Skip to main content

Posts

Python 3.8 and Pygame 2.0

One of my goals for the year has been to learn Python. I got started on it earlier this year, but a move to a different state got me out of my routine of studying it every day, so its been a couple months since I last looked at it. Now that I am all settled in here I decided to pick up where I left off, but change things up a bit.  I had been working my way through Christian Thompson's excellent series on creating a Space Invaders clone in Python and had successfully gotten a little spaceship moving around, and a couple enemies on screen that could be fired at, and register a hit. However this tutorial uses Python Turtle  and I decided that I wanted to learn with Pygame , since that is quite a bit more capable than Turtle and learning it would enable me to theoretically build games down the road. The chances of that happening are quite remote, as I am primarily interested in learning Python as a tool for data analysis to augment my FileMaker development skills, but I think it
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

Lazy Inventory 0.4 Released

LAZY INVENTORY RELEASE 0.4 OVERVIEW I am proud to announce the 0.4 release of Lazy Inventory, the amazing inventory management system that nobody currently uses ;) It can be downloaded via clicking this link . In the last few months I have made quite a bit of progress on adding new features and debugging existing ones, as well as moving to a numbered release system for easier tracking. We are a long ways away from even a 1.0 release, but Lazy Inventory 0.4 now is fully capable of not only managing inventory for a small business, but also picking orders. I would say it's an even bigger jump from trying to use Google Sheets or Excel than the retroactively renamed version 0.1 was. My very basic features and bug tracking spreadsheet is shown at the right, its pretty basic but it gets the job done and keeps me on track. Currently there are forty-four features on my to-do list, a version 1.0 release will require somewhere around  thirty-five of them to be completed and polishe
Post a Comment
Read more

Writing Updates

Progress has been slow this past month, but there has been progress. Mostly what I have been doing is expanding my outline from what was sometimes just a sentence or two, fleshing each out to sometimes as much as several hundred words. Book one (The Pyongyang Incursion) has its outline completely done, although I am sure there will be further revisions to it as I work on the other two book outlines. Currently the outline stands at over 2400 words across twenty different outline points, and I am overall pretty pleased with how it's shaping up, the overall story arc is much tighter and I was able to trim some fat off some points and add other points to keep the story moving along at a good pace. Book two (The Vladivostok Penetration) has most of the summary written but only three outline points, while book three (The Berlin Infiltration) has one lonely little outline point and no summary written. The summaries for the overall series background has been expanded a little bit more,
Post a Comment
Read more

Axis and Allies 1942 Online Review

I have been enjoying Axis and Allies for almost twenty years now. I started with what is now called Axis and Allies Classic, the 1984 edition. I bought it for forty dollars (plus eight dollars shipping and handling) when I was about twelve. I had played the game at a neighbor's house, and absolutely fell in love with it, obsessing over it and mentally playing and replaying games in my head, trying to understand its ins and outs. I read the strategy guide, looked for opportunities to try new strategies, and even built a custom table for the game, something that barely fit into the cramped room my brother and I shared. I never became an expert in A&A, at best I am a fairly good casual player and the nice thing about A&A is that you don't have to be a massive board game nerd to enjoy it. The rules are complex, but the basics are easy to grasp. Once I went off to college, it was years before I played another A&A game, and in that time there had been a couple rev
Post a Comment
Read more

Writing Update

So far this week I haven't gotten too much done, I've mostly been outlining. Book 1 was fully outlined in basic one sentence form, so I have been going back through the outline and tightening it up, by removing things that impede the narrative flow, and expanding the areas that help it progress.  I want to make sure that I don't have anything outlined that is just "filler" or something clearly thrown in just to pad the word count a bit, I hate it when authors do that. The goal is to get each one sentence outline expanded to a full paragraph. Then I'll do a scene breakdown, then and only then will I write the story. My hope is that this will not only keep the books feeling cohesive, but will also help me use my writing time more effectively. The outline for The Pyongyang Incursion  is twenty-one points currently, and I have expanded nine of them to a full paragraph in the last week. I also have the first three outline points done on the sequel, The Vladi
Post a Comment
Read more

Soviet Mainframe Computers

Ural-1 Control Unit The world of Soviet tech is an interesting one, they frequently were forced to resort to workarounds as they attempted to compensate for their lagging technological development when compared to the West. This does not detract from their very real accomplishments in areas such as the space race, where they led the West for years before finally irrevocably falling behind after the untimely death of their leading designer, Sergei Korolev in 1966. I recently purchased an entire book on eBay called The Technological Level of Soviet Industry, (archived 1978 review  here , there is no direct link to buy it as even Amazon doesn't seem to have it). This isn't a full book, rather it is a collection of different author's papers all bound together. I purchased the book specifically to get Chapter 8, Computer technology  which is an extremely good resource on the state of Soviet computing in the late 70s. At the time of publication in 1977, personal computers s
Post a Comment
Read more

Ramblings and Updates

I haven't been doing much writing in the last couple years, I have mostly been working on other side projects. One of the problems with being somewhat absent minded and prone to chase rabbit trails ;) I have been pleased to see a handful of people downloading Rise to Revolt from Kobo and I even got a couple more star ratings for it, its sitting at 4 out of 5 stars with three total ratings. Kobo tells me that it has been downloaded about 20 times, although I seem to remember seeing something about that number possibly being inaccurate due to Kobo having a bug of some sort a while ago that interfered with counting free downloads. Is 20 free downloads and three ratings anything to get excited about? Well for me, it certainly feels good to know that 20 people tried to read my first book, and none of them hated it enough to send me nasty emails or leave a bad review. For a complete unknown's first work, one that was deliberately published on a very small platform that reaches a
Post a Comment
Read more