Adam's Blog

99% of my personal programming projects

2011-11-09T22:46:00.001-05:00

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/12551870085/inspiration-motivation-stress-and-abandonment

'nuff said.

C# Toggle Button

2011-06-06T13:35:00.001-04:00

Quick Tip: If you have a Radio Button or a Checkbox...

checkBox1.Appearance = System.Windows.Forms.Appearance.Button;

And viola, instant Toggle Button!

Friendly Name of Generic Type

2010-11-17T08:48:00.004-05:00

There is a C# Class, Type, which can be used to get details about other classes.

  Type t = typeof(string);
  Debug.WriteLine(t.Name);

This prints out "String". When you get the value of the property Name when t is assigned to a generic type...

  Type t = typeof(List<string>);
  Debug.WriteLine(t.Name);

This prints out "List`1`".

Problem: Type.Name does not return friendly names for generic types.

So I wrote an extension method, which returns the friendly name for any Type.

  public static string GetFriendlyName(this Type type)
  {
      if (type.IsGenericType)
     {
         StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
         sb.Append(type.Name.Remove(type.Name.IndexOf('`')));
         sb.Append("<");
         Type[] arguments = type.GetGenericArguments();
         for(int i = 0; i < arguments.Length; i++)
         {
             sb.Append(arguments[i].GetFriendlyName());
             if (i + 1 < arguments.Length)
             {
                  sb.Append(", ");
              }
          }
          sb.Append(">");
          return sb.ToString();
      }
      else
      {
          return type.Name;
      }
  }

It's used like this:

  Type t = typeof(List<String>);
  Debug.WriteLine(t.GetFriendlyName());

This prints out "List<String>"

This is a test

2010-10-13T17:34:00.001-04:00

Testing 123

Unity3D

2010-09-17T15:47:00.003-04:00

Unity3D is a game development engine, which is easy to use, once you know how, and extremely powerful. Here's my first game I made in it. I may or may not add more levels and/or hazards...

Play Online: http://www.theadamgaskins.com/Unity/Platformz/

Windows Download: http://www.theadamgaskins.com/Unity/Platformz/Windows.zip

Macintosh Download: http://www.theadamgaskins.com/Unity/Platformz/Macintosh.zip

Unity allows me to export into web format, Windows standalone format, and Macintosh standalone format. The unity webplayer is required to be installed to execute the web player; I don't know about the standalone versions.

Anyways, you have three lives. If you lose them all, its gameover. On the Gameover screen, click to go back to the main menu.

Jorj

2010-08-12T13:12:00.001-04:00

My and my friend, Nathan Wilson, started a band called "Jorj". Here's the official blog:

http://www.theadamgaskins.com/Jorj/

WordPress just got an update, but still hasn't fixed the auto-html-reformat feature/bug, so I'm going to stick with Blogger still. But since I'll pretty much only be posting music and words and maybe pictures [no code] then WordPress is better for Jorj's blog.

In Jorj, I'm referred to as "Brains Rider", and Nathan is referred to as "Sid Williams".

XNA Game Studio: Complex Polygon Collisions

2010-08-03T11:23:00.000-04:00

I am working on an NHL shootout game in XNA Game Studio. I had the basic prototype down, with player movement, shooting and grabbing the puck, and a goal. The only thing left was to detect when the puck should bounce off the posts of the goal, and when the puck goes into the goal. I could have just used multiple Rectangle objects, but I decided to figure out how to do Polygon Collision Checking. It would be good to know how to do it, for future reference.

Some Google searches revealed this link. I copied and pasted the function, and made some tweaks. I put it in a Polygon class, which stores a generic List<> of Vector2s. Then I added a funtion:

public bool Intersects(Polygon other)
        {
            foreach (Vector2 point in other.points)
            {
                if(PointInPolygon(point))
                    return true;
            }
            return false;
        }

Then all I had to do was create the polygon collision bounds for all the objects, and say something like:

if (puckBounds.Intersects(goalBounds))
        {
            // Make puck bounce here
        }

I'm glad I learned this, because I'll be able to use my Polygon class for lots of things in the future. Maybe later I can upload the source and/or upload a compiled DLL.

