For anyone who plays EVE Online, I have a proposition for you. Myself and a few nerdy corpmates have been working on the django-eve projects, which are a collection of Django apps for EVE Online. We're looking at trying to get more people involved with the project, whether it be providing feedback, patches, or joining up with us longer term.

Our eventual goal as a corporation would be to use these various open-source components ...

As most Django blogs seem to be going with Disqus these days, I set out to try it for myself. The install was simple enough, but Disqus was unable to reach my production site (the one you're looking at) most of the time. Every once in a while, it'd decide that it felt like working, which left me with the normal Disqus comment box. Great.

I tested my shiny new comments by leaving ...

We had to do some things at work using TIFF files with software that relied on the presence of certain TIFF Tags. We're slowly phasing out some legacy C applications with Python equivalents, and decided to use Python Imaging Library for the task.

Everything worked brilliantly, aside from the fact that most of the tags from the original file we were modifying were getting wiped out in the newly saved file. This was a ...

To improve collaboration, the Evennia MUD Server project now has an IRC channel on Freenode, #evennia. We have taken it a step further and linked this up with our test game, so those messing around in-game can still talk/listen on the IMCEvennia channel (which is also replicated to the MudBytes Inter-MUD network).

Evennia is a Python+Twisted+Django-based MUD server. For those that who have no idea what this is, it's a base ...

After a few weeks of slow work, I finally have released python-fedex. This module is a very light wrapper around suds and the Fedex WSDLs. There is very little abstraction, the idea is just to handle the annoying WSDL stuff behind-the-scenes and raise some basic exceptions if really bad things happen.

By figuring out the suds+WSDL end of things, I hope to allow other Python developers to jump into their projects much more quickly ...

It would appear that Snow Leopard 10.6.0 has an issue with client-side DNS resolution. Symptoms include erratic resolution of domain names from local network DNS servers for any command or application using gethostbyname(). However, using the host or nslookup commands resolve things correctly.

The current best resource for this issue is a thread on the Apple support forums. There are all kinds of suggestions as to what the problem is and all kinds ...

As the title suggests, Python 2.6 may now be compiled without problem via MacPorts on Snow Leopard. The issue was fixed early in the weekend. Onward!

After a few hours of play, it seems like EVE on Snow Leopard brings a noticeable improvement on several fronts. First and foremost, there is a definite increase in framerate and performance with multiple clients open. I can not quantify this scientifically (or am too lazy to do so).

One of the other things that I'm really hyped about is that this brand new Macbook Pro runs a lot cooler with two EVE clients ...

We started experiencing AFP problems and general instability on one of our Mac OS X servers today. AFP locked up and sucked a lot of resources, caused some bogus error messages in the logs. Kept getting this in particular:

AppleFileServer[4806] MDSChannelPeerCreate: (os/kern) invalid argument

It looks like this may be due to a permissions problem on one of the root drives our AFP server is making available to clients. Looking at the files ...

I just thought I'd provide a friendly heads up to the Django and Python communities that the Python 2.6 distributed with MacPorts does not compile on Snow Leopard as of now. This issue is outlined on MacPorts ticket #20284.

There are some really hacky work-arounds, but they are not for the feint of heart. This is reportedly an upstream Python problem, and has been reported as such by the MacPorts community. While Python ...