Planet PySoy

Arc Riley: adding full Python support to Vala

Arc Riley (noreply@blogger.com) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:13:52 +0000

We've found a way to finish full Python support for Vala; plugin support will be added to valac soon and a PyObject plugin added to our distutils extension for handling Vala and Genie extension source files.

I'll be focusing on this over the next two weeks, with a target on Python 3.1. We're going with 3.1 as baseline for PyCapsule, which will help ensure type safety when passing GType objects through Python.

In the meantime work on libsoy can continue by the rest of the team.

Arc Riley: vala support beyond python-3.0.vapi

Arc Riley (noreply@blogger.com) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:05:03 +0000

While the vapi is still a primary need, we also need PyObject and PyTypeObject support in Vala itself to generate the correct code.

This will result in both cleaner .vala source and more readable generated .c code, so this time investment will pay off in PySoy development in the long run.

Arc Riley: the sad state of domain registrars

Arc Riley (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:27:39 +0000

My first business, started when I was 17, was an ISP - run out of my bedroom with a Portmaster and Redhat servers. I offered some unused bandwidth for a Tucows mirror and was later offered to join their pilot OpenSRS program.

Of course, there's many OpenSRS resellers today. Anyone paying a nominal fee can get setup to sell $10/year domain names purchased as bulk domain credits from OpenSRS. It's a great service that has really opened up hosting and registration for small businesses.

When pysoy.org was registered, I went with an OpenSRS reseller called IPower who was advertising domain registration at only a small margin above cost. The first trouble we ran into was, while the credit card was charged and control panel access granted, the registrations didn't actually get done on OpenSRS. It took 3+ hours on the phone with a tech support rep who finally had to re-create the accounts to get the registrations through their flaky system.

Their control panel was made of a series of icons, appearing to have been made using Windows Paint, with almost all of them not working because I wasn't getting hosting from them. After quite awhile of clicking into poorly named icons I found that it would not allow me to update the nameservers, but would allow me to setup custom zone files on their nameservers - with a limited number of subdomains.

Now I will say, this has been working mostly trouble-free since 2006. Last year my former partner, who was paying for these domains on his credit card, elected to remove his card from the account and we disabled auto-renewal. This year their notices for renewal ended up in my spam folder, and they ignored or reset the auto-renew settings, charging his card once again. He calls them, where they set him up as the authorized contact (note, his name only appears as the credit card owner which was removed a year prior, he is none of the domain contacts) in the agreement that he chooses not to challenge their illegal charges to his card and they agree to remove his card from the accounts. In short, it wasn't worth $30 to fight it.

Now, everything is amicable between us, but their willingness to add someone to my account without contacting me is a bit frightening. In checking my spam folder this morning I noticed some new emails from them stating that they would now also be charging $8.99 per domain for domain privacy, which was previously free and which payment was never agreed to, unless I opted-out by tomorrow.

Of course, calling them wouldn't be so easy, after three attempts to contact billing only to get put on hold for ~10 minutes each only to get dead air and a "click". After speaking to several reps, who all demanded the security code set by my former partner when he called (which I don't have) and over an hour struggling to get their control panel to give me new passwords, I finally get a security code set for one of the reps to speak to me. His tells me "a specialist" will get back to me about removing domain privacy.

I am very tired of this, and the truth is this only slightly worse than my experience with most domain registrars. I'm going to do what I should have done in 2006, near the end of the registration periods of all my domains I'm just going to transfer them to my own OpenSRS reseller account and pay the flat $10/year.

I'll extend this to any other free software project managers out there, if you're tired of dealing with crap like what I've gone through with IPower, I'll give you at-cost pricing on your domains. If your site is Python-powered (WSGI) I'll throw in hosting for a beer next time you see me.

My email address is my full name @ubuntu.com.

Arc Riley: pysoy.org website upgrades

Arc Riley (noreply@blogger.com) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:29:32 +0000

As some have noted, we recently added an ad to PySoy's website. This is actually only one of the many changes to prepare for the beta3 release.

I'll be putting in a good deal of work over the next few weeks upgrading the website for HTML/5 and XMPP, better separation of functionality to subdomains and standardizing the templates between these subdomains and hg.pysoy.org and planet.pysoy.org/.