C# Programmatically Compiling .cs files to executables

2010-07-20T18:08:00.000-04:00

I was thinking of making a program that generates an executable which installs an application, but how to generate the executable?

public static void Compile(String Output, String code)
{
    CodeDomProvider codeProvider = CodeDomProvider.CreateProvider("CSharp");
    CompilerParameters parameters = new CompilerParameters();
    //Make sure we generate an EXE, not a DLL
    parameters.GenerateExecutable = true;
    parameters.OutputAssembly = Output;
    CompilerResults results = codeProvider.CompileAssemblyFromSource(parameters, code);
    if (results.Errors.Count > 0)
    {
        foreach (CompilerError CompErr in results.Errors)
        {
            Debug.WriteLine(
                "Line number " + CompErr.Line +
                ", Error Number: " + CompErr.ErrorNumber +
                ", '" + CompErr.ErrorText + ";" +
                Environment.NewLine + Environment.NewLine);
        }
    }
    else
    {
        Debug.WriteLine("Success!");
    }
}

In order to use this function, you must using these two classes:

using System.CodeDom.Compiler;
using System.Diagnostics;

Once you have that done, you're good to go! As a quick example, you can create a textarea named txt_code, a textbox named txt_output, and a button btn_submit. When btn_submit is clicked, then it will say:

Compile(txt_output.Text, txt_code.Text);

Which if you put a valid path in txt_output, and valid C# code in txt_code, then you will have your executable!

Original Article Here

Google Search Stories

2010-07-16T23:45:00.000-04:00

Google came out with Google Search Stories, where you can make a video of a series [up to 7] of google searches to tell a short story. I made one to test it out:

You can make your own here:
http://www.youtube.com/searchstories

C# Remote Desktop Client

2010-07-16T12:19:00.004-04:00

Recently, I've been trying to find a challenging C# Project to work on. I've tried stuff like a program that tells you your WPM and then submits it to the highscore table. It wasn't really very challenging, although I did learn a thing or two. But the other day, I really hit the nail on the head: A C# Remote Desktop Host/Client.

Skip this paragraph if you already know what a Remote Desktop Host/Client is
A remote desktop host/client is a program that lets one person remotely control another person's desktop. So, for example, lets say I had a friend in california, and I live in north carolina. The person in california, using this program, could control my desktop and, say, create and populate a text document. The host is the program that lets you control the desktop that the client program is running on.

So in order to pull this off, I need to have two connections: One for the server to send information to the host, and one for the client to send information to the host. I was initially going to use Sockets, but that would only work over LAN. So I created some PHP scripts to communicate with the MySQL database to do things such as post a string to the output database [the input for the other side], and check for posts to the input database [the output for the other side]. Once I got all that working, I could use WebClient.DownloadString("Script.php"); to execute the script via C#. Both Get and Post parameters work with this.

Then I set up threads on the client and the host to check for messages multiple times per second. The main problem at this point was sending an Image, 1440x900px [my screen resolution], to the database quickly. Uploading and Downloading it directly would be far to slow, so I did a google search for "C# Image Serialization". I found a really good method, using base64 encoding, and it uploads fast. So the client would take a screenshot, encode it to base64, and send it to the database via PHP. Then the server would download the encoded image as a string, decode it into an image again, and display it. All this happening multiple times per second.

So all that is the theory behind it. I still have to implement the sending and receiving, but everything else is working properly.

Death Worm: Update 1.1.2

2010-06-19T21:36:00.000-04:00

I spent a lot of time on this update:

Updates:

Four different enemies which appear sequentially
Images for the enemies
FPS counter
Minor performance updates to the particle system

Death Worm 1.1.2

View version history here: http://www.theadamgaskins.com/DeathWorm/

In the next updates:

The white enemies will run faster if they see you [because they get scared]
A health system
Some enemies will shoot bullets, which will make you loose health
You can die if you run out of health

All that is a lot, so It'll probably be a update or two before I get it all finished.

