Hurp de durp

Just because.

Time for coding

As it happens I still find some time these days for my projects and to make some small changes. Not as much as I’d like but they grow. I use this post to introduce my current projects and to calm my conscience by doing something that resembles work.

Pynal / Knote

As mentioned in the past “This week in Pynal” post I discontinued the Pynal development in favor of rewriting it in C++ and proceeding from there. The project made great progress although this is the first time I made something bigger with C++. But that is probably more thanks to Qt and KDE rather than my own proficiency.

Hach ja

Komm garnicht mehr dazu mal was zu schreiben. Sollte ich aber mal, hab eigentlich recht viel in Sachen Programmierung getrieben in lezter Zeit…

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This week in Pynal 10

Actually about the past two or so weeks but calling it “this week” will do and it’s mainly about two things.

First

I started a freehand branch to work on the freehand-drawing feature. A very simple version works now and so does selecting items and moving them around. And I added the background changing to the undo stack so they can be undone again.

But it becomes clearer and clearer to me that I miss some things in Python that I really liked when working with Java – namely the static typing. I think it is completely fine and nice for Python to have it dynamic and it is immensely useful at times but I miss it when developing a bigger project.

For me static typing provides another dimension of documentation in that I can look at a portion of code and directly see what types are involved. Of course the type checking when typing or compiling is another factor, but for me it’s mainly about looking at code and seeing how it fits into the rest of the application. This leads me to point two:

Second

Since Java is not an option to work with (Jambi…) there is really only one option left that gives me the opportunity to work on Qt, KDE and have static typing. And that option is of course C++.

For all the years I’ve been programming and developing I never got into C++ – I tried a few times but usually I gave up as the progress I made was so slow. Turns out it was just me being young and impatient and C++ not having a standard GUI library leading to most tutorials and resources being CLI only.

These shortcomings of me have hopefully changed a bit and those I had with C++ are cured by using Qt or KDE from the beginning. One might argue that it is not the ideal way to learn C++ but I guess it is a good start and it seems to work for me.

What I wanted to say with all that: I just went ahead and started porting Pynal to C++ using KDevelop. At this time it still is fun and every time my poor C++ code compiles is another little success for me. The code is hosted at github again but there is not really much to see. It opens a window and uses some classes but there is no real Pynal-functionality.

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Gamering

Hurray, another fine blog entry!

Most of my time in the past weeks was spent playing Minecraft – other things, too – but mainly Minecraft. And when one does look more or less closely at it one might notice that it is written in Java. It runs in an applet and offline as an installed application, runs with 3D acceleration and eats lots and lots of memory.

It reminded me of my early steps with Java game programming back in early 2007. I experimented plain old Java2D, with the openGL bindings of lwjgl and the 2D engine Slick2D. The result was not really nice on the eyes (or the ears) but I had my fun and really learned something about programming.

Unfortunately I did not finish bDefense, or even got it in a playable state and the project died peacefully in its sleep. But seeing how well Minecraft was received and accepted although it’s Java gets me in the mood to give it another try.

And this time I know better how to start a project and not to aim too high. And I even have it in a working state right now – here or in the menu on the right. Now it is just a Tetris-clone I use as a starting point to integrate more sophisticated features or other games.

Blabla, here ‘s a screenshot:

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And so it begins again…

Today lectures started again and to have a really good start it began for me with another round of mathematics. Fortunately there is a new lecturer with a great russian accent and a very nice way of explaining the concepts of probability and stochastics.

That had me motivated enough to make notes on paper (yes, real paper made from trees) and convert them at home to a fine digital version. In the last semester I used MarkDown to convert simple text-documents via LaTeX to PDF but now I used the chance to dive deeper into LaTeX.

But I was still hesitant enough to avoid pure, retarded LaTeX and went for Lyx as a graphical LaTeX editor. A nice the-more-you-know: LyX was initially created by Matthias Ettrich who later started the KDE project.

So, using LyX was a step down from MarkDown, exposing more of LaTeX to me but also giving me more control over the document. Starting to work with LyX was a horrible pain as its shortcuts are very similar to those of Emacs – and I’m more of a Vi-person. So typing ALT+M G O for a capital omega did take some time to get used to.

It took me about 2 hours to convert 7 A4 pages to a PDF, although most of the time was researching how to use LyX correctly. The result can be seen here. I’ll keep working with LyX until I finally give up and accept to use raw LaTeX with Kile or Texlipse…

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This week in Pynal 9

Ha! The week isn’t over yet but it’s not as if anyone cared. I picked Pynal up again by getting it to run under openSuse on my tablet. And that actually is some sort of achievement as it was developed only with Arch (I had other platforms and even Windows in mind but to see that it at least runs on different distributions is a good sign for me)

The code itself did not really change. I did merge the development branch with master to make it look like I did something ;-) And I just have to link to the repository.

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Not dead…

… but not really alive either. I say the blog is undead – gives me a nice excuse to not write regularly.

But I do plan to start writing again. Pynal was on hold for the past months as it is just very hard to find the time I’d like to have to work on it. But there have been some other projects going in a completely different direction as pynal, they might be another topic here.

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This week in Pynal 8

Past days did not see any change in Pynal as I was busy with University and private things that keep me busy most of the time. Development will continue when I mange to sort things out and have time to spare for Python and Pynal.

University and Assembla

Some days ago I saw an advertisement on Reddit, saying that assembla.com now provides free private git repositories. And since I’m a greedy person checked it out but was too dumb to find the private and free repositories. Instead I opened a public open-source project, containing more than a repository but viewable for everyone. (Good work, assembla PR guys…)

Well I decided to stick with it and play around a bit with assembla and the tools it provides, had some fun and suddenly everything looks like a project that can be hosted and managed on such a platform. I am experimenting with using assembla to manage my studying and writing for this semester and maybe it will prove to be really useful.

Anyways, here is my project “unizeugs” which will also be linked in the menu bar on the right in this blog. The current plan looks like this:

• Use git to manage assignments and other things I have to work on or write from my own initiative.
• Use tickets to manage single tasks I plan to do and their progress (again, assignments or other things I write).
• Use milestones to sort out which tickets I want to have finished before some exam or test and also as a basic calendar for important events.
• Use the wiki for I don’t know what. Things I would write in the wiki are placed in the git repository as binary PDFs and the markdown text files they are generated from.
• Use messages for announcements, but actually this can be done with this platform. I’ll think about what it can be used for or remove it.

Ah time will show if this was a good idea or just a giant piece of overhead I employ just because I’m bored and assembla looks fancy…