pong game tutorial video with python

3dbuzz discusses the design and implementation of a pong game. The preview mentions the design includes some classes such as actor, vector, ball, and player. the pygame library is used. it costs $24.99 but the previews are free.

python resources video

Showmedo has a video on Python resources. It looked useful for those starting out. He mentions some videos, books, blogs and other web sites.

I would like to checkout Python pdf support some time to see how difficult it would be to work with text for printing.

Continuing with the web development topic, the video mentions they use TurboGears for the ShowMeDo site.

python web frameworks

Jonathan Ellis has a post of his opinion about some Python web frameworks.

Currently I use BlueHost for a very basic web site. They advertise support for Python and Ruby on Rails. I've heard of some videos for Ruby on Rails. I believe they are on the official site here, but I'm planning on continuing with the Python route instead for now since I'm working on getting more familiar with that language. His post mentions TurboGears or Django or Pylons as alternatives. However, so far I don't see any response to a forum post asking about Pylons support about a year ago, and it seems like some other forum posts describe how to manually install the other two frameworks (I haven't tried their scripts yet). Since this isn't urgent I plan on continuing to look for more information about this. Perhaps eventually Bluehost will have more support and that will make things easier.

wikipedia chinese cuisine article

Wikipedia has an article about Chinese cuisine. It has some information I hadn't heard before and seems like a start for learning more about it. I don't eat as much Chinese food as I used too but perhaps learning about it will be interesting.

learning python

There is a blog called learning python that look like it might be helpful. The author published some stuff in Python magazine and has some posts about programming games with Python.

pycon

There is a Python podcast on the python.org web site that I'll be checking out today. It has some excerpts from Pycon, an annual Python conference.

Also, Yahoo news has an interesting story about carbon nanontubes mimicing asbestos.

Arduino ide on 64 bit Ubuntu gutsy

Arduino ide on 64 bit Ubuntu gutsy

This site was helpful when trying to get the Arduino IDE working on 64 bit Ubuntu. It used to crash with a message about incompatible word size after showing a window to pick the sketch directory. I just recently upgraded my pc to the 64 bit AMD version to try it out and ran into this problem.

memristor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

Some news recently announced about a new circuit element. Apparently it will be quite useful in the near future. NPR has more information that I'd like to check out later.

Programming video site

I'm checking out http://www.showmedo.com for Python video material.

Also, http://snippets.dzone.com has examples of usages for Python and other languages to read and learn from. The local interpreter helps with this kind of learning.

Jon Bentley has a blog that looks interesting, but I haven't had time to find something interesting in it. He mentions he works with IronPython now.

Blender Awarded 6 GSOC Projects

Blender Nation has a note about Google Summer of Code projects.

97k demo program

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=537

This blog describes a 97k game demo program. He writes that procedural programming helps make the game look good while keeping the usage of space minimal.

The Art of Motion Control

The Art of Motion Control

The front page has video demo of a robot painting an egg.

Fog generating algorithm

Computer Science Fog Machine Improves Computer Graphics

The article mentions a movement toward more ray tracing based algorithms lately.

more python information

http://socal-piggies.org/scp

There is a SoCal Python users group and they had a meeting at Disney in LA about how it is used by their animation people.

comp.lang.python

This newsgroup had some information about GUI kits.

They mentioned Qt & PyQt, wxPython, and Tkinter.

python development continued

I found some links related to Python development with an IDE and a standalone debugger:

http://spyced.blogspot.com/2008/04/python-ides.html

http://prabhuramachandran.blogspot.com

I'm not sure where to start yet. There's idle and scite to keep it simple. Eclipse could be an option too because I've used it for some Java development before. Finally, some one at the first link commented about looking for an ide with a good gui designer. That sounds like it would be useful.

Python related to computer graphics

I was given some Python related information about computer graphics.

After some more looking around, it turns out 3d buzz has some information about using it for scripting in Houdini and Maya, but it is not free.

Also the python.org site has an article about ILM using the language.

From the article it mentions how some companies developed their own software as an insurance policy for the future because of the possibility of needing custom extensions or improvements.

Basically, it sounds like they gradually used it for their toolset:
"As Python was applied in more ways, it slowly crowded out a plethora of competing technologies for shell scripting and batch control, embedded scripting, component software development, database application development, and so forth. Python's versatility ultimately simplified the developers' toolset and reduced the number of technologies that needed to be deployed to ILM's thousands of production computers. This new, simpler toolset translated directly into an easier to manage and more reliable development and production process."

So it does sound like they used it as a "glue" for their various software assets.

Code metrics in Visual Studio 2008

MSDN blog entry about code metrics in Visual Studio 2008

Some other blogs have commented about this already. For example, here is an entry from a guy in Russia.

The blogger warns about problems with the lines of code metric. I was just reading Code Complete about the topic. The guideline given there is to limit the number of lines of code per routine to around one screen or one or two pages of program listing, or about 50 to 150 lines. He warns against routines longer than 200 lines and notes that there has been some inconclusive research on the quality of routines less than 200 lines. I've also heard of another guideline that an entire class should be less than 300 lines.

Boston Dynamics Robot

This looked interesting.

Arduino board

Arduino board

I am interested about electronics and have started playing with an Arduino board to learn more. I am not familiar with the tools to assemble it and ended up playing with very basic things such as a soldering iron, 22 gauge solder, a board holder, magnifier, a clipper, a holder for the soldering iron, a multimeter. Besides the tools, other basics such as figuring out the ratings of capacitors and resistors had to be done. With some help from some other people, the hardware has now passed a simple blinking led test.

rfid for horse riding

High tech for horses

This article describes a system where cameras are aided by rfid tags and sensors to help videotape horse riders.