Death Worm: Update 1.1.1

2010-06-18T23:05:00.001-04:00

Updates:

The screen shakes when coming out of the ground
NPCs/Victims added. They are just arrows for now. If you collide with them, they explode in a puff of particles.

http://www.theadamgaskins.com/DeathWorm/1.1.1/

View all versions here: http://www.theadamgaskins.com/DeathWorm/

Death Worm Homepage

2010-06-18T12:30:00.001-04:00

This is becoming a fun project, which I will have motivation to continue for a while yet, so I created a webpage where you can view the updates on Death Worm. I'll still update my blog, but this page has a list of all the updates, and links to them.

Death Worm Homepage

Also, I moved all the links. The links will still work, though. I'll just have the old links redirect to the new links.

Death Worm: Update 6/18/10

2010-06-18T12:15:00.001-04:00

Scrolling Added
Background Color Changed
Scenery Added [to show scrolling]

Death Worm 1.1

Older Versions:

Death Worm 1.0

Death Worm: Java Remake

2010-06-18T00:01:00.001-04:00

I haven't used Java in a while, so my skills were getting a bit rusty. I decided to pull out the WD-40, and do a game.

I saw this game on yoyogames.com. It was simple, yet extremely addicting. What I have so far is almost complete. I just need to add the NPC's [a.k.a. victims] and the game will be finished.

Small Size
Medium Size
Large Size

Java Games

2010-06-17T21:04:00.000-04:00

Java games are surprisingly easy to create. You just need to download the JDK from sun microsystem's website and you're all set! You don't need to download the JMF or anything for audio or images. This tutorial will really help; its how I learned:

http://www.javacooperation.gmxhome.de/TutorialStartEng.html

Good luck, and happy programming!

YouTube Embed Test

2010-06-10T17:19:00.001-04:00

PHP serialization

2010-06-10T15:31:00.000-04:00

Recently, I was working on a PHP script for my Dad which reads some data, and will make a report on the changes of the data over time. To save the reports, I needed some way to export an array into a file and then read it back from the file in a separate script and have it exactly the same.

Thats what the serialize function does in PHP. It takes any argument, and converts it to a string. Then you can unserialize the string, and get your original object. So I just serialized my array and saved it to a file:

$string = serialize($array);
file_put_contents("saved_data.txt");

and saved it to a text document, and when I wanted to access the data:

unserialize(file_get_contents("saved_data.txt"));

If you have more than one object you want to serialize, you can put all of it in an array, and serialize the array.

$string_1 = "Hello World";
$string_2 = "What are you doing?";
$string_12 = serialize(array($string_1,$string_2))

YouTube HD

2010-06-05T22:53:00.000-04:00

YouTube is pretty cool for sharing your video tutorials. And its even cooler when your videos are crystal clear quality. Basically, when you record your tutorial, record it in the CamStudio Lossless Codec at 856x480 [or if you have it, the TechSmith Lossless Codec]

I record my audio separate, and so I load my video into virtualdub and combine it with my audio. I then add a water mark which says "theadamgaskins" [my YouTube username]. Then I export with the same settings I recorded with. It doesn't loose hardly any quality, even being exported twice. Here's some examples:

720p: http://www.tubularlinks.com/watch.aspx?v=fSaFU87kL0s
480p: http://www.tubularlinks.com/watch.aspx?v=L9Tx7ZMFb4g

Lossless Codec

2010-06-05T14:58:00.002-04:00

For my video tutorials on youtube [View my Channel] I was previously using the Techsmith Lossless codec in CamStudio. The quality was epic, and so was the encoding speed. But just yesterday [or the day before, I don't remember] my Camtasia Studio trial expired. So that means that the Techsmith codec wouldn't work either.

