prostoalex writes "Chris McAvoy is a UNIX administrator and an owner of two cats. So as a natural application of his work to his hobby he built this Linux-based cat feeder. A little hardware hacking and Python scripting can get you a device that would automatically disperse a yummy fish at specified intervals."

Dutch Dopey writes "In an interview with Lars Gustavsson of DICE, it was mentioned that Battlefield 2's modding tools are going to be delivered with the game, and that the tools are the same ones used to develop the game. The modding language in use is Python, and will support all aspects of the language.

Eric Giguere writes "Python is now available for use on Nokia's Series 60 platform (versions 1 and 2), the operating system used on a number of popular cellphones like the 6600 and less popular ones like the N-Gage. It's Python 2.2.2 with additional modules for platform-specific stuff like SMS messaging. It's an alternative to C++ or Java, though no devices are shipping with Python preinstalled as of yet."

An anonymous reader writes "Take Two Interactive announced today that they have acquired the rights to the Civilization franchise. They also announced Civ 4, saying that "Civilization IV will also set a new standard for user-modification, allowing gamers to create their own add-ons using the standard Python and XML scripting languages." Okay, so XML's not a scripting language. But it's nice to see open source tech in a major PC game!" Civ IV will be released under the new 2K Publishing Label we reported on yesterday.

Dr Twox writes "The Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces has received a $2 million dollar boost from a multi-national corporation to further develop Jef Raskin's RCHI project, a radical new and simple to way interact with computers. Co-creator of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface, Raskin hopes to have RCHI finished within 18 months. "When you actually try it," says Jef. "It actually does what we say. We've got the goods." It's built with Python and SDL, so how long before someone ports this to *nix?"

Newly released TextWrangler 2.0 is now free (as in beer). TextWrangler is a stripped-down version of the popular BBEdit text editor. TextWrangler has switched identities since 1.0, from being a text editor with an indeterminant purpose to a subset of BBEdit, a BBEdit Lite on steroids. It handles syntax coloring, scripting tools (perl, python, shell), and some Xcode integration. It does not include some of BBEdit's more advanced features like source control, CodeWarrior integration, glossaries, and creating text factories (though it can run existing saved factories). BBEdit remains $200, and TextWrangler still qualifies for BBEdit's $130 cross-upgrade price. Previous purchasers of TextWrangler qualify for a store credit (they will be notified via e-mail).

soren.harward writes "The New Scientist has an article about TinyP2P, the world's smallest P2P app. It's 15 lines of Python code brought to us by Edward Felten, CS Professor at Princeton and outspoken supporter of the digital rights the Slashdot community holds so dear. He wrote the program as a proof-of-concept that P2P apps are really easy to write, don't have to be complicated, and thus banning them (a la the INDUCE Act) is pointless and silly."

Python for Series 60 has been released on the Forum Nokia website. The release notes included in the package seem to give a fairly realistic image of the current status, and the demo apps and documentation seem to be quite good. The supplied documents even hint that there might be an OpenGL-API in the future. Alas, the emulator package seems to be for Windows only, as are the required S60 SDKs.

Robert Nagle writes "Over the last year, Zope and Plone have gained mindshare as open source web application servers. In the last few months, two books have come out about how to use, extend and administer Plone. One is Andy McKay's Definitive Guide to Plone (available for free online), and the other is Julie Meloni's Plone Content Management Essentials." Read on for Nagle's review of both books.

nile_list writes "Edward Felten of the very fine Freedom to Tinker has written a 15 line P2P program in Python. From the post on Freedom to Tinker, "I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless." Matthew Scala, a reader of Freedom to Tinker, has responded with the 9 line MoleSter, written in Perl."

