ` works with the current release on Raspbian now (the Debian distribution put out by some Raspberry Pi people). Thanks to Ben Nuttall for that! https://github.com/bennuttall/ piwheels/issues/52 These are built automatically when new things are released to pypi. So the pygame 1.9.4 release should go on there without us having to do anything. piwheels website: https://www.piwheels.hostedpi. com/ blogpost about what it is: http://bennuttall.com/ piwheels-building-a-faster- python-package-repository-for- raspberry-pi-users/ FAQ: https://www.piwheels.hostedpi. com/faq.html ps. Anyone reading this with a binary package they maintain... you can just ask them to install the Debian depen

Mu, the little #python editor that could.

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Nicholas and the Mu gang have been busy with their python editor, and it now supports pgzero. https://mu.readthedocs.io/en/l atest/changes.html Mu is a simple code editor for beginner programmers. I'm pretty excited about this. Here's a little demo of it in action with pgzero ... https://www.youtube.com/embed/jmIK3XfSvNI Whilst it's still in 'beta' with rough edges... it's pretty neat already. Also, they seem to be quickly moving through issues people in the community encounter with each beta release. It's been super-lovely to see the python community get behind them and offer their support. Stop idling, and go have a look: https://github.com/mu-editor/mu

pygame documentation updates

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There are some documentation updates on https://www.pygame.org/docs/ The website documentation builder was waiting for updates from bitbucket(our previous code host). lol? oops. Robots running in the cloud doing things no one wants them to do anymore. I had to write a new github integration, so now commits to master on github/pygame/pygame will cause the website docs to be rebuilt automatically again. And python -m pygame.docs didn't work with the wheel builds... because they don't include docs (for some reason). So now, if the docs can't be found locally, it opens the web browser instead. There were a bunch of documentation updates from Ian Mallett and Lenard Lindstrom which are finally up on the website. Lots of editing, and improvements to the tutorials. Additionally a bunch of old links were fixed. Mostly to point to https:// versions of pages. The docs are being built with a new version of Sphinx, which has nicer output in a few ways. See http

Hey! It's work on pygame stuff week.

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So, it's been about 9 days since I had " a fun day working on pygame stuff ". That morning I woke up, and just started working on pygame things. This is a pattern with me between big freelance contracts. Last year I spent some months on pygame stuff, and also the year before that some months. It was such a fun day... I just kept going. And here we are 9 days later with a web log of some of the things that happened. A fun 9 days working on pygame stuff. New pygame.org website changes. Got a new version of the pygame website out. It took a couple of days, but I fixed a number of issues, and improved a few things. In the process I found a lot more issues on the website than I fixed. So there are now more issues listed than when I started . Feels like progress. "it's the schrödinger's bugtracker" -- þeshipu pygameweb 0.0.1 - Weedy Seadragon Witness the beauty of the Weedy Seadragon ( photo by Kenneth Hagemeyer) #30 https url s

Hey! It's work on pygame stuff day.

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Yasssssssss! Today was work-on- pygame -stuff day. ROTFL. ASCII renderer in action. So here is a log of pygame (The game library for python) updates. Removed a s.p.aaaam infestation from the pygame.org website. Planned next round of improvements for spam fighting. Went over issue tracker adding labels, and replying to things. Thinking about, and closing a few issues. Felt a bit bad about closing some issues, mixed with a bit of relief. Shoulders felt a tiny bit lighter. Set up a new linux box for doing pygame stuff with. Mucked around with pypy nightly. Messed with the python beta. Ya to breakpoint(). No real big breaking changes to the C API uncovered yet. Read the TLS API changes. Thought to myself that latency, and low memory benchmarks would be a good thing to submit. time.time_ns is useful but still a workaround for using floats for time, and there is code out in the wild already using a smaller measurement of time than ns. 1GHz is a nanosecond, and 5Ghz CPUs have b