A quick Google search revealed MSU, a free open source lossless codec. The download was a DLL, so I just had to put it in the system32 folder on my pc. Then I can use it in CamStudio for very high quality, and an insanely low size, video!

Blender Tutorial Compilation

2010-05-31T10:59:00.000-04:00

Finally getting tired of searching google and youtube for useful Blender tutorials, Adam Gaskins creates an online Blender Tutorial Compilation. Anybody can access it and suggest/create tutorials for it.

http://www.theadamgaskins.com/Blender/

Complete with a mailing list for the most popular/best tutorials!

As of now, I only have like 20 some tutorials. So any suggestions are readily accepted!

The basic guidelines for tutorials are:

Audio voiceover: Unless the tutorial is very good, it won't be accepted without a useful audio voiceover. This is mainly what makes or breaks a tutorial.
Straightforwardness: An annoying thing with some tutorials, is they aren't straightforward; they're wobbly backwards. Make your tutorials as easy to understand as possible. Walk yourself through your tutorial before you record it. This also can make or break a tutorial
Good Quality: This isn't a requirement, but if you have a 320x480 resolution tutorial, it most likely won't be accepted.

If a tutorial meets the first two requirements, and the last one more or less, then it will most likely be added on the site.

How to shutdown your computer

2010-05-01T00:10:00.000-04:00

There is a command in the command line in Windows XP, Vista, and 7 that lets you shutdown your computer. Combined with the right arguments, you can create a prank on somebody. First create a batch script with this code:

SHUTDOWN -s -t 05

That shuts down the computer after a five second delay. Then, create a shortcut to the batch script on the desktop, and name it whatever. For this example, lets say you named it "Google Chrome". Then assign the shortcut the Google Chrome logo, and delete the real Google Chrome icon. So then, when an unsuspecting person opens Google Chrome, their computer shuts down!

Additionally, you can use the argument -c "text", and it will display "text" during the five second delay.

Magnifeye

2010-04-20T21:05:00.001-04:00

I made this in c# as an exercise. Its free to use. If you use it in your videos, you don't have to give me credit. Well... please do. But you don't have to.

Supports zooming and resizing, and follows the mouse. If I make another version, then I will probably add more customizable options.

Download: http://www.theadamgaskins.com/Magnife...

If you find any bugs, or have feature suggestions, lemme know!

Joomla 1.5: Locking Yourself Out

2010-04-17T13:47:00.009-04:00

Joomla 1.5 is pretty good for making sites. There is one pretty major bug, though, that needs to be fixed.

If you go to the plugin manager, at [or near] the top, you'll see something like "Joomla -- Authentication". NEVER change the "published" to false. Otherwise you'll be locked out, because you disabled logging in!

If you do happen to have this happen, then don't worry. All you have to do is edit the database. I recommend using phpMyAdmin, but you can do the raw SQL too, if you want.

So start up phpMyAdmin, and find the joomla database. It usually has 'jo' in the name somewhere. Then go to the 'jos_plugins' table, and go into browse mode. Find the "Authentication - Joomla" field, and edit it. Scroll down [if necessary] to the publish field. Change it to 1. Save.

Now you can login!

The Beach

2010-04-10T14:10:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm at the beach. My Grandparents have a beach house, which they wanted to make a maintenance trip to, and brought us along. Its about 72 or so degrees, and very sunny, so I wear a coat and sunglasses. How ironic [ironically].

Anyways, we fixed the spring on the door, screwed in some broken railings, fixed the swinging gate at the top of the stairs etc... We're getting ready to go down to the actual beach, which we haven't done since we arrived yesterday. Luke is going to go swimming in the ocean. I'll probably just sit on a towel on the beach and not get dirty.

They have wireless Internet setup, and Grandpa let me use his laptop, so that's how I'm blogging.

Two days ago, we got six more chicks..... I don't remember what kind. The girls call them cute.... I'd rather name each one separately though.

