For The new bugfix assingment this quarter I decided to path
the Boto library. Boto is an awesome python module for working with
Amazon web services. In particular I wrote a patch for the route53
portion of boto. My patch added a new function which made it easy to update
route53 dns records. Previously in order to update a record one had to delete
the existing record and then recreate with the desired modifications. My
new function takes care of this by allow you to just specify a new Record
object that is used to define the modifications. The code itself is simple,
just 2 calls to a function that lets you create or delete records. After I
wrote the function i came across a previously created function that did the
same thing. It however was not a part of the importable boto module. The
commit is located at
https://github.com/rossdylan/boto/commit/f6497902ea017c9e50fe8c8a922d8ae991b33b4f
I have yet to try and get this pulled into main boto, I plan on cleaning
it up a bit and added a few more features before trying to get it merged in.
Right now myself and the rest of the robocode team are working
away on finishing up the rest of the project. Tomorrow is the final day of
the FOSS class and everyone is working on different sections of RoboCode.
I am working on uploading robot code and storing it. The other team members
are spread out across making facebook authentication work, and getting both and
backend and the frontend running on openshift. Everything is starting to come
together and we are planning on being here for most of the night. In other news
the raspberrypi comes out tonight. Hopefully I will be able to snag one
This is a remarkaly simple script to find services on a network
using multicast. It doesn't really do anything else. The code size
is small, and the api is simple. It fills a small niche that I needed
to fill for another project. Check it out on my github,
https://github.com/rossdylan/Helixode-SD
College life has been busy as of late so I have not been
updating this blog much. Anyway In the last few weeks a lot has happened.
In the FLOSS seminar not much progress has been made on the creation of
games, however we have learned a whole lot about the redhat cloud
openshift, and python wsgi. Outside of school, I have been hired by a
content aggregation company called newstex. I will primarily be working
on python apps in "the cloud". Finally I was also made an RTP for computer
science house. This just means I am now a CSH sysadmin, so I help run
house systems and troubleshoot things when shit hits the fan.
This post is a little belated, however
better late then never. For the FLOSS seminar
I had to create a paper prototype of my game idea.
My idea was a combination of the bejeweled mechanic,
and the hacking minigame from bioshock. The prototype
I created was a lot of little paper squares with different
types of pipes on them. The goal was to turn and switch the
squares to complete pipes. During the play testing several
different variations were tossed around. This was helpful
in identifying what mechanics I wanted to focus on. It
also helped to start balancing the game and making it
easy enough to be casual, but challenging enough to
maintain interest. In the end the class
decided on 3 games to develop, sadly mine was not one
of them, however I did join a team developing a
modified version of robocode, a programming game.p
Since I had a serious attack of apathy over break I neglected to work on
the floss homework. As such I was left to do the majority of it Monday night.
Which somehow I pulled off. The code is located in
this repo: https://github.com/posiden/rit-floss-hw1
For this homework my plan of attack was to first analysise how the 2 examples
worked seperately and then figure out how to integrate them into a single demo.
To implement the full functionality of builings and tiles I made a class
which holds all tiles that can possibly be placed. This makes it easier to add
new tiles later on. Once I had the Tiles class in place I could begin working
on the draw method. Combining both examples draw method, was surprisingly
easy. All I had to do was copy the image drawing code, and make it work using
my generic Tiles class. So at this point the 2 examples have been combined
and are working. However I have yet to work on switching event handling
over to jquery. I attempted to start working on this, and quickly realized
that my brain was no longer functioning at full capacity due to
lack of sleep. I will finish up that last little bit tomorrow morning.
This blog was thrown together really suddenly last night after I finally hacked
rss support into the gibsy code. So, because of the sudden appearence of this
blog I decided to explain a bit about GIBSY. GIBSY Stands for GIt Blogging
SYstem. The reason it exists is because I needed a blog for the floss course I
am taking. I originally had a wordpress blog hosted on my server typhon.
However typhon had a sudden and horrible death by shorted power supply. Thus I
was left without a blog. This happened on a friday, so that weekend I sat down
and wrote the core of GIBSY. GIBSY works off a cloned git repo. When you
install GIBSY it creates a git repository and it runs a FAPWS3 http server to
host the content in the git repo. The idea is that whenever someone pushs to
the git repo the blog automatically reloads the content. This is acheieved
using git hooks. So that is gibsy, the source is up on github so go check it
out. http://github.com/posiden/GIBSY
Welcome, to a blog, however this is no ordinary blog, this is the first blog
hosted by gibsy, a blogging software written by Ross Delinger after the server
hosting his wordpress blog gave up the blue smoke. Anyway. The main purpose of
this blog was originally to chronicle my adventures through a seminar on FLOSS
development and casual web games. However since I went and wrote my own
blogging platform for this, I decided to just make this into my own blog.
Anyway that is all for now.
--Ross
So For the seminar FLOSS class I was tasked with finding and fixing a bug in
existing open source software. This was actually a bit of a challenge because I
ended up spending more time writing the GIBSY blogging platform then I did
looking for bugs (I do believe the critera for the assignment was actually met
with this though, I added issues to gibsy and then uploaded patches to gibsy
and closed the issues). However just to make sure I also submitted code to a
project I work on frequently. The schongo modular irc bot.
https://github.com/DarkDNA/Schongo. Since schongo recently underwent a rewrite
to bring it up to python 3.2 alot of its modules also needed a rewrite. So I
took up the task of patching the santa tracker module. (Seemed appropriate due
to the season). To do so I fixed the various unicode differences between
python2 and python3 (instead of u"String", we just need "String"). I also fixed
up the usage of urllib which proved to be a tad annoying due to how strings
changed between python versions. Finally as an added bonus I patched a
vulnerability where eval as used when it should not have been. The closed
issue, with attached commit is here: https://github.com/DarkDNA/Schongo/issues/1
--Ross
For a while now I have been struggling to find a proper place to
put this blog. First it was on one of my development
servers, then it was on my desktop, and now
It is sitting on a VPS I help manage. However during this long
drawn out ordeal GIBSY has evolved, it now uses the twitter
bootstrap library to look some what decent now. Feed back
on the new look is of course always welcome.
--Ross