With my new job underway I have some free time that I am plugging with two old hobbies: the equestrian team and pottery class. No, that’s right… ah, writing a finance app in Python and playing video games. More on the former later; more on the latter now.

I beat Arkham Asylum with a completion score of 90%. I solved 100% of the Riddler Challenges, including the unlisted final Amadeus Arkham riddle. The attention to irrelevant Gotham City villans was impressive – they even plumbed the depths of the Alice in Wonderland themed characters by showcasing the ridiculous Jervis Tetch, Dumfree and Deever Tweed, and Humphry Dumpler. I guess if you didn’t really care about the Bat-a-verse the game would still be pretty good, but if you’re a comic book fanatic, it’s *really* good. Finally in Batman news, GameInformer just ran a cover story on Batman: Arkham City, which sounds like it will be even better (“…and it sounds even BETTER than when I’m singing out!”).

After Batman I participated in a two-for-two trade with one my friends. I sent Bayonetta and Batman out into the world and received Heavy Rain and Demon’s Souls in return. Demon’s Souls is famously difficult and my wife thinks it would make her punch through walls and flip the apartment over, but I’m giving it a go. I don’t have an incredible amount of time and my typical playing style (bull rush. attack. everything.) is leaving me bloodied and annoyed. SO – I’m taking it upon myself to show that I’m a learner and trying to play a calmer and gentler game of Demon’s Souls. Also, I’m the thief – so I can’t even wield the big weapons anyway. But that’s ok, it’s fun.

Ok, on to the former. v1.0.0 of FINally is about to be released (to my wife and I)! I’ve made pretty good progress implementing some under-the-hood features like a new SQLite backend using Elixir and a new grid-based GUI front-end using wxPython. The first version of this tool focuses on getting the basics (creating, reading, updating, and deleting) to work in an extensible and clean way. What does this mean? It means the tool looks like complete ass and will probably not approve in appearance until all of the guts are there. Skinning the tool will probably be a task all it’s own down the road because I know myself well enough to know that I could spend nearly infinite time tweaking the appearance.

Pretty much all of the FINally code has been re-written, although it might look familiar to those who have browsed it before because the underlying wxPython setup didn’t change. The biggest improvements were made to the database, the Python class/module layout, and general user friendliness.

The backend was written using Elixir, which is a Python module that basically sits on top of SQLAlchemy and prevents you from having to do any real work. Elixir’s worth lies in the fact that it allows you to create and access SQLite databases of moderate complexity with truly minimal code (not to mention a minimal understanding of Object Relational Mappers). I haven’t hit this speed bump yet, but I think the balance for this is the fact that if you ever *do* need to get into the nuts and bolts you basically have to learn SQLAlchemy, which you could have learned in the first place. I had to pick one of the two to go with and Demon’s Souls convinced me to go with Elixir.

On the Python class point, I did some research into classes to try and determine why I was occasionally doing this:

class foo(bar):

    var = 1234

    def __init__(self):

        # code here

..and why I was occasionally doing this:

class foo(bar):

    def __init__(self):

        self.var = 1234

        # more code here

The reason (class variables vs. instance variables) was interesting and clarifying. (Side note: yeah, so I’ve never really professionally written anything other than embedded C (not even C++) for automotive applications, and Perl for an occasional Venom-laden makefile. I think I’m a bit behind on my OOP. Also, I skipped Java entirely.) IN ANY CASE it was very interesting and it helped with the tool.

Finally, I tried to simplify the UI so that the average operator could sit down after a long night at the bar and tally up the receipts with no problem. As mentioned above, the skin I’ve chosen is “Butt Ugly”, but that will change in time. The basic use is: open tool, enter/edit data, close tool. The tool handles the rest. Hoorah!

Here’s a screenshot of the main screen:



The hideous green will be replaced by buttons, a menubar will appears, and I might even add some row-by-row icons to special expenses. Many things to come.

Ok, my wife has now gone to bed and this post has gone on long enough. I’ll write again later to talk about how you can contribute if you’re interested and also to shed some light on my love affair with Mercurial.

This just in (sort of) – there’s a new StackOverflow site for gaming:

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/

You can import your profile from StackOverflow, and you get one-hundo S.O. points for joining the site! There aren’t too many questions yet (~900), but it appears to be getting some decent traffic and if StackOverflow is any indication the community that will form around the site will be pretty useful for all kinds of gaming inqueries.