A Lesson in Game Design

2010-03-31T16:04:00.001-04:00

You can tell when you are playing a good game. Hours fly by as mere minutes. You become so immersed in the game world you don't want to stop. How do you come up with a game concept so grabbing? Well, for one thing, even if you have a pretty lame idea, it can be made into a fairly cool game if you design it correctly. But to make a game that people will love, you have to love it yourself. The creator of Pokemon, Shigeru Miyamoto, originally created the game because he had an idea that he loved, and so just made it for his own personal use. He sold it, and got tons of money.

Sid Meier says the easiest way to get a game concept is to dream up the details, then genre [e.g. I want to make a game about cars... I think action would be the best genre for this]. This is pretty good advice. If you try to start with FPS.... what hasn't been done before? But if you start with a car concept and choose the genre FPS then you might come up with a mix between Mario kart and Halo.

You need LOTS of play testers. Your fellow nerds [assuming you're a nerd], your Mom & Dad, all your friends, just anybody who will play test it. They can give you valuable feedback on what aspects are too hard/easy/annoying etc... Also, with all these people anticipating the game to be released, you are less motivated to just stop developing the game.

You also need motivation. There have been precious few games I have actually finished. 99% of my games I just stopped developing because I lost motivation. If you lose motivation, just plod your way through unless its obvious that the game idea is lame. Sooner or later [hopefully the former] you will regain motivation when things get more interesting.

Most game ideas are lame. Totally lame. [Yeah, I know. The cup is half full with me right?] And sometimes, you don't realise it until after you spend hours [even days] working on the game. So DON'T START DEVELOPING until you know that the idea at least isn't FULLY lame. Write down all the details about your game idea on a piece of paper or type them up [I always do the latter]. Then come back after a long period of time. Try not to think about the game idea too much. Come back at the least an hour or so later. For best results [now I sound like pop tart toasting instruct writer] I would leave the idea for a full day. When you come back to the idea, try to think about your game in a rational way. Try to think why the game would be fun to play. If you do this, you could save yourself hours [even days] of work. Once you think you're sure the idea isn't lame, or at least is kind of fun, then start designing!

Now for the designing part. If you are totally new to the whole programming thing, then Game Maker is for you. If you feel you are willing to actually type in the code, then you should look at Microsoft's XNA game studio, Microsoft's Dark GDK, and Java. I personally use XNA, but its your choice. Maybe sometime in the future I'll make some XNA or Java tutorials..... but not right now.

Anyways, that pretty much wraps up this "tutorial". Thanks for reading!

We now have nine chicks

2010-03-28T17:51:00.001-04:00

We used to have ten. One died. I'm not going to point any fingers, but my Mom says its her fault because she didn't change the water before she went on her retreat. But anyways we don't care. We didn't name it; we're not attached to it:

Sulley, you're not supposed to name it! Once you name it, you start getting attached to it! Now put that thing back where it came from or so help me...

-- Mike Wazowski

Princess Daisy is doing fine. Whenever we put her back in with the other chicks, though, they peck her. So my Mom bought separate water and food feeders for her. Now I thought that being a chick was boring. They just waddle around all day. But being a chick by yourself..... that must be really boring.

Princess Daisy

2010-03-27T14:06:00.000-04:00

Most of you have probably heard of the female video game heroine, Princess Daisy. But most of you have probably not heard of the chicken named Princess Daisy.

Princess Daisy is the princess of Sarasaland, who first appeared in the game Super Mario Land. Although Daisy is the ruler of Sarasaland, her current place of residence is in the Mushroom Kingdom.

-- Mario Wiki

Our chicken named Daisy hurt its leg a few days ago. The girls nursed it back to health and named it after the video game character Princess Daisy [don't ask me why]. I think Mike Wazowski said it perfectly:

Sulley, you're not supposed to name it! Once you name it, you start getting attached to it! Now put that thing back where it came from or so help me...

