Efectos Especiales

(from the don't-you-have-better-things-to-worry-about-dept)

According to the Orb of Insight, there will be 4 cards that mention "Loxodon" in Ravnica. The spoiler at MTGSalvation seems to agree.

That seems odd. I (maybe mistakenly) assumed that Loxodons were restricted to the plane of Mirrodin. How did they end up in Ravnica? Other "species" that were introduced in Mirrodin, like Myr and Leonin, don't show up elsewhere. What makes Loxodons different? Are they all over the place, like e.g. Griffins? It still seems odd, considering the isolated nature of Mirrodin, a plane that is very different from anything else we've seen so far.

It seems to be out of flavor. I wonder what the reasoning behind it is. WotC usually puts great effort into creating consistent worlds; I am curious to know if this was an oversight, or a deliberate decision.

Other things found in the Orb of Insight:

• myr 0, leonin 0
• griffin 7 (yay, I like griffins :-)
• falcon 0, eagle 0, hawk 1
• dragon 3, drake 8, wurm 5
• zombie 12, goblin 15, orc 0, merfolk 0, elf 10
• centaur 5, angel 5
• equipment 4
• boros 16, selesnya 9, golgari 16, dimir 15

...has *not* been solved, but then again this wasn't one of Jason's tasks. We briefly considered tackling it, but I eventually decided that it really isn't all that important.

For those who don't know: currently Wax imports all its core widgets in __init__.py. This is rather inefficient, because all those classes will in memory even if you don't use them. However, the Wax classes are relatively thin wrappers around wxPython ones; the real "meat" is in wxPython and is loaded anyway, even if I find a way to curtail the Wax import. Also, I noticed the following:

>>> import wax
>>> len(dir(wax))
159
>>> import wx
>>> len(dir(wx))
3394

In other words, Wax exports 159 names, and wxPython exports 3394! In the face of these numbers, I think that Wax's "namespace pollution" is rather modest. ^_^

I like to be able to do from wax import *. If you don't, then you can always use import wax and use qualified names (wax.Button, etc). So I don't think there's much of an issue here.

Wax 0.3.19 is available. This is the first public release after the Summer of Code. Go here for the general Wax-on-SF page, or directly to the release.

Most of the changes and new features were written by Jason Gedge (who, IMHO, delivered excellent work, and without a doubt deserves his SoC money). Some of the highlights:

• Added WaxAPI.py, a tool to easily browse docstrings and generate HTML documentation.
• Added WaxRF, a tool to load form definitions from XML, comparable to XRC.
• Fixed OverlaySizer, OverlayContainer and OverlayPanel.
• The bugfix mentioned above made it possible to write a Wizard class (not based on wx.Wizard).
• Updated FindReplaceDialog, which now accepts some hooks that make it easy to add find/replace functionality to editor widgets, or to add it to your own custom controls.
• Added a few new, smaller widgets, like FancyLabel, Gauge, SpinBox and Slider.
• Added a SystemSettings object.
• Most widgets support a GetStyleDict function that returns a dictionary of styles rather than an integer. (Caveat: this doesn't work for every widget yet, because I have to convert them to use the new __styles__ construct.)

Jason also wrote a prototype of some code that makes it easier to work with sockets. Think downloading with urllib/ftplib/etc and displaying a gauge indicating progress, for example. This will need to be polished and has not been checked in yet, but will soon. (Famous last words...)

Anyway, as always it's a work in progress... I plan to add more features, and there are also some patches from contributors waiting to be applied. Watch this space...

My 10 Python Pitfalls article was translated into the Czech language, by Pavel Kosina and Petr Prikryl.

(It's too bad that I don't understand a word of it... considering that my ancestors are from Ostrava. Or so I was told.)

Some people take the Harry Potter books, and the who-is-going-out-with-who stuff, a little too seriously...

What is this supposed to mean?

That is really condescending.

Check out the art of this guy Jonas.

Updated API documentation is available, generated by the WaxAPI.py tool (new in Wax 0.3, written by Jason Gedge):

• http://zephyrfalcon.org/waxapi/index_a.html -- overview per control/class
• http://zephyrfalcon.org/waxapi/index_h.html -- hierarchical overview

Feedback welcome. Is this documentation format acceptable? Are there things missing? The Summer of Code is not over yet, so reasonable suggestions might be implemented before September. :-)

[Note: There are no official Wax 0.3 releases yet; I'm waiting until the SoC is over.]

Having a technology called "Ajax" was bad enough... but who calls a programming language "Kont"?

(Again, probably only funny if you're Dutch...)

Zen in a Stone.

Interesting. It must be rather creepy when the stone starts talking to you, especially if its comments are on point...