moving to Bullet

Bullet has some really great features over ODE; soft body physics, particle physics, and hardware acceleration among the top.

After talking with a Crystal Space developer about this, I put it on my list of things to look into when PySoy is a bit more mature. However, a Debian packager's decision has accelerated these plans.

ODE is not designed to be installed as a single shared library, it has many build-time options which radically change it's behaviour - such as whether the library uses single or double precision, or whether to calculate gyroscopic force. As a general rule, distributions stick to the defaults when packaging as much as possible, but Debian (and thus Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros) ship a single system-wide library with non-default compile flags (Double precision) that would result in sub-par performance, network sync issues, and in some cases bugs in games.

Debian could have shipped four or eight different versions of the ODE library, such that games could be linked against the one it was designed for and work as expected, or ODE could have been designed to build both a single and double precision library with the other options as runtime flags, but instead we game developers are caught in the middle.

We fought this battle before with Soya, for some time actually, and in the end Soya had to ship their own version of ODE embedded in the source and statically linked to get around the problem. Even then it was an issue to get the package including a static ODE included. It's a battle not worth fighting.

While Bullet also supports building as double precision, it's an option so rarely used that no distro builds with it (Gentoo doesn't even have a USE flag to switch it), and given that Bullet is currently not packaged for Debian it'd be easier to add it as a new proper package than fight Debian packages to improve their build of ODE.

I am not looking forward to working with Bullet's incomplete C-API, likely having to fill in some gaps as we work on it, nor writing the Vala bindings for Bullet, but it'd be a lot faster and fun - not to mention resulting in new features.

beta-3 roadmap updated

I updated the Roadmap for 1.0-beta3 today.

In short, we're dropping ambitions for audio support in this release. Once our migration to Vala is complete and the related changes implemented we'll release without further delay. After that we'll begin work on the newer features like audio, networking, and browser embedding for beta4 while the community tests and gives feedback on beta3.

There are a lot of new features already compared to the beta2 release. We're aiming for a beta3 release by January 1st 2010, 2 years from the beta2 release.

Kudos for Mercurial going GPLv2+

The largest problem with integrating Mercurial with our new web framework is being resolved; they are upgrading Mercurial's license to GPLv2 or later.

Thanks to this, our favoured dVCS will be available for integrating into GPLv3 and AGPLv3 licensed projects without any weird hacks or work-arounds.

adding full Python support to Vala

We've found a way to finish full Python support for Vala; plugin support will be added to valac soon and a PyObject plugin added to our distutils extension for handling Vala and Genie extension source files.

I'll be focusing on this over the next two weeks, with a target on Python 3.1. We're going with 3.1 as baseline for PyCapsule, which will help ensure type safety when passing GType objects through Python.

In the meantime work on libsoy can continue by the rest of the team.

vala support beyond python-3.0.vapi

While the vapi is still a primary need, we also need PyObject and PyTypeObject support in Vala itself to generate the correct code.

This will result in both cleaner .vala source and more readable generated .c code, so this time investment will pay off in PySoy development in the long run.

the sad state of domain registrars

My first business, started when I was 17, was an ISP - run out of my bedroom with a Portmaster and Redhat servers. I offered some unused bandwidth for a Tucows mirror and was later offered to join their pilot OpenSRS program.

Of course, there's many OpenSRS resellers today. Anyone paying a nominal fee can get setup to sell $10/year domain names purchased as bulk domain credits from OpenSRS. It's a great service that has really opened up hosting and registration for small businesses.

When pysoy.org was registered, I went with an OpenSRS reseller called IPower who was advertising domain registration at only a small margin above cost. The first trouble we ran into was, while the credit card was charged and control panel access granted, the registrations didn't actually get done on OpenSRS. It took 3+ hours on the phone with a tech support rep who finally had to re-create the accounts to get the registrations through their flaky system.

Their control panel was made of a series of icons, appearing to have been made using Windows Paint, with almost all of them not working because I wasn't getting hosting from them. After quite awhile of clicking into poorly named icons I found that it would not allow me to update the nameservers, but would allow me to setup custom zone files on their nameservers - with a limited number of subdomains.

Now I will say, this has been working mostly trouble-free since 2006. Last year my former partner, who was paying for these domains on his credit card, elected to remove his card from the account and we disabled auto-renewal. This year their notices for renewal ended up in my spam folder, and they ignored or reset the auto-renew settings, charging his card once again. He calls them, where they set him up as the authorized contact (note, his name only appears as the credit card owner which was removed a year prior, he is none of the domain contacts) in the agreement that he chooses not to challenge their illegal charges to his card and they agree to remove his card from the accounts. In short, it wasn't worth $30 to fight it.