-- Mike Wazowski

But I admit its not likely that we'll be bringing Daisy back to the store.

Python Project: Recursive File Scanner

2010-03-27T13:03:00.000-04:00

My harddrive was filling up, so I wanted to find the biggest files on my computer. I thought python would be the perfect language to do this, so I wrote a little script. The script starts in drive C:\, and recursively scans through every directory and file on your computer. If any file is larger than one Gigabyte, then it is put in a list. After every file has been scanned, then the program prints out the list of files larger than a Gigabyte. This is very useful for finding big files to clear your hard drive. Here is the code:

   import os

   def listdir(path):
   good = []
   try:
   files = os.listdir(path)
   count = 0
   for i in files:
   filepath = os.path.join(path,files[count])
   byte = os.path.getsize(filepath)
   gigabyte = byte / 1073741824
   if(gigabyte >= 1):
   good.append(filepath + " -- " + str(gigabyte) + "GB")
   if(os.path.isdir(filepath)):
   bbt = 0
   tempt = listdir(filepath)
   for p in tempt:
   good.append(tempt[bbt])
   bbt += 1
   count += 1
   except WindowsError, e:
   print "Windows Error:"+str(e)
   print " -- Continuing..."
   return good

   lists = listdir("C:\\")
   count = 0
   for i in lists:
   print lists[count]
   count += 1

I am, as we [well actually just me] speak, moving quite a few GB to our MyBook.

Four Types of Humor

2010-03-25T14:49:00.000-04:00

My friend and I are going to make [or at least start making] a movie where I star as the comic relief. So I needed to write up some lines, and then punch them [get it? punchlines?] before we visit next. I came up with a few ways to do that. Lets list a few [I say "lets", but I'm doing all the work]:

Equivocation: You use the same word two times, each time meaning separate things.
If, of all the animals, man is the only rational being, then that means women are irrational
Sayings that are warped in a way that is applicable.Concerning Penguins: Birds without feathers flock together
Mishearing/Misinterpreting One character says something, and the other character responds as if the first character said something that sounds like what he really said.Mr. A: You are loquacious [lo-kwa-shus]Mr. B: On the contrary, I'm very cautious!
Taking Literally: This is probably my favorite; I'm definitely the best at this. When one character says something, the other takes him literally.Mr. A: Where on earth have you been???Mr. B: At Latitude 40.68952 and Longitude -74.04444

By the way, Latitude 40.68952 and Longitude -74.04444 is the statue of liberty.

So hopefully, with these in mind, you can write funny one-liners/dialog.

I don't want to get involved with any copyright infringement or whatever, so I'm going to say that equivocation joke was from The Fallacy Detective. The rest are made up by me.

Yesterday....

2010-03-25T13:42:00.001-04:00

.... we went to Greek class. As we sat down for our quiz, the fire alarm went off. We grabbed our most important stuff, and piled outdoors. We finished the quiz outside, a good distance from the building. Nathan said he wished he left his geometry book inside in case the building was on fire. By the time we finished the quiz, the alarm had stopped. We all went back in and continued class as normal.

While the Mom's were talking [instead of leaving =)] me and Nathan talked about some movie concepts. He wanted me to be the Comic Relief, so on the way home I made up some puns and humorous equivocation. I'm thinking about making a tutorial on how to write Comic Relief...

Around 10:00 last night, we went into our garage to check on our chicks. One of them had a broken leg or something, and it couldn't walk. All the other chicks were pecking at it. We put it in a separate box [lined with newspapers and wood chips] and gave it its own food/water supply. This morning, it was just a tad bit better.

Python Tutorial 4: File IO

2010-03-23T16:08:00.008-04:00

If you have worked with PHP or Perl, then file IO should be familiar. To edit/read a file, you need a file object. To get the file object, you have to open the file.

fileObject = open("file.ext", "r")
print fileObject.read()

But what if you wanted to start reading from the middle of the file? In python, this is possible. To set the file read cursor, you must use the seek function:

fileObject.seek(offset,where)

where is optional, and it tells the compiler where to start from in the file. If where is 0, then it puts the cursor at offset characters from the start of the file. If it is 1, the characters are counted form where the cursor is currently. If 2, then they are counted from the end of the file. If where is not specified, then the compiler uses 0.