Help is, of course, always sought and welcome! If you're good with CSS or want some experience working with HTML/5 drop me a line.

Arc Riley: Vala migration continues

Arc Riley (noreply@blogger.com) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:36:37 +0000

We're pretty far into the big Vala migration now, enough to talk about where we're going with it.

The most notable new component is libsoy, a glib-based library written in Vala that integrates all our dependencies to provide the non-Python functionality of PySoy.

This abstraction ensures that all PySoy's background threads remain GIL-free and will be useful for many implementations of "cloud gaming", which I'll go into more detail on later.

The largest task remaining is python-3.0.vapi, which will allow us to write the Python extension modules for libsoy. These will not be simple Python bindings which could be provided with PyBank as PySoy includes many complex Python datatypes which the gobject model cannot provide.

Joju Lucas: First article, aheh, yes, it's a technical one again

James Bourne (noreply@blogger.com) — Fri, 08 May 2009 03:55:55 +0000

What is a better way to contribute to an open source project as effective and efficient as you can?
I have been working with pysoy for three days, all things are new for me, so it is natural to think about finding a better way to handle its characteristics and to extend it.

As my role in PySoy is basically a google summer code student, so I should always keep in mind my original proposal subject, that is to add character animation into PySoy.
Be in traditional suitation, I would find the fastest method to add as much structures and functions of character animation as I can. But it is really impossible to do so in current status
of PySoy. There are two reasons: first, programming-in-the-large the framework for module addition of PySoy is currently not mature; second, I don't know much of the languages PySoy says, programming-in-the-small.

All members of PySoy are now actively working for PySoy's beta 3 release, then the first reason may probably be alleviated. Even though the situation isn't perfect, I will feel not
wasting time to find a module addition framework rather than now struggling with semi-completed framework. At this moment, let focus on the second issue.

PySoy uses three programming languages C++\C, Vala, Python now. Python is the essential advantage of PySoy. PySoy is a 3D game engine for Python. Python is a script language and now scripts for 3D game engine. Admittedly, python is only a high level script language, all graphics, physics and windows functions are implemented in C\C++, indeed they
are Gobjects. Then we inevitably need glue language, that is first pyrex, now vala(see "so long, Pyrex!"http://planet.pysoy.org/)

Now the major work of mine is to find the way to implement character animation using Gobject and convert the functions into vala, assuming vala will do all the work of providing
python a interface. Be clear about all these, we can consider more design and implement work. The design work means we should take into account the engine framework proactively more or less before really deal with Gobject engine core construction, they must be extensible, flexible, modular and loose-coupling. The implementation one is how to write character animation code in Gobjects. To say some, character is hierarchical ODE object, and there may be OpenGL shaders.
Besides, deep understanding of vala's design objectives, among Gobject, python and PySoy's are very helpful to contribute to PySoy.
Recent schedule and objectives:
The timeline is rough totally combined May 8 - June 20.

1、Write an example articular character animation using Gobjects as other PySoy examples did.
2、Using vala to translate all the code above into Python extension lib.
3、Embed the lib output above into PySoy and the test python example will be checked.

Joju Lucas

James Bourne (noreply@blogger.com) — Mon, 04 May 2009 05:28:32 +0000

人并不是在有时间时才培养耐心；正确的观念应该是：由于人学会了有耐心，所以才拥有比足够还要多的时间。

Arc Riley: summer of code students announced

Arc Riley (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 02:53:24 +0000

It's been a stressful few weeks, but we've selected 30 students to work with the Python Software Foundation for Google's Summer of Code.

I don't know what I was thinking in volunteering to be the PSF's admin this year, but I'm happy to have had the opportunity. I believe we have more students working on core Python projects this year than all previous years and certainly a good start with getting students involved in our community.

There's a lot more work to be done; getting students setup on the SoC Python planet, getting all the backup mentors and coordinators organized, making sure students are taking advantage of the community bonding period, etc.

PySoy ended up with one student, Jo Yo (aka Lucas Westine) working on character animation. He worked with the Ogre3d team last year on a similar project. He's being mentored by Eric Stein (aka Toba) who wrote PySoy's soy.fields module as a Summer of Code student in 2007.