Tuesday, September 30, 2014

PyTalk - Final Thoughts

This was an interesting experiment. The entire class is weird due to the fact that I have nowhere near as much mojo when it comes to all of these tools we are using like coding in python and using the Raspberry Pi. Especially after seeing all of the other projects in the class. PyTalk works, though it is a little rough when being used on a Pi, although that portion needs a little more testing when it comes to making statements like that.

Our demo for the class was a little rough since it was on a Pi that we had never used before. It managed to connect up to the IRC chat and post a few things, but the speech recognition was a little off, much like the first builds of the project. That said, we are hopefully doing another demo today which should go much smoother.

The only thing that we have left to do is upload the project up to Pypi, which is my job and overall it has been going horribly. I would never have expected that the issues I'm getting. What is a little more impressive is that there doesn't seem to be anyone else who understands the error either. Hopefully uploading from the Pi itself might work better, although that will probably end up taking a long time.

Regardless I am looking forward to the next project s that we will be having. I don't really have any thoughts on what I want to do, so I'm just going to try and stick with mstubinis with whatever project he wants to do for this milestone.C'est la vive

PyTalk woes

This has been an interesting experience. It honestly has. I have learned a lot more about using Python than I originally did and also doing some interesting things with IRC. my partner, mstubinis, who is a pretty awesome hacker, is responsible for writing the greater majority of our code while I was working on more of the management side of things, documentation and packaging. This project would probably not have gone nearly as well without all the work Mst put in.

That said, packaging is really weird. As I am not really fluent in python, using it in the shell is still a little weird to me and the errors that it throws make it a little hard to discern. It has certainly been a humbling experience as it shows me how little I know when it comes to my own field. I think the greatest challenge has been trying to keep up with everything that has been going on as far as the project is concerned. The time frame for the project really made this interesting. I would never expect something like this to be done in five weeks.

The current crossroads I am stuck at is getting the project up and hosted on pypi. I have everything setup and ready to be put up, (although as it isn't uploading properly, it means something is missing...somewhere).

At current, I am testing out different methods of getting the file uploaded onto Pypi. I hope this whole process will go much smoother later...

Thursday, September 18, 2014

September 16th: RocPy meet-up

So this was a new experience. I had never been to RocPy before, but I was moderately aware of what happens at the events because of what DeCause talked about regarding it during class. I knew that it would be over at the University of Rochester, and I knew that people would be giving talks about the various works they had done in the last month while working with Python. What I was not expecting was that we would be in a classroom off hidden in a corner of one of the buildings. It was a little jarring and made it easier to see why they didn't have many people outside of the people that DeCause had brought with him.

The actual information presented was pretty interesting. RyanSB gave a presentation on the general make up of the course website and what goes into it. There was also a large portion dedicated to being able to create things using OpenShift. At least I believe that was the premise, what was happening while RyanSB was talking was a little over my head for the majority of the technical aspects.

There was a few lightning talks, with the first one being by a fellow classmate who presented on why you shouldn't include the .git folder where you host your website. It was rather interesting overall. DeCause also gave a lightning talk which was over a tumbr blog that he came across which mashed up a programming book and the King James bible. DeCause ran with this and made wupotus, which is a mash up of speeches from President Obama and lyrics from the Wu-tang clan. He showed it off, but then quickly remembered it was very NSFW.

Overall RocPy was an interesting experience and I am looking forward to going back again next month, though I do wish the accommodations weren't so...sketchy? Just my thoughts.