The offset [as previously explained] tells the compiler how far from where to set the cursor. Negative numbers are acceptable

fileObject.seek(15,0) would move the cursor 15 characters from the beginning of the file
fileObject.seek(15,1) would move the cursor 15 characters to the right from its current position
fileObject.seek(-15,2) would move the cursor 15 characters away from the end of the file

Notice the negative sign before the fifteen in the last example.

seek, read, and open are the most basic IO functions. Lets look at some more: tell(), readline(), readlines(), write() and close()

tell() gets the position of the cursor in the file, which [as shown above] can be set with seek().

cursorPos = fileObject.tell()

The readline() function reads from the cursor position to the end of the line. The readlines() function reads from the cursor position to the end of the file, and returns an array with each line in a separate index. You will never guess what the write() function does. Ok, you might if you are really smart. Assuming you arn't really smart, I'll tell you what it does. It writes to the file. It writes at the cursor position, overwriting any characters infront of it, like if you press the Insert button in Microsoft Word and type. The close() function closes the file object so you can't read or write to it anymore without reopening the file. You should always remember to do this because if you don't, then the changes you made most likely won't effect the file.

Now lets talk about pickles. No I'm not being random; Pickles are a way in python to save objects to files. You can save almost any object to a file with pickles. Inorder to use them, though, you have to import them with the statement: import pickle. Then you use the pickle.dump() function to save them to the file:

import pickle

numbers = ["one",2,"three","four",5,"can you count?"]

fileObject = open("numbers.txt", "w")

pickle.dump(numbers,fileObject)

fileObject.close()

To read a pickle back in, you use the pickle.load() function:

import pickle

fileObject = open("numbers.txt", "r")

numbers = pickle.load(fileObject)

fileObject.close()

for item in numbers

print item

The main con with pickles is that you can't save more than one object to a file. A way around this would be to put all the objects into an array, and then save the array to the file.

That concludes my fourth python tutorial.

Python Tutorial 3: Loops and Conditionals

2010-03-22T15:20:00.001-04:00

Like I said in my First Python Tutorial, there are no brackets [ { and } ] ; Python uses indentation instead.

a = 0

while a < 10:

a = a + 1

print a

print "End of loop"

Everything after the while a < 10: statement that is indented is repeated until a is no longer smaller than 10. Everytime through the loop, a is incremented, and then printed. The output of this program:

End of loop

Notice that "End of loop" is only printed once. That is because it is not indented, and hence comes after the while loop ends. Here is the basic form for the while loop:

while {condition that the loop continues}:
{what to do in the loop}
{have it indented, usually for spaces}
{the code here is not looped}
{because it isn't indented}

The if statement is rather similar

if(condition)
   statements
else
   statements

This can be very useful for many things

if(enteredPassword == correctPassword)
   login()
else
   print "Incorrect password";

Chicks

2010-03-22T14:32:00.003-04:00

We got baby chicks! I knew Mom & Dad were planning to do this eventually, so I was surprised when they walked out of Tractor Supply Co. with them. They had gone in to buy supplies for them, so we'd be ready when we got them.

We currently have them in a box in our garage. We had to buy wood shavings and a special heat lamp and water container for them. We lined the cardboard box with newspapers, then covered it with wood shavings.

click images to view them full size

I must be out of my mind; uploading pictures that don't have me in them.....

Now for the chicks:

My Dad will be building the Chicken Tractor for them, and then they will stay outside. But for now, we'll keep them in our garage.

Affect vs. Effect

2010-03-21T18:12:00.002-04:00

I don't know about you, but I haven't ever heard an easy-to-understand rule about when to use affect and when to use effect.