So far I’ve seen a lot of gaming hardware, older game ports, open ended (RPG, MMORPG), and strategy game questions – it’s been a good distraction from my usual obsessive Reddit and S.O. checking.

On another gaming note, I finished Fallout 3 last night and to say I was disappointed by the ending doesn’t even begin to capture my true feelings, which are must closer to rage. RAGE! First of all, the game ended so abruptly it was kind of shocking. I was walking around, thinking about how awesome my Plasma Rifle is and plotting my next adventure, and BAMN! Game over. Then, in an oft documented game design failure, it doesn’t let you continue exploring once you’ve ended (without installing a patch anyway).

My wife got my Batman: Arkham Asylum for my birthday, so I think I’m going to visit each unexplored location on the map and then call it a day. I have several suits of Enclave Tesla Power Armor, every weapon in the game, and a tonne of ammo, so I’m pretty much indestructible anyway. Pfff…

No, but seriously, it was a great game up until the ending. I recommend it to anyone interesting in open ended gunplay.

…Sex & The City 2 suuuucked.

About a month ago, my wife and I flew out to Boston to visit some good friends and see the city for the first time. Specifically, we visited my college roomate from Freshman, Junior, and Senior years and his charming and massively fun new fiancée. We haven’t been on such a pleasant trip in a long time and the city was wonderful – we’ll definitely be back. You can find some images at my wife’s site, Shadow&Soul Photo.

During this trip we had the misfortune of having some free-time align perfectly with the showtime for Sex & The City 2, which we saw, and which everyone in the group hated. The two-plus hour run time allowed for plenty of private thoughts such as: Is Kim Cattrall intentionally tanking her lines? Could this movie be any more offensive to Muslim peoples? Is Paul  falling asleep or having an aneurysm? Why am I not watching Predators, Splice, Avatar: The Last Airbender, etc… any of those must be better than this drivel!

(note: apparently karma caught up with Avatar: The Last Airbender and forced it to repay some cosmic debt for not casting any Asian actors by totally sucking. The opening weekend take was just over 40 million, and since Paramount sunk a total of 280 million into producing and marketing the film, I would call that “a loss”.)

I guess the point is I haven’t seen a great  movie in the theater in a long long time. I liked Iron Man II, but it wasn’t great. I liked Clash of the Titans in a campy monster-pr0n kind of way, but it *definitely* wasn’t great  (Also, the guy behind me shouting “Release the Kraken!” every 5 minutes didn’t help. Listen up, nimrod: there’s only one Kraken and he doesn’t get released right away because nobody would be able to stop him and he would destroy the city like Lizzie from Rampage and that wouldn’t be a very good start to Perseus’ journey now would it?). I remember thinking the Lord of the Rings movies were something special in the theater, and because I’m a comic book kinda guy I was equally impressed with V for Vendetta. Even 300 was pretty amazing the first time through. Lately though, no dice…. I’ll report back if I manage to buck this trend.

In other news I got a new job about a month ago and it has afforded me some much needed after work free time. In order to plug this free time leak I’ve spun up several projects – old and new:

1. Re-learning my once epic piano repertoire. My wife has mandated that I start with Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat Major Opus 9, Number 2. We’re probably going to have a dinner party and I’ll play it for some guests to give me some performance-like event to shoot for. I’m excited about this because it’s been a very long time since I’ve legitimately played any piano. I have a complete set of the International Library of Music piano compositions, and I have a whole binder full of things I performed when I was taking lessons…. so I’m good on  the music front.

2. I’ve dusted off my Fin-ally project and I’m going to try and get that rolling again. I have a few goals here: get better at Python, be less dumb about relational database schema, get even more familiar with Mercurial, and finally make something my wife and I can use to track our ridiculous video game/clothing/makeup/comic book habits. By the way, not all of those items apply to both members of the Sisco household. For example, Rachel doesn’t read comic books.

My friend Tim has been kind enough to point out all the things I’m doing wrong/poorly with my current database schema, so I’m going to start with that.  The Fin-ally Google Code page is active again, too – with a brand spanking new Mercurial repo and some updated tooling documentation.

