Those of you that know me, know that one of my favourite illustrators is Jon Pinto. I have been following his work for a number of years and his style has rubbed off on me a little bit for a recent poster I did for the local AmDram group.
Anyway, just Before Gallifrey this year I decided to get a phone case for my trusty Samsung Galaxy S3 and found an unauthorised UN Jon Pinto design. I mailed him and told him about it. He asked me if I wanted a print – Of course I said yes! and sent him my address thinking nothing more of it.
Well, guess what turned up inthe mail yesterday? not one but 3 signed prints ! I cant wait to get these bad boys framed and on the wall (probably in the new Titanium Bunker wing)
If you’re reading this Jon, Thanks so very much . We here at the bunker deeply appreciate this. and if you haven’t already stopped by the site (and why haven’t you?) then click this link right away. your eyes will love you for it!
Had to venture out of the bunker this week to get A copy of Doctor Who: U.N.I.T Files . as the Android Invasion will be covered as part of the live Hoo on Who recording at Gallifrey . and I had to get watched and caught up in only a few days.
I asked the assistant at HMV if they had it in stock. One quick check on their computerised stock sytem told me that they had one. 20 minutes of searching later and it wasnt there .
“Oh well,” said the assistant, “We don’t seem to have it in stock. Sorry about that”
So I went downstairs and asked the Manager. Again a 20 minute wait before :
“Sorry we don’t have it in stock”
Neither the assistant, or the manager offered to order it in for me. and as I said to the manager as I left.
“oh well , In which case I will have to order it on line. Looks like you missed a sale there”
Today what’s turned up in the post? U.N.I.T Files. from Amazon.
And that’s one of the myriad reasons why HMV is basically marking time untill the whole chain collapses. No concept of helping customers access the content they are looking for. No attempt to secure the sale or even attempt some kind of customer service. Within 24 hours I had the DVD delivered from another part of the country
I have been working a lot with .net recently and as part of that I have been colouring .net controls. You could, if you like, use paint or photoshop or an online color picker like Colorpicker.com to find a colour you like and use its rgb values to colour the control. Or you can use the pre-defined colours to quickly color the control.
Thing is the predefined colours have names like BlanchedAlmond or DodgerBlue . I have no idea what they look like or more importantly how well they could work together.
So I have knocked up a little .net pallette app to help. :
simply move the mouse over the swatch to find out what its called. I plan to add other functionality like getting RGB, HEX or ordering colours, putting them in a workable order, from hot reds down through the lilacs,and then beyond into the ultramarine (oh yeah, I just quoted the Boosh!)
Remember a post Mike made about the software being developed here in the bunker?
Mike spent a couple of days detailing the software architecture and utterly seemed to be going ok.
Fast forward 2 months and the software is still not ready. At OggCamp, Aq gave an interesting lightning talk at Oggcamp where he argued that too often software developers tie themselves up in design without something
Long story short . I have written it myself!!!! Mike continues his 0 – streak!!!!!
Last night I attended the opening of Cambridge’s Makespace. In case you didn know a makespace is an enviornment where memeber get access to exotic bits of kit , CNC routers, repraps lathes soldering stations so geeks can make new and interesting hardware projects , similat to a hackspace.
The cambridge makespace is a spinoff from the Cambridge SHDC (Super Happy Dev Club) but at the moment its is just an empty shell. They are setting up the equipment and getting the place established.
iF you are interested in joining ( and if you are reading this blog then surely you must be!) then check out their meetuppage – Maybe I’ll see you at a makernight!
I have been developing a little application in python.
“oooh!” I hear you cry, “Get you using free and open source development languages to develop a cross platform application. Was it a liberating, life changing experience?”
Well yes. Yes it was. And no as well
Here’s the yes, the pros of development. The plan was to develop a small application to run on the Mac Mini we use here in the bunker as a DVD player. Having spent some time reading up on Cocoa and straining my eyes trying to read the display ( its connected to the TV via a scart composite cable so the desktop display isn’t great) I decided to develop the application on my Windows Desktop using python. The rational being that it is cross platform, if I can write it to work in a windows environment, it should work in a Mac environment right?
I installed a portable python and Boa constructor onto my trusty USB Key based development studio ( more on this another time) and in an afternoon I had managed to write my first ever python WX app !
booting up the Linux laptop I installed python and wx in a short period of time (Ubuntu software centre is the gift that keeps on giving! ) and yup, the application ran fine
So far, so good, I have developed in one platform and deployed to another. now the next step. compile it into a stand alone exe that can run in Mac OS. And this is where we come to the cons
Mac Software centre
Mac OS has a software centre for getting software. I wanted to be certain that I had the latest version of python. so I typed it in the search field. After sifting through downloads of Monty Python’s flying circus shows and films I found it. all for the princely sum of £1.99
really? £1.99 for software that’s free and easily download-able from pythons own website after a cursory search on google? Why anyone would think that Apple where a money grubbing organisation trying to fleece owners by charging for free content?
Installing WX
next up was installing wx. A relatively painless experience. The was an installer on their website that allowed the installation of the package and I was finally able to test the application in the Mac OS and it worked! Kind of. Because of font differences. one of the buttons needed to be enlarged and moved – cue 20 minutes of putting values in, running the module , stopping the module, changing values etc just to more-or-less replicate what showed up first time on windows and Linux.
Installing py2app
In order to convert the python script into a stand alone app was going to use py2app which makes creating app files easy. This is the point where I lost the best part of a day struggling with a number of issues, chief among them is the fact that as a Windows/Linux user I am used to right clicking a link in my web browser and saving links. to right click on mac you hold down ctr (yeah its so intuitive to me too) Apparently Mighty mouse which are 4 button mice do actually have a right click functionality, but it needs to be set up from the finder by assigning the secondary click function to the right button- don’t panic, its not as scary as it sounds, but you got to question why such simple design paradigms have to be defined. When i plug a new mouse into my windows or Linux box, I don’t have then tell the OS what buttons do what It works out of the box.
installing easyinstall
To install Py2app I was going to have to install another python package called easyinstall. This is the point where I lost a lot of time on the documentation. which , while it showed me what to type in terms of setting it up. I was typing the commands into a python shell window and trying to run it as a python module with no luck until Mike told me that it was terminal prompts. Just a line explaining that this was to be run from a terminal would have saved me 4 hours of frustration trying to get easy install er… installed
installing app2exe (again)
However, once I had installed easy install, installing py2app was a dream. its a lot easier to use terminal commands when you actually know they are terminal commands!
making the application
I then started setting up the solution to create the app. Py2app basically takes a number of arguments, the first is the location of the main.py file, followed by resources. in this case the application icon. The problem here was my USB Key. On Mac OS it appears with the title “NO NAME” and while py2app could parse the space in the location of the initial .py file, apparently for the icon file it didn’t recognise it. Cue renaming of drive to replace spaces with underscores
This time I wan the py2app applet and SUCCESS!!!! a program appeared in my Release folder in my user profile. After 2 evenings of frustration, weeping and much gnashing of teeth, I had built my first Python Mac OS application!
Lets run it to see how it works.
And it crashed. Something to do with different versions of WX!!!! AGGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!
