Tag Archives: Software

Flame V1.1.0

Posted by on February 28, 2008 No comments

I released Flame Version 1.1.0 today. It has lots of bug fixes, mostly for major oversights I didn’t account for in directory structures and obscure and unnecessary Wix rules. I’m working on code to generate .wxs files that work with Wix V3, but it was taking me too long and I wanted to get these other fixes out. On that note – if you have insight into how Wix V3 does things differently, please let me know — I’ve entertained a fantasy multiple times recently of me lighting some microsoft cubicles on fire and standing on the copy machine, disembodied mouse in one hand, broken monitor in the other, with a necktie on my head ala Natural Born Killers, shouting ‘BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY!’ at the top of my lungs. Even typing it brings me solace.

Anyhoo — check it out and give me feedback. Flame still has a ways to go, but I have successfully built installers with it for Tail, WPMC, and itself, so it’s at least mostly functional.

DirTreeCtrl – wxPython tree widget for directories

Posted by on February 18, 2008 3 comments

As I was writing Flame (a GUI for Wix) I really wanted to show the contents of a directory in a tree, JUST like the GenericDirCtrl in wxPython. I tried using the GenericDirCtrl initially, but you really can’t customize it at all, most importantly you cannot set the directory you want to use – it always shows everything from the base drives out. I need this tree control for selecting files that go into an installer, so showing files outside of the relevant directory will be annoying for the experienced users and disastrous for the inexperienced. After a LOT of looking and hacking I didn’t find or create a working solution to the problem, so I started over and wrote the DirTreeCtrl below. It is simply a wx.TreeCtrl with some extra functionality related to the filesystem. When you pass the tree a directory, it gets the directory contents and displays them, querying the OS to get any file extension icons available. The file structure is loaded virtually to minimize memory usage and there is an option in the widget to remove loaded directory data if memory use is critical for you. More features below:

DirTreeCtrl — wxPython widget for displaying directories
Features:

  • Automatically loads files in the given directory
  • File lists loaded on the fly when nodes are expanded so you only load what you need
  • Gets the OS icons used for files when it can to emulate file explorer as much as possible
  • Easily use your own icons for any file extension
  • Automatically loads the correct icon if file shown is a .ico file
  • Does NOT require win32 libraries or anything else outside of normal wxPython install

Check it out here: DirTreeCtrl – wxPython widget for displaying directories

Tail

Posted by on February 14, 2008 No comments

I’ve always missed have the tail -f command while working on windows machines, and something finally snapped yesterday. I’d seen some tail implementations for windows, but none of them were good enough, so I sat down and pounded out my own version and called it, drumroll please, tail.

Features:

  • GUI — no command line needed
  • Monitor many files at once
  • Customizable filters for flagging files – eg, only flag if error or warning is found
  • Visual and audio changes indicate flagged files
  • Pause/Restart monitoring, Mute/Unmute sounds, and change the number of lines in real time
  • Automatically saves your preferences when closed, including any files currently opened, and re-applies them when opened again
  • Free! Open sourced under the GPLv3
  • Platform independent — don’t worry linuxers, we won’t tell

Check out the page for it at Keeyai.com/projects/tail

Download it. Use it. Love it.

MUA Framework – 2D View Progress

Posted by on February 11, 2008 No comments

I’m currently working on the 2D view and tools necessary for it.

I had a mostly finished 2D view going, but am currently destroying it and replacing a lot of code in it with rabbyt, an openGL sprite library that is FAST, and Lamina to get pygame blitting and drawing control back (FUCK writing openGL code). I’ve also been seeing a lot of talk about pyglet as well. It looks like this could be used to replace pygame – it appears to have everything pygame offers except a joystick interface and a draw method (have to do it in openGL). I’ll probably code something up in both pygame and pyglet and benchmark them. I expect pyglet will be much faster, so if any of you out there have some openGL XP and feel like wrapping up some basic draw functionality, let me know.

I’m also thinking about adding some sort of ‘view state’, which will really just be different views with their own sprite lists, guis, and user input behavior. Think things like the loading screen, the lobby, the main game screen, and the menu. Then I’ll add something that makes it extremely easy to switch the views around and manages all the sticky bits for you.

After all this I will have to re-do the pong demo, then write some expansions on it to emphasize the newly added features.

Also, someone remind me to get SVN set up again…

SETI @ Home Stats

Posted by on January 25, 2008 No comments

I wrote a fun little page-scraper script for the SETI@Home team statistics page that displays your team’s top 20 members in a snazzy interactive pie chart. You can compare by total activity or recent average activity.

Check it out at here

For those of you who don’t know, SETI@Home is a program you download that uses your computer when you aren’t on it and searches SETI data for non-natural radio signals. By installing and using the SETI@Home software, you are joining a massive distributed super computer that makes the search for extra terrestrial intelligence possible. So, go download the software (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/index.php) and become part of the magic. It costs you computer time you weren’t using anyway and a little extra power. Also, once you sign up, you’re welcome to join team MUA. Just search for MUA in the team area and click the link to join the team.