This is a list of things I like about Halloween and October in general:
- The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury. My dad gave me a copy of this book when I was younger and I try to read it once a year. It’s atmospheric, a little bit creepy, and very well illustrated.
- Scary movie marathons on TV. October is the best month for Lovecraft, Cenobites, and John Carpenter’s magnificent rock guitar solos. Srsly – he scored In the Mouth of Madness and throughout the movie you can hear him shredding in epic fashion.
- The word Samhain. Quite possibly the most Halloween-y word ever. You basically just tack it on to any word you can think of you’ve generated a band name, movie title, fantasy locale, or sci-fi character. Check this out: “Dude, I love the part in Samhain’s Holiday 2 where Pete Samhain goes to Samhain Gorge and that Toothbrush of Samhain song comes in. I totally saw them play Meadowbrook! (speaker air guitars a wicked ToS lick)”
- This picture my wife took of me in a Halloween mask. It’s like a Mardi Gras version of the doctor’s mask from Assassin’s Creed II - which is in turn a Hollywood version of the beak doctor from the Middle Ages.
It’s a great college football month – unless you happen to be a Wolverine in the RichRod era. Which I am. Ok, scratch this one, we’ll just go with four things.
In other news, the finance tool is still progressing nicely. Version 1.4.1 was released today and features expense searchability and date-based filters to limit the amount of data you see at one time. It’s still only marginally useful when compared to “real” finance tracking tools, but it’s been a great project and with a few more features it should actually be useful for my wife and I.
Here’s a screenshot of the main screen:
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As project cycles go, this one appears to have some staying power. I’ve definitely passed through Phase 1 (OMFGthisissoexciting) and Phase 2 (WTFhowdoesthiswork?), and I’m solidly in Phase 3 (The Grind). One of the most exciting things was the fact that I look a few weeks off (to play Castlevania: Lords of Shadow) and I was able to get back into development quickly without having to re-learn too much.
Also, I decided to bit the bullet and design some of the GUI interfaces with a tool called wxGlade, which is like a GUI for your GUIs. With it you can create and connect wxPython graphical interfaces without having to write Python code from scratch or tweak layout components manually. wxGlade provides most of the basic wxPython controls and a “self-explanatory” (quotes intended) interface for organizing them into dialoges, frames, etc… Once you’re done it will generate code that can be integrated into an existing app. In theory you can generate entire GUI programs from wxGlade, but I found several features either missing or obfuscated to the point that they appeared to be missing. In any case, it generated a much nicer new expense dialog. See for yourself:
vs.
Umm… yeah, mine looks like total crap and wxGlade earns it’s keep. The problem is you can’t quite specify *everything*, so I always end up having to hand-edit the generated code – generally a big fat bad idea. I guess provided you don’t have to make too many tweaks to the GUI, you should be ok. I’ll spin through some of the other hideous dialogs over time and see if I can’t make them a little bit prettier.
The end – happy Halloween!
