DJango in a (pea)nutshell
by eamonn on Jul.26, 2010, under development
DJango is an open source MVC (or MTV) Web CMS written in Python, HTML, JS and CSS.
It uses a urls file to interpret the incoming request, separating out the params from the action, eg /customer/1/delete would be interpreted as delete customer 1.
The urls file links the request to a view function. This view function uses the model objects to modify the values in the database and then passes them onto a template. This template then displays them!
The model objects are stored in a database and are defined using python. There is not really any need to know sql. Although, I would always suggest knowing it!!!
That is it, really! There are loads of great features that I will cover soon!
I am doing my first commercial project in DJango and it is going well! I will post on it once it goes live!
Changed themes again
by eamonn on Jul.22, 2010, under misc
Sorry all, I have had to switch back to my old theme. The comments plugin is broken in other themes 
Jiglibflash First Experiences
by eamonn on Jul.22, 2010, under development
I have been playing around with jiglibflash. It is a rigid body physics engine. I have been looking at example projects like this.
I am working on a secret project at work and I thought it would be good to share what I have learned. I want to point out that I had no 3d experience before I started this! So you should be able to do this too!
I have been using papervision to render a texture map. It takes a black and white jpeg which marks shallower and higher areas on a terrain. Papervision converts this into a 3d terrain, mountains and ditches. I also have a car which is loaded from a dae file. Papervision loads this file and renders it. I am then using Jiglibflash to create JBoxes, JSpheres and others. These ‘J’ shapes are used for the collision detection. You can even have a Papervision sphere inside a JBox and the physics engine will treat it as a box. It does all the collision detections for you. It takes care of friction and gravity. You can apply forces to the shapes. It is really straight forward handling simple shapes. The next stage of my project is to start describing complex shapes using these J shapes. It is going to be tough!!!
Using these libraries has been great! It has been a bit of a pain as Jiglibflash uses Papervision (you can also choose to use Away3D) and you need to ensure you use working sets of Jiglibflash and Papervision. A lot of the examples use strange combinations of versions so beware!
I will post the other stuff I discover as I discover it!
Promotion at Work
by eamonn on Jul.18, 2010, under misc
It has been a crazy few months. It all started when I left Gamesys.
At Gamesys I was a flash developer. We produced gambling games. We used the flex sdk to compile, we used HudsonCI for continuous builds. We even (many moons ago) used to develop using TDD. It was, for a long while, a serious programming outfit.
For many reasons, I decided a change would be good and so I took the plunge and accepted a position at Fuse, who I had been really been impressed by. Fuse is a digital agency with strong video and 3d skills. Skills I have been lacking.
Fuse were working on a project for The Football Pools, it was Spot the Ball. It was a free to play gambling game to be used as an acquisition tool and then a pay to play version was to be delivered after initial go live. The project was a success and was delivered on time and we have now been asked to work on some more projects for The Football Pools. I was really interested, working in a digital agency working on a gambling game after just leaving a gambling company. The difference was unbelievable.
Since joining Fuse, have worked on programming with Papervision3D, Away3D, JiglibFlash, Unity3d, Cocos2d and more. I have written a tool that uses OpenOffice 3 to convert PowerPoint documents into swfs and html. I have written a php ldap address book which we have opensourced. I have worked on internal network support, replacing a 2 x quad core mac with an NSLU2 (more on that later). It has been crazy but great!
Fuse have been happy with my performance and have made me a technical director. I am very honoured and I am very excited about what we are going to achieve so watch this space!!! To celebrate this promotion I decided to give my blog a little facelift. (I installed a new theme, lol). Despite the change being minimal here it is! I hope you like it and I hope nothing has broken 
My new phone! HTC Desire
by eamonn on Jul.17, 2010, under misc
I replaced (upgraded?) my iPhone for a HTC Desire.
I started off by getting annoyed at people for not having html versions of their flash sites, then I got annoyed at Apple for not allowing flash on their iPhones and then I decided to go with the internet and embrace flash. So I bought a HTC Desire.
I got my Desire about 2 months ago. It was free on a £30 / month price plan from Orange (who turned out to have a worse network than 3!).
The handset it amazing. The battery is average, the screen display is very nice and it feels really sturdy in your hand. It uses micro usb for charging so getting a charger for it is pretty easy!
I use Google Apps for my personal email/calendar/docs. When I turned on the handset I entered my details and it sync’d over the air. I had my calendar, my email and all my contact available on the go. AWESOME!
The market place app is pretty good. It doesnt have the same feeling of quality as the App Store, but that is a very minor let down. The apps themselves are a little lacking. It reminds me of when I first got my iPhone. There were very few good apps. I think that will all change when Froyo is out in full bloom and when the Air App Store opens up.
I have used three different software keyboards (including ShapeWriter, which i gave up on because I couldn’t figure out how to write in caps). I am yet to try Swype.
Web browsing is soooo much better than the iPhone. The pages feel like they render quicker (I have not checked this out thoroughly so do not flame me!). When you zoom in and out of a page the text automatically reflows to fit the screen, which makes reading it much easier.
The built in music player is a little shabby to be honest. I am yet to find something as polished as iTunes. It is nice just copying MP3s over to the microSD chip though and not having to sync. Any tips on a media player would be great! 
I have started devloping for the handset. It is easier than the iPhone as I know Java already but I will go into more detail on that soon in another post!
The prodigal blogger returns
by eamonn on Jul.17, 2010, under misc
I have not blogged for ages! Sorry!
Things have been pretty crazy the last couple of months. I will post more on that very soon!
I am now back and will be blogging until you are sick of it! Ha ha ha!
Blog updates
by eamonn on Mar.15, 2010, under development
My blog is now on the Amazon cloud! I have signed up to AWS and am hosting my own sites on my own box (running Gentoo).
I have also enabled a social networking plugin for wordpress that allows you to login using your google account. I will adding support for twitter and facebook soon!
[Google Services] What a gem!
by eamonn on Jan.27, 2010, under misc
I have been using Google Apps for over a year and I love the service.
[Email]
In the past year I have had about 20mins of downtime which is less than a third of the downtime I had when I paid for hosting. The service includes great spam filtering, good message labeling, secure imap and pop3 and webmail. The service is fast and very reliable. It is much better than squirrelmail.
[Sites]
I used Google Sites to host a website for our wedding. It was inbetween using a template service like RV Site Builder and a wiki. It was easy to assemble and looked pretty good. It has built in Google Analytics tracking support so that you do not need to edit any templates.
more to come…
More info and sign up
The International Gaming Expo – Earls Court
by eamonn on Jan.27, 2010, under misc
I am heading off to IGE today. IGE is:
The most influential group of gaming industry speakers ever assembled at a b2b exhibition will feature at the IGE Gaming Leaders Programme of presentations, seminars and round table discussions. The three day programme, consisting of 50 sessions with more content being added up until the shows open, will deliver a unique insight and crucial first-mover advantage across a range of important commercial, technological, legislative and social responsibility areas
I am going to be checking out all of the offline slot games and some of the online ones too. I have heard that there is a lot of innovation in bingo this year and after the improvement in offline slots last year I cannot wait to see what is there this year. I will take some pictures about blog them this week along with some reviews.
On a side note: if you want to meet with me to discuss some opportunities then drop me an email using the contact form. I will be checking my email whilst there.
