Quoth Jamis:

Ok, I’m putting out a few feelers here for people that would be interested in helping to test a nascent Basecamp API. The documentation is currently minimal, and you would be well-served by having a bit of Ruby experience (because that’s what the documentation is, currently). Also, we would ask that you not distribute details about the API. If you are interested, please email [me]. No promises you’ll get to help, though — it all depends on how many (or how few) people volunteer.

I’m not currently a Basecamp user (although I have tried it out), but having a usable API might be what gets me to take another serious look at it. It’s a great tool as it is, with a very slick interface. Allowing me to write some scripts to automate things would just be too cool.

Sounds like some sort of polite NDA will be in effect, which is entirely understandable. If you are interested, Jamis’ email address is in the original post. I didn’t want to repost it here.

Update: Jason Fried says, “API is 90% done. Hang tight everyone. It’s on deck.”

Still plugging away at PyGame. Tonight I took my bouncing marine from last night and tried to make it a little more game-like.

I was able to add background music (e1m1), change the sprite depending on the direction of movement, and show a shooting sprite and play a shotgun sound when the return key is pressed:

Still a far cry from a complete game, but I’d call it definite progress!

After reading about the PyWeek Python Game Programming Challenge, I decided to take a closer look at PyGame:

Pygame is a set of Python modules designed for writing games. It is written on top of the excellent SDL library. This allows you to create fully featured games and multimedia programs in the python language. Pygame is highly portable and runs on nearly every platform and operating system.

So tonight I installed PyGame on my Windows box and fired up Komodo…

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The details of the next PyWeek Game Programming Challenge have been released:

The date for the second PyWeek challenge has been set: Sunday 26th March to Sunday 2nd April (00:00UTC to 00:00UTC).

The PyWeek challenge invites entrants to write a game in one week from scratch either as an individual or in a team. Entries must be developed in Python, during the challenge, and must incorporate some theme chosen at the start of the challenge.

The challenge doesn’t start until March, so even if you’ve never touched PyGame or done GUI development (like me!), there is still time to learn.

The rules are available at the PyWeek Challenge website.

Update: Looks like people are already thinking about their entries.

This is almost a year old, but r00tshell has an AllOfMP3 client that’s written in Python. Really only useful if you download your music from the Russians, but it might be decent example code. There is also an enhanced version by Randi Mooney.

Brian Ray asks a question that I know many people have asked:

IPython, a Python interactive shell developed for the scientific computing community by Fernando Perez is such a powerful tool, I just may replace my default login settings from just bash directly to IPython over bash.

How may people do this? I mean really! Is it practical to cross this line?

Heh. I’d like to hear about the experiences of people who have tried it.

Also, if you aren’t familiar with IPython, you can check out Enhanced Interactive Python with IPython. It’ll get you up to speed.

Update: The newly released IPython 0.7.1 will be the last release with Fernando Perez as the maintainer of the stable branch:

This release marks the end of my tenure on the stable branch of ipython. Ville Vainio will continue as maintainer of the ipython trunk, while I will continue working on the development branch of IPython (chainsaw). I will remain available on the list as usual, both to assist Ville as needed, and to discuss withe anyone interested. But I’ll try to limit my time and effort spent on trunk to a minimum, so we can really advance the (fairly ambitious) chainsaw project.

PyDelicious is a Python library/module that allows you to easily access the Del.icio.us API. The new 0.3.0 version fixes some serious breakage that existed in the previous version.

Stomp*3’s PyPDF is a Python library for working with PDFs:

A Pure-Python library built as a PDF toolkit. At present, there is only one actual tool in the toolkit - the ability to grab pages from PDFs and output them into a new PDF. Like a hammer, this tool is useful for two operations: splitting and merging. You can extract individual pages from a PDF file, or selectively merge pages from multiple PDF files.

By being Pure-Python, it should run on any Python platform without any dependencies on external libraries. It can also work entirely on StringIO objects rather than file streams, allowing for PDF manipulation in memory. It is therefore a useful tool for websites that manage or manipulate PDFs.

There’s even some example code on the site to get you started.

DenyHosts is a Python script that is “intended to be run by Linux system administrators to help thwart ssh server attacks.” Basically it takes a look at your logs, scanning for hosts that have attempted to connect to your ssh daemon. It then automatically adds any hosts that appear to be attempting to hack into your system to /etc/hosts.deny, permanantly blocking them.

It is made to be run from cron or as a daemon, so it continually checks for offending hosts and automatically adds them to the blacklist. Just let it run in the background and it does the work. It’s really a pretty slick idea.

So I loaded it on my Gentoo box to try it out…

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Quoth Max Ischenko:

TurboGears is the first major open source project I feel like actively contributing to. It’s still in the early stage of development which is no good for users but great for developers — feeling the power to “make a difference” and be able to push the shape of the project is great.

Cool! TurboGears appears to being doing a great job of getting releases out to the masses while fostering an accepting and active community of developers.