Now, everything is amicable between us, but their willingness to add someone to my account without contacting me is a bit frightening. In checking my spam folder this morning I noticed some new emails from them stating that they would now also be charging $8.99 per domain for domain privacy, which was previously free and which payment was never agreed to, unless I opted-out by tomorrow.

Of course, calling them wouldn't be so easy, after three attempts to contact billing only to get put on hold for ~10 minutes each only to get dead air and a "click". After speaking to several reps, who all demanded the security code set by my former partner when he called (which I don't have) and over an hour struggling to get their control panel to give me new passwords, I finally get a security code set for one of the reps to speak to me. His tells me "a specialist" will get back to me about removing domain privacy.

I am very tired of this, and the truth is this only slightly worse than my experience with most domain registrars. I'm going to do what I should have done in 2006, near the end of the registration periods of all my domains I'm just going to transfer them to my own OpenSRS reseller account and pay the flat $10/year.

I'll extend this to any other free software project managers out there, if you're tired of dealing with crap like what I've gone through with IPower, I'll give you at-cost pricing on your domains. If your site is Python-powered (WSGI) I'll throw in hosting for a beer next time you see me.

My email address is my full name @ubuntu.com.

pysoy.org website upgrades

As some have noted, we recently added an ad to PySoy's website. This is actually only one of the many changes to prepare for the beta3 release.

I'll be putting in a good deal of work over the next few weeks upgrading the website for HTML/5 and XMPP, better separation of functionality to subdomains and standardizing the templates between these subdomains and hg.pysoy.org and planet.pysoy.org/.

Help is, of course, always sought and welcome! If you're good with CSS or want some experience working with HTML/5 drop me a line.

Vala migration continues

We're pretty far into the big Vala migration now, enough to talk about where we're going with it.

The most notable new component is libsoy, a glib-based library written in Vala that integrates all our dependencies to provide the non-Python functionality of PySoy.

This abstraction ensures that all PySoy's background threads remain GIL-free and will be useful for many implementations of "cloud gaming", which I'll go into more detail on later.

The largest task remaining is python-3.0.vapi, which will allow us to write the Python extension modules for libsoy. These will not be simple Python bindings which could be provided with PyBank as PySoy includes many complex Python datatypes which the gobject model cannot provide.

summer of code students announced

It's been a stressful few weeks, but we've selected 30 students to work with the Python Software Foundation for Google's Summer of Code.

I don't know what I was thinking in volunteering to be the PSF's admin this year, but I'm happy to have had the opportunity. I believe we have more students working on core Python projects this year than all previous years and certainly a good start with getting students involved in our community.

There's a lot more work to be done; getting students setup on the SoC Python planet, getting all the backup mentors and coordinators organized, making sure students are taking advantage of the community bonding period, etc.

PySoy ended up with one student, Jo Yo (aka Lucas Westine) working on character animation. He worked with the Ogre3d team last year on a similar project. He's being mentored by Eric Stein (aka Toba) who wrote PySoy's soy.fields module as a Summer of Code student in 2007.

Building a better Pyrex - part 2

Vala, the C#'ish language from the Gnome project for building GObject-based applications, may not seem like the most intuitive choice for building Python extension modules.

For PySoy, she may be our long-sought salvation from Pyrex.

First to note, PySoy is based heavily on GLib. While much of GLib is redundant to types and functions available with Python's c-api, the GLib functions don't require Python's GIL to be used. This is what allows PySoy to take full advantage of multiple cores and run Python code in parallel with rendering and physics processing.

Second of note, as I wrote in my last post, Pyrex/Cython are not appropriate for PySoy as an overwhelming majority of our code is inside with nogil:. Many Pyrex/Cython language features, what makes them easy to work with, are thus unavailable to us. The language becomes a burden and "GIL minefield" that makes working with it difficult.

Like Pyrex, Vala "compiles" clean object-oriented code to C, unlike Pyrex we have full and direct access to all datatypes and classes without the GIL. Like Pyrex, Vala needs pseudo-headers to instruct it how to use C libraries, unlike Pyrex the .vapi files give us an OO API for working with those libraries.

This was the real deal maker though; Vala is flexible enough to use PyObject and family directly. Not only do we get GObject access but with python.vapi, full OO access to Python's c-api with automatic incref/decref and easy Python/C type conversion.