python

2012 was another year that kept me glued to my iPhone and iPad, checking out the latest batch of iOS games and other apps. So which ones proved to be among my favorites? In alphabetical order...

Angry Birds Star Wars My wife and I love to play Angry Birds, and the Star Wars edition is a great take on the familiar franchise. This app could've easily taken a turn to the dark side. But Rovio knew just how to pair its birds and piggies with the classic Star Wars characters and settings that fans know and love. The challenging … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- What happened when NYU students discovered they could e-mail 40,000 people at once.

- Trotify kit puts Monty Python horse coconuts on your bike.

- Why is Slate defending your right to name your kid Hashtag?

- Why people spend so many hours stitching footage into YouTube collages.

- Access Main Computer File: Exploring graphical user interfaces in movies.

- Brave Robotics offers 3D-printed 1/12 scale mecha transformer at Maker Faire.… Read more

Every time I watch "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," I insult along with the French knight, sing Sir Robin's praises, and fervently wish I had a coconut to add horse-trotting sound effects to my life.

Design studio Original Content London has figured out how to bring the sounds of Monty Python-style equine movement to bicycles. Trotify is a wood kit that mounts on the front of a bike. As you pedal, the tire triggers Trotify to clomp a coconut up and down. You'll have to provide your own minstrel and squire. … Read more

The handful of Monty Python apps released to date have been of mixed value. The Angry Birds ripoff Cow Tossing was amusing but not fulfilling, while the "Holy Grail" companion The Holy Book of Days offered a fantastic behind-the-scenes look at everyone's favorite Python movie.

Now comes Python Bytes, a collection of 22 sketches from the first season (or "series," to use Brit-speak) of the "Monty Python's Flying Circus" TV show.

Among the highlights: "Albatross," "Dead Parrot," and "Lumberjack Song." In other words, there's ample comedy gold to be mined here.… Read more

Like any self-respecting geek, I can quote just about any scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"--complete with a pretty spot-on English accent.

Needless to say, it ranks among my all-time favorite films--and that's why the new Monty Python: The Holy Book of Days app for iPad is such a treat. It's like a coffee-table book come to life, a mammoth interactive collection of cast-member goodies from the filming of the movie.… Read more

Nice financial results notwithstanding, Google had some trouble late today with its App Engine service for online applications.

Overall availability of the cloud-computing foundation, which can run online applications written in Python or Java, dropped at least as low as 88.1 percent, according to the Google App Engine status dashboard.

The dashboard showed problems serving Java programs--more than half of attempts to request an app's Web page resources produced errors at one point. There also were delays in using a programming interface to manage tasks.

In Google's postmortem analysis, the company determined that there was an overall … Read more

Talk about a can't-miss idea: an Angry Birds-style game based on the cult classic "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Instead of flinging birds at pigs, you fling French cows (and other presumably French barnyard animals) at King Arthur and his knights. Sprinkle in clips from the movie and some unique gameplay twists, and you've got pure gaming gold.

In theory. In reality, Monty Python's Cow Tossing (also available for iPad) is missing that certain...special...something [cue music].

The game works on the same basic principle as Angry Birds: fling stuff at your enemies … Read more

Jack White (White Stripes, Raconteurs, Dead Weather) has a cool video demonstrating his "triple-decker," three-records-in-one 12-inch single, "Blue Blood Blues." You have to watch the video to see exactly how the technology works, but let's just say for now it's a 7 inch 45 rpm single glued to one side of a 12-inch single; but the 12-inch can be pried open to retrieve another 45! It's a limited to 300 edition so I'm sure it'll sell out quickly. The Triple-Decker Record is a Jack White invention; and it's assembled by … Read more

The enterprise has long favored Java and .Net, but PHP and other dynamic programming languages have left their infancies and are rapidly closing the gap on their more stodgy competitors.

That's the message I got from Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, the "dynamic languages company," in a conversation this past week. I wanted to find out how the Vancouver-based "old school" open-source company is faring in building business solutions and developer tools around Perl, Python and Tcl.

Quite well, as it turns out (and as described by Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond). But the story is … Read more