Evennia MUD server gets BSD’d

As of a few days ago, the Evennia MUD server has been re-licensedunder the BSD License. We feel like this will knock down another barrier for those considering running a game with Evennia. I can’t recommend this codebase enough for anyone who may have caught the MUD development itch (hey, they still exist!). Griatch has been doing an awesome job making improvements and building a community.

Evennia is an advanced Python+Django MUD server, with all sorts of goodies (like a web-based client). While the project has been going on for a number of years, the community has been growing a bit faster over the last year or two. We hope this will help continue that trend.

Feel free to stop by #evennia on FreeNode IRC to lurk, hang out, or ask questions.

python-fedex and colormath re-licensed under BSD

I am happy to announce that python-fedex and python-colormath havebeen re-licensed under the BSD License. At the time these two packages were created, there were reasons for GPL’ing these. However, said reasons have long since been removed, so it’s BSD time!

My involvement with both of these projects has been minimal since I joined DUO Interactive, since we don’t have a use for either. However, my hope is that a more permissive license will encourage contributions. I still review pull requests for both of these when they appear, and would be very much open to capable individuals taking over maintainership of either.

python-bluefin 1.3 released

python-bluefin 1.3 has been released, now with improved errorhandling. The major feature in this release is that we have smoothed over some inconsistencies in Bluefin’s error handling.

Instead of setting an HTTP status code indicating an error like they do for most of the Bluefin API errors, we get an HTTP 200 back, and a rarely used attribute in the response contains an error flag, with another rarely used attribute containing a cryptic error message. Since you need to handle invalid credit card numbers and authorization failures gracefully, we now return a different exception (that still inherits from what was previously returned). We also provide a more friendly error message for the authorization-related errors, that are not user-friendly, or human-friendly.

Of course, you can still access the original exception message through Exception.raw_message. See the changelog for full details.

This release is backwards compatible, it’ll just give you better granularity in your error handling.

Get it from the PyPi page, or by installing ‘bluefin’ from pip/easy_install.

python-bluefin 1.2 released, sans urllib2

python-bluefin 1.2 has been released. python-bluefin is a very thinwrapper around the Bluefin payment gateway’s API. The two major changes are:

• urllib2 has been removed, with the excellent requests taking its place.
• We now check directmode’s status_code for known failure codes and raise exceptions based on what we find. Previously, no exception was raised, which would result in a silent failure if you weren’t looking at status_code yourself.

To install, either easy_install/pip install bluefin, or download directly from its PyPi page.

Mountain Lion observations so far

As some of the software I use on my Macbook Pro now requires at least10.7, I had to retire my trusty Snow Leopard a few weeks ago. After a few weeks of using Mountain Lion, I’ve got things mostly straightened out to where I’m productive again. A few random observations:

The Good

• I appreciate being able to download the 10.8 upgrade digitally, and open it directly on the desktop like any other application. This is easy enough for most people to figure out quite easily.
• Things do seem a little more snappy on my mid-2010 MBP. Nothing drastic, but less beachball-of-despair.
• After getting spoiled by Ubuntu’s Unity notifications, it’s really nice to see Apple implement something similar. Gave me an excuse to uninstall Growl.
• Being able to grab the XCode suite from the App store is more convenient than having to mess around with Apple’s funky developer site.

The Bad

• The reversal of the default scroll direction upgrading an existing 10.6 install, was very abrupt and unnecessary. For upgrades, they should probably preserve the old settings when possible. Sometimes software companies do stuff just to be different for the hell of it. I get the sense that this was one such example of this behavior. It doesn’t make life better or easier. This got set back to the original behavior.
• The auto-hiding of scrollbars was similarly unecessary. Vertical space is at a premium with these laptop monitors, but there is loads of horizontal space. I really like being able to see how far into something I am without doing any goofy finger tapping, so this ended up getting set back to “Scrollbars always visible.” Here’s how to make them stay visible.
• The “overscroll” bouncing when scrolling past a page’s top or bottom limits is strangely disconcerting on a desktop OS for me. I’m not sure why I dislike it so much, but I find it jarring. Maybe if it bounced less. Here’s how to disable it.

The Ugly

• The 10.8 install completely flips its shit when encountering Linux partitions, to the point where you can’t proceed with installation. There are various ways to attempt to fix this, but I eventually ended up sacrificing the Linux partitions temporarily. Bummer. Some people have figured out how to correct the various errors you get here, but this wasn’t quite worked around on day 1 when I upgraded.