Harry Tormey

June 7, 2010

PyGameSF meetup Wednesday June 9th 6pm @ Main SF public library 4th floor Sycip room

Filed under: Games, Interesting, Programming, Python, Talk, linkedin — admin @ 10:55 am
The June PyGameSF meet up will be at the Sycip conference room on the fourth floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

  • Casey Duncan: “Grease: it’s a game framework, no it’s a game engine, no it’s a framework for making game engines; and now it’s more than just vaporware!” Grease is an open-source project for rapid Python game development. Casey is going to give a little guided tour of the not-just-sci-fi-anymore Grease API and talk a bit about future directions. He is also going to talk about using Sphinx to document Grease, and how you can, and should, use it to document your own projects and ideas.
  • Al Sweigart : “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python.” Al’s presentation will cover his book which teaches kids (and adult beginners) how to program by making computer games. Al will talk about the methodology his book uses, things he’s learned about teaching programming and games, and about how games can bring more people into software development. The book is under a Creative Commons license and is available for free at http://inventwithpython.com. The book is also for sale in print on Amazon.com.

April 28, 2010

PyGameSF meetup Thursday April 29th 6pm @ Main San Francisco Public Library

Filed under: Android, Interesting, Programming, Pylons, Python — Tags: — admin @ 3:11 pm


The April PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

  • Colin Bean: Complex visualization with Pyglet and NumPy. An introduction to how complex numbers can be visualized ad 2D geometry, how geometric transformations can be described as operations on complex numbers, and how basic complex functions can produce visually striking results. Visualization code will be provided using Pyglet and NumPy. The material is based on Tristan Needham’s book “Visual Complex Analysis”.
  • Harry Tormey: Mobile games to make you move around. Obesity has been cited as a contributing factor to approximately 100,000–400,000 deaths per year in the USA alone. To help address this problem the company I work for is having a competition to create an Android app that inspires and tracks physical movement using ourAPI’s. The grand prize for this competition : An all expenses paid trip to TED Global 2010. I will be demoing an example open source exercise tracking Android app and an accompanying pylons based web stack which displays information captured via the phone. Talk will cover: An introduction to Android, mobile data capture techniques and displaying information captured from the phone via a python based web backend using the Snaptic API.

March 2, 2010

PyGameSF meetup Tuesday March 2nd 6pm @ the Sycip room on the fourth floor of the Main San Francisco Public Library

Filed under: Games, Interesting, Music, Programming, Python — Tags: — admin @ 10:28 am
The March PyGameSF meet up will be at the Sycip conference room on the fourth floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

  • Patrick Stinson: Embedding Python as a Realtime Audio Scripting Engine. Topics will include separation and communication between the application and scripting engine, why Python is “safe” for audio work including empirical performance metrics, and caveats related to multithreaded processing as performance requirements increase. I will share my experiences using the standard CPython implementation to research and develop a state-of-the-art scripting engine for the Play professional sampling engine (http://www.soundsonline.com).
  • Shandy Brown : Structuring Your Game’s Code. One approach to designing video games with a focus on rapid development and networked multiplayer capabilities. Shandy Brown will highlight key ideas in his tutorial. Fundamental topics such as event-based design, defining your game model, and separating the model and the view will be covered.

October 11, 2009

Random Tech Nugget: Creating a dictionary from a list in Python

Filed under: Programming, Python — Tags: — admin @ 5:05 pm
Say you have a list and you want to create a dictionary such that the contents of the list become the keys of the dictionary. This is how you would do it:

 Python |  copy code |? 
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#Example, key = file name in list, value = path+filename
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import os
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path      = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
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mylist   = ['harry.png', 'andy.png', 'dan.png']
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aDict    = dict([(fn, os.path.join(path, fn)) for fn in mylist])

October 4, 2009

PyGameSF meetup Thursday October 8th 6pm @ 3rd floor Main San Francisco Public Library

Filed under: Facebook, Interesting, Programming, Pylons, Python, Social Networks, Technology — Tags: — admin @ 9:59 pm
The October PyGameSF meet up will be at the PALEY (not the STONG) conference room on the third floor of the main San Francisco public library besidecivic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

  • Shannon -jj Behrens, How to Blow Up Helicopters Using Pygame. The talk will consists of a summary of some of the libraries and tricks JJ used for his two PyWeek entries. It will be covering topics such as PGU, generator-based animations, and state machine based levels.
  • Harry Tormey, Who is it? This talk will cover the in’s and outs of working with Facbook and pylons while giving an update on a social network game I am currently working on. (This talk will cover a lot of the material skipped over in the August presentation)

    JqueryTwitter: A simple Twitter Pylons example using Jquery and python-twitter

    Being able to write applications for facebook is nice but if you really want to be all hip and buzzword 2.0 compliant you need to be able to add ajax and Twitter to your repertoire. With this in mind I decided to put together a simple little demo which uses Jquery/python-twitter to scrape, search and update a list from the twitter public time line in “real time” every time you type a letter in a text box. You can grab the source here.

