osxcon.2.1 › Steve Jenson's blog

I listened in on the Darwin Ports talk, which Jordan Hubbard is managing. I appreciate that he worked so hard against second-system syndrome.

I might have a spare x86 box here soon, so I'll try running Darwin/x86 on there for a while, to test KAME extensively under Darwin, to get a sense of kernel hacking on xnu, and check out darwin stability (which should closely correllate to OS X server stability)

Scott Anguish's talk on WebServices in Cocoa was fun. I have experience with the Mulle Kybernetik xml-rpc framework which is pretty solid and very mature compared to the all-C implementation Apple has put into the CoreServices Framework. The stub generator (which emits ObC/C/C++) WSMakeStubs was pretty neat. An incredibly tiny nitpick: Scott talked about Blogging tools and mentioned Radio and Moveable Type but didn't mention the Blogger API which they both implement. :-(

Speaking of Moveable Type, a bunch of us OS X nerds crawled into a few cars and drove down to a local indian restaurant. I sat across from the Trott kids (so you know, they're older than I am by a year or two). I didn't know Ben was also a crypto nerd. Super nice couple. I had briefly met them before at Cory's book-reading a few months back at Cafe du Nord. I also received a good lecture on Frontier's short-comings. Why is this product 899$ if db path's overflow after 256 characters and have no concept of a namespace (importing into a scope, I mean). I don't know if that's an old version of Frontier but if not, geez, throw that shiznit away and code something in Zope.

Speaking of Dave, he's supposed to attend the RSS BoF tomorrow night. People seem worried that he's going to yell at people like he did to Kevin or be rude and interrupt people like he did at ETCon. I hold out a belief that Dave's above that.

I was chattering about PyGame the other day so I whipped a simple side scroller in pygame the other night, just some rectangles and lines, no big deal, and realized something: PyGame really isn't meant for side-scrollers. Even with hardware acceleration (which, admittedly, my tiBook doesn't have much of) updating the entire screen with every frame is too slow if you have a bunch of Groups.

PyGame seems to really excel when you only have to redraw certain sections of the screen.

Tomorrow I'm on the alpha OS X desktop geek panel, that should be fun.