pyglet and pygame: which one?

Pygame is great. Pete Shinners has done some fantastic work in creating it. I have played a bit with it in the past and was planning to learn to use it better, and probably write some Crunchy-based tutorials for it. Unfortunately, this will not happen. Since I moved from a PC to a Mac, and installed Python 2.5, I can not use Pygame, as there is no ready-made version for my setup. Yes, I imagine I could find out how to compile it from the source ... but there is an easier alternative: pyglet. pyglet is a pure python library, with no external dependency. I downloaded it, tried it ... and it just worked. Not only that, but when Python 2.6 will come out, I know it will still work.

I do realise that pyglet is just in alpha stage ... but it's a very impressive alpha. It is not as fully featured as Pygame is ... but it works for me, thanks to Alex Holkner.

If you're currently using pygame, there's probably not any reason to switch. But if, like me, you find that you can not use pygame with your current setup, check out pyglet. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Python 3.0a1 has been released!

Congratulations to all Python developers on the release of Python 3.0a1!

My favourite language is on its way to get even better!

Crunchy-like sites for javascript and ruby

While I have been aware of the Try Ruby site for quite a while, recently I came across this interactive javascript tutorial. While none of these are nearly as flexible as Crunchy, they are nice resources that are currently available for anyone to try without needing to install anything. It would be nice if I could have a dedicated server running Crunchy in a sandbox so that people could try it out without having to download it.

flat is better than nested?

In the process of making Crunchy more secure, I had extra attention to css files that contained import statements, since these can be used to insert javascript code. I was rather surprised when I looked at www.python.org. First, I noticed the line

  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"
  id="screen-switcher-stylesheet" href="/styles/screen-switcher-default.css" />

which, in itself, appears rather ordinary. Upon following the link, I found that the content of the css file consists of the single line:

@import url(../styles/styles.css);

In its default security mode, Crunchy just ignores any style information that contains "url(" in it. As a result, when viewed using the default security mode for Crunchy, the python.org site's formatting is lost.

I wonder why the link redirection is used...