Bought and installed…

Best game ever.

Update: Just for reference, that screenshot was taken at 800×600 and all the texture and model details turned down to either normal or low.

Ordered a new power supply for my main desktop PC tonight. This is part of my continuing quest to figure out why my PC seems to lock up when I’m playing 3D intensive games…

Update: Shipped from Memphis, TN with a scheduled delivery date of 10/12/2006. w00t!

Irssi participated in the Google Summer of Code which ended on September 8, 2006. They had a pretty good list of proposal ideas, including one to add script bindings for Ruby, PHP, Python, and/or other languages:

Irssi already has extensive bindings for Perl scripts. This project would add bindings for other languages, including Ruby, PHP and/or Python, which would allow scripts written in those languages most of the capabilities currently afforded to Perl scripts. At the minimum, the ability to access information about windows, window items, and nicks, to bind signals, add commands, statusbar items, and settings, and to manage redirections, timeouts, and formats would be required.

My guess is that is how Christopher Davis’s proposal for Python Script Bindings for Irssi began. Quoth Christopher:

My Irssi module will provide the features to Python scripts afforded by the Perl bindings: servers, windows, window items, nicks, signals, commands, status bar items, settings, redirections, timeouts, and formats. Python is an easy language to learn, and users who know Python but not Perl may take a greater interest in Irssi.

After a little checking I noticed there is now an irssi-python module in SVN, so it looks like some progress has been made. Unfortunately no one in the #irssi channel seemed to know much about the project and had no idea when such a feature would be merged into the the trunk. Oh well…

If you need to map addresses to lat/lon coordinates, you’ll be interested to know that geopy 0.93 has been released:

Geopy is a geocoding toolbox for Python. It includes support for many popular geocoders including Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Virtual Earth, geocoder.us, GeoNames, MediaWiki (with the GIS extension), and Semantic MediaWiki. It also includes a module for calculating geodesic distances using different models (spherical and ellipsoidal).

The geopy website has a lot of examples to get you started. And there’s more info about the release on Brian’s blog.

Update: The Cheese Shop version appears to be for Python 2.4 only, so I don’t think you can use easy_install to install it if you are running Python 2.5.

Update 2: According to Brian’s comment below, there’s a geopy version for Python 2.5 now. So I would assume that easy_install will work just fine.

A few months ago I read about ORMs and (SQLAlchemy in particular) and decided it was time to start using them in my scripts for database access.

Now, I have no problem writing some SQL. But being able to handle database information as objects and getting closer to database independence (e.g. SQLite vs. MySQL) seemed like a good thing. So after hearing about how Django will be including SQLAlchemy in the future, I decided it was time to give it another try.

I made sure pysqlite was up to date, and installed SQLAlchemy via easy_install.

Much to my surprise I found that between the excellent 0.2 documentation on the main site, and some helpful tutorials on the web, I was able to start creating/updating databases in no time.

Also, as a side note, I had no problem getting SQLAlchemy to work with the built-in SQLite3 in Python 2.5.

In case you missed it, Pylons 0.9.2 was released in September.

XML.com has an article up called Introducing WSGI: Python’s Secret Web Weapon by James Gardner.

Here’s the summary:

The recent Python 2.5 release features the addition of the Web Server Gateway Interface Utilities and Reference Implementation package (wsgiref) to Python’s standard library.

In this two-part article, we will look at what the Web Server Gateway Interface is, how to use it to write web applications, and how to use middleware components to quickly add powerful functionality. Before diving into these topics, we will also take a brief look at why the specification was created in the first place.

If you are trying wrap your head around the whole web framework and WSGI thing, this article might help.

If you run Firefox Portable from a USB drive, you are probably used to seeing the splash screen that is displayed before the browser starts up. If you want to disable the splash screen, here’s how to do it.

Make a copy of the example FirefoxPortable.ini file located the FirefoxPortableSource subdirectory and put it in your main FirefoxPortable directory. Edit the new .ini file so that DisableSplashScreen is set to ‘true’.

For example, here’s what my FirefoxPortable.ini currently looks like:

[FirefoxPortable] FirefoxDirectory=App\firefox ProfileDirectory=Data\profile PluginsDirectory=Data\plugins UserProfileDirectory=Data\userprofile FirefoxExecutable=firefox.exe AdditionalParameters= LocalHomepage= DisableSplashScreen=true AllowMultipleInstances=false SkipChromeFix=false SkipCompregFix=false WaitForFirefox=false RunLocally=false

Save the file and restart Firefox Portable. No more splash screen.

Update 11/28/06: It would appear that this method does not work in Firefox Portable 2.0. Any ideas?

Update 2/6/07: Fixed! See the comments below.