By the way – conversion with complete history from Subversion to Mercurial was much simpler than originally anticipated but the online buzz and commentary about this process was fairly complicated for some reason. At the end of the day, all you have to do is enable the Mercurial “convert” command in your .hgrc file and then execute the convert command as such:

hg convert <SVN repo path> <local directory>

3. I have contracted my wife to create a new Realvelour.com banner image/colorscheme because I don’t really like the default one any more. That should be done sometime in mid to late August – so look out for that update!

Fin!

What the hell is Mastodon ftw! doing with 109 views in 14 days? Given that I am not a Mastodon fan-site and most of my friends and acquaintances don’t really care for Mastodon’s brand of prog-metal, this makes virtually no sense. It would make sense if I wrote a post called “Smushed-face cats and hand-drawn tools” and got a billion hits in one day, but this is crazy.

Thankfully Wordpress has a killer plugin called Wordpress.com Stats, which gives me data to turn into this:

As you can see, there was an unexplained spike in Mastodon post views in Mid-April. Because I’m kind of a data nerd, I find this interesting and kind of irritating in its inexplicableness (YEAH, IT’S A WORD). Maybe if I was a slick web developer I would be all like “oh yeah, that’s just your mid-April prog-metal traffic spike… GUH.” Unfortunately, I’m just a simple caveman embedded software engineer so all I can say is “it’s odd”.

I did some web traffic archeology and discovered that the search terms most used to find Realvelour were “mastodon”, “borat”, and “mastodon images”. This is congruent with the traffic, but doesn’t make the situation less weird because it implies that people are specifically searching for Mastodon and coming across my site. Like they go to Google, type in “mastodon images”, and Google says “OH, y0u sh0uld t0t3s ch3ck out Re@lv3lour.c0m… th3y h@v3 this *one* @rticl3 you would lik3″. I think not. I’m pretty sure Google talks like that, though.

Long story short, I found something that makes this all very sensible: a Spanish language metal discussion board linking to the image of Mastodon and Borat I posted. Realvelour.com is linked in a post, followed by a bunch of Spanish commentary. I’m sure it’s NSFW so don’t go trying to Google translate it at work or anything. It turns out somebody from Costa Rica found this image, posted it to a chat board, and started driving all sorts of Spanish metal traffic my way. Win? I’m not sure. All traffic is good traffic, but I’m pretty sure the Venn diagram for metal fans and kitten/tool drawing fans looks like this:

Otherwise known as what? That’s correct… the null set.

hoot.

haHA! You thought I had fallen off the wagon and started ignoring my Daily Tool responsibilities when I was, in fact, just busy playing Bayonetta and Assassins’s Creed 2 and slowly drawing this beast:

The halogen work lamp I drew a few tools back was from the same cordless tool set as this drill, which means they share an 18V battery pack.  So, in an attempt to be clever I copied the battery pack from the older drawing and used it as a base for this one. Unfortunately, because the work lamp drawing was horribly disproportionate, using it as my scaling base left me with some sort of floppy clown drill – a tool that totally sucks.

Out came the ruler and 30 minutes later I had a proportional grid from which to draw. Much better. To give you an idea of just how wrong the work lamp battery was, here it is side-by side with the proportionate battery:

In addition to corrected proportions, some serious shading upgrades were made between the first drawing and now. I shaded the drill by laying down a solid color with no depth, then selecting a slightly darker color and adding concentric bands of darklights. This ended up being pretty “patchy”, so I used the blur filter and a low-opacity eraser to clean it up. I’ll probably use this technique for the rest of the drawings.I’m proud to say that you can see increases in line quality and shading quality between these two pieces, as well as a general decline in jank.

Here are some bonus images in the form of the drill’s flesh and bones. “Bones” would be the outline and “Flesh” would be the shading with no outline at all. The flesh image looks like an impressionist piece of some sort, which is neat.

Tool #30 is definitely going to be the DeWilt Reciprocating Saw, so I’ll probably go back to some simpler tools this week.

————————————————————————————————————————————

And now for something completely different… my wife has asked me to build her a light box for photography stuff and I have agreed to do it with LEDs and then use it to take pictures of my Legos and other assorted games and toys. This project is wife-sanctioned and involves LEDs and construction. I am excited about this. I will try to spend less than $100.00.