whit537 asks: "Anyone who uses Gmail for 5 minutes can see that it's a pretty dern sophisticated web application. But just how sophisticated? Well, first of all, the UI is composed of no less than nine iframes (try turning off the page styles in Firefox with View > Page Style). But then consider that these iframes are generated and controlled by a 1149 line javascript. This script includes no less than 1001 functions, and 998 of these functions have one- or two-letter names! They're obviously not maintaining this script by hand in that form. So do they write human-readable javascripts and then run them all together, or have they developed some sort of web app UI toolkit in Python? Does Gmail need to be this complex or is the obfuscation a deliberate attempt to prevent reverse-engineering? And are there any other web apps that are this sophisticated?"

jg21 writes "Although this reader-compiled list of software development's giants omits pioneers like George Boole, John Louis von Neumann, and the 'Forgotten Father of the Computer' John Vincent Atanasoff - among others - it does a pretty good job of mapping the Code Masters, from Alan Turing who gave us the algorithm, to Klaus Knopper the one-man band behind Knoppix. They're mostly here - the inventors of C, C++, C#, Java, and Python; example. There are a couple of programmers who have snuck in more for their business acumen than their programming talent, like the former Powersoft/Sybase CEO Mitchell Kertzman but otherwise the 40 nominees seem pretty 'pure' and the overall idea is to narrow the list down to the Top Twenty Software People in the World - a phrase invented by Tim Bray, who blogged that Adam Bosworth would be among them. Be careful what you wish for when blogging - looks like Bray's about to find out who the community thinks the the 19 others are."

ClintonRNixon writes "A new open-source tabletop RPG has been released, The Shadow of Yesterday. People have been putting RPGs online for free for years, and Wizards of the Coast has their Open Game License, but this is the first time a game has been written and published using only open-source tools, and is published under a Creative Commons license. To make the online version, vi and Python Docutils were used; the published game was laid out using Scribus, The Gimp, and OpenOffice."

mAriuZ writes "In many ways, it seems like Python and Parrot are from different planets. In Python, the general approach seems to be to reduce everything possible to a canonical form as early as possible, and then deal with everything consistently. In Parrot, the general approach seems to be to leave everything in its original form as long as possible, and then deal with everything separately."

Amit Upadhyay writes "KDE's award winning integrated development environment KDevelop, has integrated support for Ruby, an excellent and easy to use object oriented scrpting language. If you are looking for a good programming tool for quickly developing a professional one off application, Ruby (with KDE bindings) maybe just the thing for you. There is a quick tutorial and an online book to get you started. You may also want to read a quite informative comparison of Python with Ruby. If you are web developer or write enterprise applications with JAVA etc, take a look at Ruby on Rails(api), they have a nice blog too. KDevelop provides a GUI builder and Debugger for rapid application development(RAD) with Ruby, which is getting better. There is a nice tutorial on using KDE libraries with Ruby. And if you have lots of code in C/C++, extending Ruby to use them is easy.
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Eibwen writes "For the upcoming release of Monty Python's Spamalot, Hormel foods is giving the first 100 customers who purchase a ticket a golden can of honey grail spam."

Jonathan Edwards writes "The Lightweight Languages Workshop (LL4) will be webcast live from MIT tomorrow. Previous years have seen lively discussions between the proponents of languages like Perl, Python, and Scheme. Check out the program at the website."

Eventh writes "The final release of Python 2.4 was just released. Python 2.4 is the result of almost 18 month's worth of work on top of Python 2.3. New features are, but not limited to, function decorators, generator expressions, a number of new module and more. Check out Andrew Kuchling's What's New In Python for a detailed view of some of the new features of Python 2.4. "

An anonymous reader writes "Check out this blog entry in Loosely Coupled about ActiveGrid's new open source Grid Application Server based on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack. Not to start another PHP vs. Java flame war, but it looks like LAMP is starting to grow up, and that it is much better suited for next generation applications than J2EE."

DarkLaser writes "When's the last time you played Scotland Yard? A version called London Law, written by Paul Pelzl, is now in beta. Its updated status can be seen on the freshmeat information page. It is written in Python, and intended to be able to run on Linux, BSD, Mac, and Windows."