Jwendl.NET

I will be attending Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) for 2008 in Los Angles. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft has to offer as far as insight on the new tools goes. I am excited for the pre-conference session I signed up for also titled Performance by design using the .NET Framework. I plan on blogging about this when ever I can. So keep your eyes glued to my crappy blog and you may learn a thing or two.

While working on a school project using wxPython and XML I was intrigued by the way that Python wants you to handle XML. You have three options, 1) expat, 2) SAX or 3) DOM. All three methods happen to be very disgusting to implement. I decided that it would be worth time spent to find a good way to convert XML to an extensible object structure. I actually found that method at this URL http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/149368. The best part of this snippet is that you can call an elements name, get their child, get the name of the child, get an attribute all really fast (because the author used expat).  

for child in element.children :
	if child.name == "Panel" : 
		pnl = wxPanel(frame, pos=(child.getAttribute("x"), child.getAttribute("y")), size=(child.getAttribute("width"), child.getAttribute("height"))) 
		for control in child.children : 
			self.setControl(pnl, control) panels.append(pnl) 
		else : 
			self.setControl(frame, child)

I have developed a fairly decent way of getting my gamertag on my website side bar without using Iframes. It uses an API that was developed by Duncan Mackenzie. I just take the data and place it on my SideBar.ascx for BlogEngine. This script will work pretty much anywhere though.

More...

The word API is defined as an Application Programming Interface, or rather it is a set of code that allows an external appliation to affect a part of an appliation. If you were to ask what my favorite thing to work on as far as programming or software design is concerned it is in this field. Realistically that is what the Web 2.0 hype is all about. The easy creation of dynamic controls and the ability to access functionality from external applications.

One thing that was made was the tooltip add for World of Warcraft that http://www.wowhead.com/ created. Here is a test of this API:

Merciless Gladiator's Touch of Defeat

The easier you setup an API, the more likely it is going to be used. This may sound obvious, but there are a lot of poor software out there that ignore this fact. There are a lot of things to consider when developing an application and the easy use of APIs should be added to this lengthy list of considerations.

Well our team got 8th place in the region, and 1st place on campus for the programming contest. We tried really hard and were right with many things that we did. One of the problems we kept getting a "wrong answer' on because the test cases were screwed up. I sent out a request to the judges to double check the test cases. They said the test cases and solutions were correct and our team had a "wrong answer". So we skipped it and moved on, only to find out an hour later our prediction was correct and their test cases were inaccurate.

When all was said and done we had 5 minutes left on the clock and we were almost done with our 6th problem out of ten when we had a formatting issue with printf. Then time was up, it is really so unforgiving. At least we competed and we got first place on the campus which is a good thing. Also getting 8th is not that bad either especially with the turnout of teams. You can look at the results here http://cs.unomaha.edu/~acmregn/rankorder.html so long as they keep the link up. Look for University of Minnesota : null_ptr

Afterwords I went to a buddy's house and played an X-box game called Gladiator and had a few drinks. I am nice and calm at the moment (almost ready to pass out.) Tomorrow I get to work on programming code all day long yay for me.