Toes to the Edge

Here are the slides and examples from my Code Mash 2.0.1.0 talk:

Restful Interfaces to 3rd-Party Websites with Python (PDF)

examples.tar.gz

My unofficial interface to the Concept 2 Online Logbook is ready.

This allows one to programmatically get information from the logbook (such as your total meters rowed to date) or to add workouts to the logbook from another program.

For example, entering this URL in your browser after getting your own API KEY:

http://c2logapi.appspot.com/api/1/user/totalmeters?format=xml&api_key=xxx

would cause the browser to prompt you for your logbook username and password and then it would return the total meters you’ve rowed to date.

Details and code examples in Python and Java are at the (Unofficial) Concept 2 Online Logbook REST API Home Page.

The slides from my Code Mash presentation on Test Driven Development in Python are now online at: http://powertwenty.com/kpd/downloads/TestDrivenDevelopmentInPython.pdf

It is an introduction to TDD, some tools that work well when doing TDD in python, and the results of a case study in TDD game development using pygame.

Wow, CodeMash turned out to be a fabulous conference. The atmosphere was one of learning from others in a friendly way – people checked their religious wars at the door. It was a fun conference. Feeling a little under the weather, I didn’t have a chance to check out the water slide park, but the movie shown at the closing ‘can geeks surf in Ohio?’ leads me to believe that might not be a bad thing.

I enjoyed the Neal Ford and Bruce Eckel’s keynotes the best. Neal spoke of mini-domain languages. Bruce tied in some great shots of Burning Man with a thought-provoking talk on using your imagination and thinking outside normal limits.

Between Kevin Dangoor’s talk on TurboGears, David Stanek’s talks on Enterprise Python Architecture and Web Services in Python, Mark Ramm’s talk on SQLAlchemy ( which made me vow to look into this library), and my talk on TDD Python, the language was well represented.

I am happy with how my talk on Test-Driven Python went. I hope to post the slides some time soon. Running through the presentation at this month’s Cleveland Python Users’ Group pointed out some areas that need refining, especially around the live demos. Fortunately I had the time to make the changes before Code Mash.

Oh, and the winning program in the coding contest was by Matt from CLEPY and coded in Python. There was some debate about the grand prize in the contest because the winner did not code the solution but instead solved it manually due to a loophole in the requirements.

The conference organizers did a fabulous job pulling things together. As an attendee and speaker there were no hitches, and in fact they even had a speaker’s room and gift bags for each speaker. That was a nice consideration. The only hitch in the conference overall that I am aware of was some issues with audio recording of the earlier sessions, and that was really the fault of the resort and its confusion between male and female audio jacks.

In the end, there is nothing I’d have changed for this conference, other than hitting the water park next time and perhaps fairing a little better in the XBox 360 and WII drawings.

Just finished listening to Kevin Dangoor’s talk on TurboGears at Code Mash.

His talk was a general overview of TurboGears features. While I’m in the middle of prototyping a TG application, there were a few things I wasn’t aware of:

o the ease of which AJAX widgets can be incorporated into an application
o multiple templates based on accept parameter
o lots of good things to say about SQLAlchemy

I’ve taken away from this that TG evolution is going strong and that SQL Alchemy is well worth looking at. Good timing on the latter as there is a presentation later today on it.

As a kid, my older brother and I would head up to the local arcade and play Atari’s primitive tank combat game. This was a long time before Doom, a time when simple gray-scaled graphics sufficed.

I spent a long time creating a clone of Tank when I received my first computer, the TI-99/4A. It was one of my first real programs. Very blocky, very slow, and a whole lot of fun. One option was that your could shoot trees and receive a point for each shot if you killed the other tank. The idea was that while one player was busy shooting trees, the other might sneak up behind for the kill.

I recreated Tank as Super Tank over Christmas break one year in college. This was a good excuse to practice my nascent C language skills. BBS’s and the Net were around and the game made it to a few archives.

Not having thought much about the game over the last few years, I was happily surprised to stumble on it last week at a site called Abandonware. They even gave it a decent review! Seeing the screenshots brings back some great memories.

It would be great fun to port it to PyGame some day.