Lonely Lion

Mark Ramm, one of the authors of the Turbogears book gave us a Turbogears overview, followed by Ian presenting his Web 3000 framework ZjangoGears. Hopefully he’ll have a screencast online soon, it’s going to give a lot of Web Developers something to think about.

“”With a decade’s worth of self-released cassettes (if ever a medium matched its contents, this is it!) and their first official banner LP on Dead Beat Records and CD on Trick Knee Records in 2004, you’d think there’d be some sort of mud and twig statue up there in Wisconsin dedicated to them.”

From Victim of Time.

hehe.

Quit being so goddamn cool! How am I supposed to hate you?!

You released a robot studio?!

Come on?! That’s awesome.

Yesterday you released a game studio, today a robotics studio.

Phew. That is really awesome. Awesome.

ArsTechnica explains it better than me.

My favorite excerpt:

Back in the late eighties and early nineties, small groups of hobbyist coders broke into the video game business by creating exciting new games on the Amiga, an open computer platform that had many advantages for developing the popular 2D side-scrolling games of the day. With nothing but a few magazines and a compiler, dedicated coders could create something that rivalled the output of the big game houses.

With the move to 3D gaming, development has become more complex, and, outside of the mod community, it has been difficult for small teams or individuals to create games that can stand next to the industry heavyweights. Many of the people on the XNA team either were involved with or remember the glory days of the Amiga gaming scene and its independent coders, and they are anxious to see if those times can come again.

As evidence of the homebrew PC game creation community of the 80’s, check out this archive of Computer Gaming World. There’s plenty of review articles, just like in modern gaming magazines, but there’s an awful lot of content aimed at readers that were making games.

Good work Microsoft, hopefully this will catch on.

From the book, “Here again is a recurring theme of this book: at its worst, web development is boring and monotonous.”

That’s going on the Lion front page.

From day seven of the Perl Advent Calendar:


1 use Acme::Don't;
2
3 #The following does nothing
4 don't{
5 print "Dear Santa,\n";
6 printf("I want %i %s", int(1+9*rand), $_) foreach ;
7 print “k thx luv janie\n”
8 }
9 __END__
10 ponies
11 puppies
12 ipods


The don't function doesn’t do a block of code. It’s like an extended comment. Why’s that awesome? I have no idea. It just is. It’s the thing I love most about Perl, sometimes it totally doesn’t make sense.

Thanks to Brian Lloyd for commenting on my last C# post, I found this translation of the XNA studio examples into IronPython.

So, it looks like you can use IronPython to write games in the XNA framework, which means you can write Xbox 360 games in Python.

That…is…awesome.

The Django weblog is pointing to several Django v. Rails reports. If you’re a software engineer, and you need to make a recommendation to your boss about a web framework, I can see how having some research to back up your decision is valuable. However, in general, these kinds of exercises make me limp.

I have two world-facing Django projects (Victim of Time and Tastebud), and one internal Rails work project. I love all three of my web children equally. I never want any of them to feel superior to any other. They’re all my creations, and they’ll always be taken care of.

Actually, here’s the really gaspy part. The work Rails project? It’s actually broken into three pieces. Two of those pieces are written in Python, one of which uses DJANGO! Dogs and cats! Living together!

Oh Microsoft, you’re finally doing something I can get behind.

This Xbox 360 stuff is cool.

Egads.

What is that? It’s a bunch of games written on the XNA “platform” using free tools from Microsoft. The development environment is Game Studio Express, a free tool promising to allow drag and drop game? Neat eh? Except, underneath the eye candy, you write your code in C#.

I hate to say it…really, it makes my skin crawl, but that whole thing gets me pretty excited. In a fit of childish glee, I bought an Xbox 360 last night. I was planning on getting a Wii, but when I really looked at the games, I decided I’d rather shoot aliens than help an ape get to banana town. The cherry on top was Microsoft’s new committment to “opening up a unique publishing avenue which will democratize game development on consoles.” Those are their own words, straight from their FAQ. Is that exciting? Hell yes.

Really though, do I want to learn C#? Not much. But I will, just so I can make a Cotton and Tulip go to Kitten Town game. That will be glorious. Besides, with M$ embracing the Python how far away could a Python implementation of XNA be? Maybe?