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Archives For August 2010

Matsuricon 2010

August 21, 2010

I’ve got a confession to make. I’m an otaku. Apparently this surprises people so perhaps I need to add Otaku to my typical Geek/Programmer/Baka twitter bio or something. I’ve always loved anime/manga and the earliest two I can still remember are Robotech and Sailor Moon back when I was probably seven or eight years old. With that out of the way, on to the actual topic of this post!

Matsuricon 2010 was totally amazing! It was my very first anime convention and (I think) only the second convention/conference I’ve been to so it was a new experience for me. I got a great chance to meet tons of new people and I also got to meet up with Chi and her friends. I hadn’t seen her for nearly a year so it was really great to see her again.

I was inspired to start drawing again, which I’m doing almost every day since now. I also made the decision to go to Ohayocon and will probably be going as either Urahara from Bleach or Honda from Yu-Gi-Oh. Honda shouldn’t be too difficult to get things together for anyway.

I’ve already put off writing this post for several days, so I’m going to end it rather short before I forget to write it altogether. In summery, I had an amazing time, I got to meet a very close old friend and made some great new friends. In fact it also looks like Matsuricon 2010 will be the cause of my first date…

I’ll consider writing a post about it in the near future, however I probably will not. Anyway, Enjoy the photos I took during the con and thanks for reading!

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In Anime conventions, Events
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CubeCreate Engine

August 6, 2010

CubeCreate is a fork of the Syntensity project with the aim of being a modern FOSS (Free/Open Source) game engine. It has recently had a large amount of work done to the build system and that work is now mostly complete.

I’m very pleased to say that the engine compiles and runs just fine. The CubeCreate team has worked up some useful docs on getting/compiling/running the engine over at the official CubeCreate Docs site. Note that it is still somewhat early on development and should be considered at an alpha state. You probably won’t notice any major direct differences from Syntensity however there are already some major strides being made.

If you’re interesting in contributing, please visit us on irc (Freenode #cubecreate), post on our forums (forum.cubecreate.com) or just leave a comment with a way to be contacted. Anyone can contribute, regardless of their skills and we are vitally in need of support. Artists, Documentation Writers, Mappers, Programmers, Sound Developers, Web Designers and anyone I’ve forgotten to list are all more then welcome.

On a slightly different note, Bios Interactive supports the development of this fork. From this point forward, all our previous Syntensity work will be transferred to CubeCreate.

In CubeCreate, Project
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BiosBase

August 6, 2010

I’ve recently started a new Python project called BiosBase. It’s intended to be something of a quickstart template for new Pylons web projects. This is a very broad overview however a working user auth system and general examples of best practices (Or at least the best I can figure out.) for handling users, forms and so forth will be included.

My reason for this project is that I currently have around 3 Pylons powered projects, all of which in various states of completion (or more accurately, lack thereof). This is in part because I finesse and finagle every tiny bit of the code to keep things as ‘perfect’ as humanly possible. The more major problems come when I start working on integrating repoze.what into things. repoze.what is basically a user auth system from the zope project. From what I understand, it’s generally considered a very solid library and the primary choice for Pylons projects. The only catch however is that there are only a few somewhat poor and outdated examples of using it with Pylons.

And from this problem comes BiosBase. Most of my work is reading through all the examples that are out there, reading the repoze.what docs and working in the best parts from everything I find. I’m working to keep the system as generic as possible and am trying to keep the controllers as self-explanatory as possible.

In summery, there is currently a prototype of BiosBase over at github.com/BiosElement/BiosBase. Currently you have to read the source to figure things out however user registration and login/logout is currently working (mostly) as intended. I’m very much intrested in community input as this is the first time I’ve worked somewhat in-depth with a user auth system and would like to continue this project as something of a “thank you” to the community.

In Programming
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PyOhio Day 1

August 1, 2010

First day at PyOhio was beyond totally awesome. I grabbed the bus and was down to the Ohio Union building in about 25 minutes. Granted the doors were still locked when I got there since I was a little early so I chilled outside until the OSU folks got us inside.

On a slightly different note, my friend Robert Conteh was actually able to get down there and so that was really nice since it’d been about a year since I’d last seen him.

After registering and grabbing a drink I decided to go to James Bonanno’s ‘Project Management 101′ talk at 10am. I can’t really say I saw the point. It was more focused on organizing then managing, although I guess you could argue those are nearly the same.

Even I went to Dan Buch’s awesome ‘Intro to Core Involvement’ talk. While I probably won’t be able to spend much time contributing to python itself, it’s great to have a general sense of how things work.

Dan’s talk ended about 20 minutes early and Robert and I took off down to McDonald’s for something to eat. We never did have more then a Yogurt since I wasn’t really hungry and he’d already eaten.

Then I made the major mistake of not looking busy around the Registration table when Catherine Devlin was there. I got jumped to help watch the table while she ran to do a few things and one way or another I ended up manning it for pretty much the entire rest of the day.

Manning the registration table is not something I’d regret however. I don’t think I’ve had so much fun in ages. Heidi Hooper helped man the booth just about 45min after I started and stayed pretty much the entire time. It was good to have someone fun to talk too. There were also a few other folks who helped out at times but sadly I cannot seem to remember their names. :S (If you read this, wack me upside the head.)

I also had a wonderful chance to nag Mark Ramm who’s the co-author of the Turbogears 2 project and works for Sourceforge improving their website and such. He’s a really fun guy to talk with and it’s really awesome to get an idea of what’s going on from the inside guy.

From there I was there talking with various people the rest of the day until the Lightning Talks. Those were pretty good + the random draw for swag was done. We had a guy ‘hack’ Catherine’s python random person chooser script by adding a random.py file since python imports from current directory over the core library. That was funny as heck + Catherine didn’t notice for a minute. Although there was an ongoing debate as to whether it would have been funnier if the script had just been broken rather then running since he didn’t have a time to test it during his ‘hack’.

Phew, it’s been a bit since I’ve written that much on what I’ve ‘done’ in a day. In closing, It was a very good day and I’m looking forward to getting up later ‘today’ and going down for the rest of the PyOhio talks.

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In Events, Programming
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