So I could turn this into a really long definition [like a grammar book would], but I'll keep it short and sweet.

Affect: verb
Effect: noun

I affected the dreams of Luke and Levi [view post]

Since, in this case affected is a verb, it has an A.

The effect of the WordPress editor is not pretty [view post]

In this case effect is a noun, so it has an E. If you already knew this then...... this is just for a reference for me

Affecting Dreams

2010-03-21T18:04:00.000-04:00

Most of the time, I go to bed later than my other siblings. One night, Luke was asleep on the floor. When I came in he stood up and got in bed. I noticed his eyes were closed, but wondered if he was awake. I decided to do a little experiment. Note that Luke's eyes were closed the whole time.

Me: Did Bob take the mustard?
Luke sits up in bed
Luke: Maybe
Me: Did George take the mayonnaise?
Luke scratches his chin
Luke: OK, bye.
Luke lies down in bed

I tried to pursue further conversation, but he was obviously fully asleep. A few nights later, Levi seemed unusually fidgety. I decided to try it with him. Note that Levi's eyes were closed the whole time.

Me: Levi? Are you awake?
Levi nods, eyes still closed
Me: Can you give me a high five?
Levi shakes his head a few times, then nods
I hold out my hand
Levi highfives a few various invisible hands
Levi shakes his head

So in both of the above cases [yes they really happened], I obviously affected their dreams, more or less. With Luke though, I could only affect his dream up to a certain point. So at what level of consciousness do I affect their dreams? At what level of consciousness is it not really a dream for them? Since consciousness can't be measured these questions may never be answered.

Unless of course in 10 years from now, we discover a way to measure consciousness.

Why I Chose Blogger over Wordpress

2010-03-21T17:16:00.000-04:00

WordPress is very feature rich, and the widgets and themes are very appealing. But the editor is awful. It takes out line breaks, and edits the HTML code. All its features can't compensate for the editor's flaws. So I decided I was done with WordPress. I tried out a few different blog engines, but none of them were what I needed. Blogger is the bare minimum of what I need. Its like WordPress, without all the widgets and themes and faulty editor. As you can see, my first post was the same Python tutorial on my old blog.

I wrestled with the WordPress editor for half an hour before I got it looking the way I wanted it. With blogger, I just type in the text in the WYSIWYG editor. Like WYSIWYG implies, What You See Is What You Get. The WordPress editor, though it is called WYSIWYG, is definitely not.

If WordPress comes out with an Update that fixes the editor problems, then maybe I will switch back to it. But for now, I will leave the WordPress blog as-is and just post to this blog.

Here is my old blog.

--Adam

Python Tutorial 2: Variables

2010-03-21T17:02:00.000-04:00

In this tutorial, we’ll study variables. Python variables are related the closest to PHP and Perl, except they don’t start with any symbols. In Python, both concatenation and addition are done with +. All the others you would expect.

+	Addition / Concatenation
-	Subtraction
*	Multiplication
/	Division
%	Modulos
**	Powers

Python variables are generic; you don’t have to declare them with a type [int,string,char etc...] or with var, you just simply use them. A variable can hold a number at one point, and later in the program hold a string of characters.

   varone = 5
   vartwo = 6

After assigning the variables, you can add them together and store them in another variable:

   varthree = varone + vartwo

This assigns varthree to 11. You can subtract, multiply, and divide in the same way. You can divide vartwo in half like this:

   vartwo /= 2

This takes vartwo, divides it by two, then assigns it back to vartwo. So since we had vartwo set to 6, it would now be set to 3. You can multiply by two with *=, add two with +=, subtract two with -= etc...

Strings are slightly different.

   stringone = "Hello"
   stringtwo = "World"
   greeting = stringone + " " + stringtwo

This gives the variable greeting the value "Hello World". Commas do virtually the same thing as + with strings, except commas insert spaces. The above greeting assignment does the same thing as the following:

   greeting = stringone,stringtwo