Tuesday, October 28, 2014
A little behind on posts
This blog has been rather inactive, partly because of the lack of Community contributions that I have done, and partly because I just haven't been doing a blog post for every week. The real issue that I have with getting one put up every week is mostly not having anything to talk about. I am hoping to change out that paradigm for the future as my workload gets a little more involved. I will be adding discussion about what the class I am teaching assistant for as well as work that is going on with the current projects. This should make things a little more lively. I thank you for reading
RocPy Meet-up - October edition
We once again set out on our way to RocPy. This time without our illustrious leader, DeCause. This meant that we had a new set of carpool leaders. The only annoying thing about the carpooling was that it had started to lightly downpour. I normally don't mind the rain, but is a little disheartening just standing around waiting in it. Regardless, we left for the University of Rochester right on time. The car I as riding in was full of complete strangers to me, so conversation was rather non-existent.
Once we got to U of R, we made the long trek up to the 4th floor corner that is the ever drab home of the meet-up. We had a surprising amount of people there, not counting the merry band that was coming from the FOSS classes. One thing that I am learning is that public speaking is not the forte of many of the organizers for the meetup, which is a little surprising as they seem to be teachers. This was most prevalent in the first portion where they were going over Python in the news.
Following that, we got a rather lengthy lecture on how to bridge Python into other languages. Despite that being the main premise of the lecture, the only thing that I really came away from it regarding bridging Python with other languages is that Python is a very slow language. The actual bridging was sort-of glossed over. It was almost like a cooking show, with all of the bridging done before hand and just showing off the results of the bridging on sample code. Ironically enough, certain examples didn't actually prove to be that much better, namely the Haskell implementation.
The thing that ended off the meeting was another of the organizers talking about His Raytracer which was being implemented in Python. What I found to be most interesting was the justification being used to use Python for the program despite being so slow. "It can be used as a teaching tool, because it is easier to read." I find that to be a remarkable sentiment. While it is true that Python can be made to look like almost psuedocode next to something like C++, a decent amount of that can be written off as the person writing the code in the first place. Programming languages are like tools, you use the tool best suited to the job, and Python is not that language for something like this thought experiment.
Overall,, RocPy was far more dull this month than it was last month. I hope that the November and December meet-ups are a little more lively.
Once we got to U of R, we made the long trek up to the 4th floor corner that is the ever drab home of the meet-up. We had a surprising amount of people there, not counting the merry band that was coming from the FOSS classes. One thing that I am learning is that public speaking is not the forte of many of the organizers for the meetup, which is a little surprising as they seem to be teachers. This was most prevalent in the first portion where they were going over Python in the news.
Following that, we got a rather lengthy lecture on how to bridge Python into other languages. Despite that being the main premise of the lecture, the only thing that I really came away from it regarding bridging Python with other languages is that Python is a very slow language. The actual bridging was sort-of glossed over. It was almost like a cooking show, with all of the bridging done before hand and just showing off the results of the bridging on sample code. Ironically enough, certain examples didn't actually prove to be that much better, namely the Haskell implementation.
The thing that ended off the meeting was another of the organizers talking about His Raytracer which was being implemented in Python. What I found to be most interesting was the justification being used to use Python for the program despite being so slow. "It can be used as a teaching tool, because it is easier to read." I find that to be a remarkable sentiment. While it is true that Python can be made to look like almost psuedocode next to something like C++, a decent amount of that can be written off as the person writing the code in the first place. Programming languages are like tools, you use the tool best suited to the job, and Python is not that language for something like this thought experiment.
Overall,, RocPy was far more dull this month than it was last month. I hope that the November and December meet-ups are a little more lively.
Monday, October 6, 2014
Hack Prop 1(2): Tic-Tac-Pi?
Hack Title - Tic-Tac-Pi
Description:
This will be a Tic-Tac-Toe board game made using PyGame and meant to be played on the Raspberry Pi. Ideally we want it to be able to be played by two people on seperate Pi's using networking, but we will have a Computer player regardless.
Libraries:
We will only really be using PyGame and writing our own net code.
Upstream Repository:
We will be pushing it to PyPi
Hardware:
We will be using the Raspberry Pi, a keyboard, a mouse, and an internet connection (for the newtowrking).
Team Members:
I will be working on mstubinis for this project.
Project Milestones:
- Get a working Server and Client application
- Set up base game using PyGame
- Integrate client with game
- Package up the game
License:
We will be going with the MIT license for this project.
Final Thoughts:
Since neither of us is really all that familiar with networking in general (mostly due to the GDD program offering little inside the major itself), it will be interesting working on the subject. Even if we can't get it working, we always have the regular game to fall back on. Here's hoping!
Advanced FOSS Guest Speaker - Google
During class on Thursday, we were greeted by a very special guest that DeCause had asked to come down to talk with our class. As it turned out, Google had been at the Career Fair and doing interviews and such. While they were there, DeCause asked one of them to swing by our class and talk to us if they were able. To our good fortune, they were able to do just that. I am deeply regretful that I don't remember the man's name. It was a truly enlightening talk that helped to really put perspective on what I was doing and working towards for the past few days.
The man started off by introducing himself, telling us what he did at Google and some things that he worked on. Right away I could tell that the man far outdid anything that I even thought about doing for a job. After introducing himself he asked us if there were any questions that we specifically had for him. We chose to ask him about what it was like working at Google and what this 20% work was. As it turns out, while working at Google, you have projects that you choose to work on for a main project and a secondary project that you do sort of on your own time.
Afterwards, DeCause asked a few simple questions as it related to the Advance FOSS class. The main important questions were the use of file revision systems and the use of IRC channels for communication. While I never doubted that it was used, it was interesting to see the reasoning behind their use.
The last thing we asked about was how it was that he managed to find himself working at Google and if he would ever think about leaving. He told us about how he wasn't exactly the best student, though far above my level, and he more or less lucked into getting internships at Microsoft and Apple, which gave him the chops to be put up for consideration by Google in the first place.
Overall, I greatly enjoyed the talk. It was slightly disheartening to see just how far I am from being a competent hacker by any stretch of the imagination, but it has also given me some inspiration to try that much harder in the upcoming future.
The man started off by introducing himself, telling us what he did at Google and some things that he worked on. Right away I could tell that the man far outdid anything that I even thought about doing for a job. After introducing himself he asked us if there were any questions that we specifically had for him. We chose to ask him about what it was like working at Google and what this 20% work was. As it turns out, while working at Google, you have projects that you choose to work on for a main project and a secondary project that you do sort of on your own time.
Afterwards, DeCause asked a few simple questions as it related to the Advance FOSS class. The main important questions were the use of file revision systems and the use of IRC channels for communication. While I never doubted that it was used, it was interesting to see the reasoning behind their use.
The last thing we asked about was how it was that he managed to find himself working at Google and if he would ever think about leaving. He told us about how he wasn't exactly the best student, though far above my level, and he more or less lucked into getting internships at Microsoft and Apple, which gave him the chops to be put up for consideration by Google in the first place.
Overall, I greatly enjoyed the talk. It was slightly disheartening to see just how far I am from being a competent hacker by any stretch of the imagination, but it has also given me some inspiration to try that much harder in the upcoming future.
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