    In times of yore developing any web application involving Javascript meant wading through a sewer of browser incompatabilites and crafting inelegant hacks to deal with the fact that the majority of people surf the web using old non standards compliant web browsers (i.e internet explorer 6). To add insult to injury the tools available for developing Javascript back in those ancient times totally sucked.

    Fast forward to 2009 and we have awesome debugging tools like firebug and webkit inspector which make web development a somewhat more manigable proposition. Apart from nicer debugging tools the Javascript scene has been flooded with a wave of sweet libraries (mochikit, yui, Jquery, etc) all designed to abstract away common tasks and annoyances (browser incompatabilities I’m looking at you). Add to all of this the recent focus by brower makers on Javascript performance (v8, JavaScriptCore, etc) and you will find that developing Javascript today is incomparably nicer than in the bad old days.

    Most of the secret ajax sauce that powers this example can be found in demo/public/search.js. My library of choice for this project is Jquery, which I picked due to the fact that there has been a ton of plugins written for it, it’s been around since 2006 and is very straight forward to use.

    The application comes bundled with Jquery and python-twitter. It assumes a basic familiarity with both Javascript/Jquery, that you have read chapter two and three of the excellent freely available pylons book and or that you know your way around Pylons. Unlike my facebook example this demo should serve straight out of the box (after you serve up development.ini with paster visit http://127.0.0.1:5330/search/index). Enjoy.

    October 1, 2009

    HelloPylons: A hello world example for Facebook using Pylons and PyFacebook

    As a follow up to my talk at the PyWebSF meet up I decided to put together a “hello world” style facebook app. The goal of the app is to illustrate clearly the relationship between what gets displayed on your facebook app’s canvas page and what get’s sent back to the sever hosting your app via it’s facebook callback. You can download this application here. To reiterate some points I made in my presentation, the basic flow of a facebook application is like so:

    • Someone visits your application (i.e http://apps.facebook.com/yourapp/), what they see is the canvas.
    • Visiting the canvas causes facebook to makes a callback to your application (i.e http://www.harryisawesome.com/yourapp/callback/)
    • The information passed by facebook in the callback is parsed by your application which then determines what gets returned and hence displayed in the canvas.
    • Think proxy (indirect connections).
    The full list of goals for the HelloPylons application are: Keep syntax as simple as possible (no decorators, etc), Keep all logic in the controller so its easy for a Pylons novice to see whats going on, print and decode everything that gets sent in the facebook callback to the console in plain english.

    The application comes bundled with the pyfacebook library and assumes that you have read chapter two and three of the excellent freely available pylons book and or are familiar with the basics of how Pylons works. I also assume that you have read the facebook developer getting started page.

    In order for this demo to work you will need to edit development.ini, change the port to something appropriate and add the api_key, app_id, url and secret key for your application. All of these should be provided when you create an application on facebook (follow the instructions on the facebook developer getting started page).

    September 30, 2009

    Slides from my talk on Facebook and Pylons

    I had a great time speaking about the challenges of developing Facebook applications in Python using Pylons at the PyWebSF meet up last night. The focus of my talk was on Facebook’s canvas/callback http request flow and how to handle it within your Pylons controller. I will be doing a follow up talk at the October PyGameSF meet up where I will demo a Facebook game I have been working on. The slides for the meetup can be found here. I will post a hello world Facebook/Pylons example in the near future.

    September 17, 2009

    PyGameSF meetup Wednesday September 23 6pm @ Main San Francisco Public Library

    Filed under: Games, Interesting, Meetup, Programming, Python, Talk — Tags: — admin @ 9:39 pm
    The September PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

    August 7, 2009

    PyGameSF meetup Wednesday August 12th 6pm @ Main San Francisco Public Library

    Filed under: Interesting, Meetup, Python, Talk — Tags: — admin @ 2:48 pm
    The August PyGameSF meet up will be at the STONG conference room on the first floor of the main San Francisco public library beside civic center BART. The library closes at 8pm so we will reconvene to frjtz on hayes street for dinner/drinks afterwords.This month’s presentations are:

    • Eric Bieschke and Casey Duncan: Xenotrader, a space trader MMO for the iPhone. The presentation will include such weighty topics as: Developing on Google App Engine, using jQuery and WebKit to create an interactive game, composing game sprites using nothing but CSS, HTML, masking tape and dental floss.
    • Andrew Turley, Harry Tormey: Who is it?, anatomy of a facebook guessing game. This presentation will cover what it takes to build a facebook game while maintaining a modicum of sanity using pylons and
      sqlalchemy.

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