February 6, 2013

Finished my Pig Latin translator tonight (or I should say Pyg Latin since it's programmed in Python). One thing I've noticed is that I'm really bad at commenting my code, and that's something I'm going to need to concentrate on. It's not a big deal for small programs like this, but a larger project that takes more than an hour or so of coding at a time is going to require heavy commenting and I might as well get in the habit now.

Also have to build a voting interface for a client about to hold board elections. They want to do away with paper balloting and go 100% electronic. I'm going to use a Google Form which populates a spreadsheet for vote tabulation and embed the form on their website during the voting period.

February 5, 2013

Worked on the first half of a Pig Latin translator in Python today. Basically used an input query and then an if-then loop to validate the input.

Also thought I'd mention that I ordered a Raspberry Pi the other day. Paid $50 for it (when the suggested retail is only $35), but I was anxious to get one and fool around with it. If I can actually build a functional XBMC for fifty bucks, I'm calling that a win.

Here's a picture of the model I bought:

Finally, the HTML5 Game Development course just opened at Udacity, so I'll be spending some time on that over the coming weeks.

February 4, 2013

I've spent the past several years keeping up with technology, and I'm at the point where I need to start keeping track of what I'm learning and what I'm working on.

At the moment my biggest projects are an eBook which is about 80% finished and a mobile and web app called Paris4Parents to help parents find fun stuff to do with their kids in Paris.

I'm four days into the Python track at CodeAcademy, and I hit my first snag today. Nothing insurmountable. It's the Review exercise for Conditionals and Control Flow and here's the problem set:

Write an if statement inthe_flying_circus(). It must include:

1. and, or, or not;
2. ==, !=, <, <=, >, or >=;
3. an if, elif, AND else statement;
4. it must return True when evaluated.

So I need to do a little research and throw some code against the wall and see how much sticks. I'm about a week away from my first Python coding project (at my current pace) and things are getting progressively more difficult. I've yet to see the real usefulness in what I've learned so far, but I know that will come.

I also started to learn Ruby on Rails but put that on hold temporarily to try out the CodeAcademy Python track. So far Python syntax has been really easy and intuitive, so I'm enjoying that. 

That's it for today, I just wanted to get this thing started so I'd have a place to make some notes and keep track of stuff.

UPDATE: I did a little research on the CodeAcademy forum and came up with the following correct answer to the problem set:


def the_flying_circus():
    #Start coding here!
    if 2 < 4:
        return True
    elif False and False:
    return False
    else:
    return False


Not sure I completely understand why that was what they were looking for, but I understand the concept of conditionals and I get control flow and order of execution, so I guess that's it for this lesson. Now I have another exercise to work through if I'm not mistaken.