Tell them, my song.

I know that I’m a nutcase, you don’t need to tell me. Didn’t I once say that the main reason why I bought the Xbox 360 was not to have to upgrade my PC/Mac again only to play computer games? Well, here I am, the living contradiction: My new nVidia 8800 GT graphics card arrived today, and she’s a real beast!

To make it short: Crysis and STALKER run at playable framerates at 1920×1200 with high detail settings on my Quad Xeon Mac Pro on Vista Ultimate Edition 32 Bit. It’s quite amazing how well these games look and how detailed their game worlds are. Still, I already know that my Mac Pro is maxed out with these games, and that probably later in the game, when more enemies arrive, I’ll have to reduce the resolution to get better performance. To be honest, I wouldn’t have expected Crysis to run at all at 1920×1200 - I am really surprised that it does, and I am even more surprised that it is really playable.

The other problem that I have now: What do I do with my third display? Vista’s Direct X 10 drivers already crashed on my while I still had the old 7300 GT cards in my computer. Only after removing them Crysis stopped crashing.

Furthermore, Aperture still showed the erratic display behavior when it’s running on a system with more than one graphics card.

So I think it might be better for my peace of mind to just leave it at having only one graphics card in my system, namely the new 8800 GT. But do I use her with my two 20″ Cinema Displays or with the 24″ HP TFT and one 20″ Cinema Display? Tough call. Although I originally had bought the HP display only for my Xbox, I have grown quite attached to it in the meantime.

I guess I have to sleep over it.

OS X Leopard comes with a version of Python pre-installed, but this version is neither up-to-date nor is it a good choice when you want to create application bundles that also have to be compatible with OS X Tiger. That is why I have chosen to install the official Python distribution from Python’s official website. It can be found here:

• http://www.python.org/download/

For GUI applications, wxPython probably is the best choice available for the Python programming language and platform. I use the Unicode-version from here:

• http://www.wxpython.org/download.php#binaries

I use the pydev plugin for Eclipse for my Python coding, and I find it great!

• http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=85796

I use it with the classic edition of Eclipse:

• http://www.eclipse.org/downloads

For deployment, py2app is the tool of choice, and it can be obtained from here:

• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/py2app

A nice multimedia and windowing library for Python is pyglet:

• http://www.pyglet.org/download.html

I install PyGame from the source code:

• http://www.pygame.org

PyOpenGL can be found here:

• http://pyopengl.sourceforge.net

Rabbyt is a fast 2D sprite engine for Python that uses OpenGL and works nicely with pyglet. You can find it here:

• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Rabbyt
• http://matthewmarshall.org/projects/rabbyt (This is the developer’s homepage)

For using SQLite with Python, I found pysqlite2 here:

• http://oss.itsystementwicklung.de/trac/pysqlite/wiki/WikiStart#Downloads

All of the modules and libraries that I use are not licensed under the GPL, and I want to keep it that way. Strangely enough, the BSD-licensed database server PostgreSQL caused me some problems here, and it took me a while to find a Python library for it that was available under a more BSD/MIT-style license. However, finally I discovered PyGreSQL, which you can get from here:

• http://www.pygresql.org/readme.html#where-to-get

If you need more number crunching power or simply higher performance, Pyrex might be what you’re looking for. You can get it from this website:

• http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python/Pyrex

Last but not least something really interesting for multi-threaded programming: Stackless Python.

• http://zope.stackless.com

Some of these libraries are only available in source code form for OS X, but the default sudo python setup.py install command is usually all the magic that you have to use to get them up and running.

These books are passionate works of love and the best titles that I’ve found about Python:

This one also comes in very handy: