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Bikesheds: Naming pygame-ctypes; Pronouncements Posted 2006.08.26 09:03 PDT

Sometimes there are just a few too many bikesheds out there just begging to be painted. While I've managed to not quite join the discussions themselves, I just had to share my viewpoint somewhere...

pygame vs ctypes

There have been a couple threads on what to name what may or may not become the new pygame. Most recently a cutesy name pistol was suggested. All because of some hopes to avoid confusion over the original pygame name.

I think the worry about confusion is a red herring, so long as things are properly namespaced. The ctypes implementation is split into two levels: a SDL wrapper, and a pygame compatibility layer. The first comes under the SDL namespace, with entries like SDL.image, SDL.mixer, etc. The pygame compatibility layer should just be another one of these: SDL.pygame.

Then existing code can switch from import pygame to from SDL import pygame if it wants to leverage this layer. No crazy names that nobody understands. No confusion over which is being used. We're done.

TurboGears vs Django

There's a lot of kerfuffle on various python blogs about what Guido van Rossum did or did not pronounce about either TurboGears or Django being the official BDFL choice, and so forth. I have yet to see a single link to text that came from Guido himself. Please stop mountainizing this rumor until there is an email or blog post or video from Guido that the rest of us can read or watch.

As for which I prefer? I'm completely a roll-my-own type, as I only do websites like this one.

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Cankiri 0.2 Posted 2006.08.06 09:01 PDT

I've just released Cankiri 0.2. It's not all that different from 0.1, as most of the changes are to improve the user experience by decreasing unnecessary clicks.

I've made the assumption that when you start Cankiri you want to record, so instead of waiting for you to click the icon, it will automatically bring up the save dialog. I've also added fallbacks so that if you don't have a place for the notification area icon, it will create a little window for just its icon. This isn't pretty, but it ensures that if you can start a recording you can also stop it. The actual recording is then the same. If it worked for you in 0.1, it should still work; if it didn't work, I doubt it will suddenly start working. Let me know if any of these assumptions are a problem for you. I think next release I'll add command line arguments so defaults can be changed; if so I'll probably allow deferring the save dialog.

I have not been able to address a problem in the area selector. Both my friend Pete, and bloodsk are unable to resize it. Pete uses KDE with xinerama on FreeBSD where not only can he not resize the area selector, it shades the part inside. But when he tried Metacity without xinerama it was still immobile. Bloodsk reports being on Ubuntu Dapper, and hopefully will follow up here with what window manager or unusual X settings he might be using.

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