My wife’s school gala was last weekend… on a boat! A yacht to be precise. This yacht:

The WSU Law School Gala was on the Ovation in the Detroit River this year. My wife’s friend’s parents were kind enough to take us to Detroit so we could avoid having to drive home, which allowed me to sample several gin gimlets in glasses of various sizes, which allows me to recall that this was the route we sailed:

It got really weird when we were sailing up the Edsel Ford (at least I think it was the Edsel Ford), but all in all the gala was excellent and we had a grand time. Here’s a picture of my wife looking radical and my goatee looking like it’s trying to escape from my face.

Also, in an act of what can only be described as un-ironic irony, they played “I’m on a Boat” not once, but twice, while we were on. the. boat.

I have been slacking off lately, taking a break to do things like “read books” and “go shopping for 6 hours,” but now I’m back. I am going to redouble my efforts to do a tool drawing every one to two days – depending on the tool complexity. I used the facetious quotes above because I’m so fond of them – but I actually am reading a new book, and I also actually spent six hours at Sommerset in Troy last Saturday looking for THE PERFECT DRESS. FOR MY WIFE. NOT FOR ME. SRSLY.

(segue)

This is a drawing of some sort of a ratcheting strap clamp that might be used to anchor item A to item B. For example, you could use this to anchor a canoe to a car roof. Or a car to a canoe – depending on the size of the canoe.

OR – you could strap a mattress to a car roof! (9:00 minutes in…)

Finally, I am fond that this Seinfeld clip is sub-titled in Portuguese. HA.

This drawing will be the fifteenth in my technically cartooned tools series – which means I am exactly one-half of the way done with my original 30-tool goal. To try and be a little more active reading other people’s blogs I’ve been wandering the blogosphere and I’ve noticed that more and more people I know are working on a daily/weekly/monthly creation project. My wife and several of my Facebook friends are participating in weekly self-portraits on Flickr and Facebook. I’m a proponent of these challenges because they help us be a little more structured with our creative endeavors. Trying to meet a quota can be a strong motivational force, and if you’re lucky enough to have people observing your art it becomes even stronger.

Finally, because I think this is awesome, King Panpan (whom I don’t know) who is compiling a 365 of the most radically Vectored bears you’ve ever seen.

Anyways, fifteen tools in I’m learning I don’t own as many awesome tools as I thought. Therefore you can expect to see more “creative” entries… like this one!

This is obviously a long handled tape pounder. You can use it to affix tape to things with great force. For example:

1. windows
2. moving boxes (with/without vases)
3. thin drywall
4. Saran wrap (…it never sticks by itself…)
5. fruits.

My wife wanted me to dedicate a tool to her and she suggested something “destructive” because that’s how she rolls.

I was talking to a co-worker about a game we both recently played – Dragon Age: Origins – and he mentioned a character specialization called a Reaver, which I had no idea existed. Apparently Reavers are Lich King/Revenant/Nazgul types, which puts them right up my video game alley. I’m so irked to have missed this specialization that I’m considering playing the whole 80+ hour game again just to get in a few hours as a Reaver. In any case, the discussion reminded me of how much I like customizing weapons in video games; and it inspired this creation:

As you can see, this piece of rare equipment gives you two impressive bonuses. Especially if you have ropes to cut and like citrus fruits. They should pay me to design video game weapons… I would be good at that.

In other news, I beat GOWIII and it was one, if not the, best game I’ve ever played. I think I’ll rank my favorite games in the next post.

I apologize for the ultra l337 post title. I’m a giant nerd.

Here’s the deal with my wife’s old computer: it’s actually a Shuttle I built three years ago when I lived in Iowa. I wanted it to play Vampire Bloodlines: Masquerade and it was basically underpowered as soon as I built it. The smallish power supply and MicroATX motherboard that the case mandated were not good choices.

Unfortunately it recently picked up a habit in which it refused to shut down and claimed that every running program needed to be forcefully terminated. I’m no computer engineer (or am I? yes. yes I am.) but I’m pretty sure this is bad and we decided to upgrade.

We ventured out to Micro Center to get parts to build a new machine because I like being subjected to the odor of humanity in tiny, dirty spaces and I’m really wild about semi-competent sales help. Thankfully we found a guy who actually knew what he was talking about and ended up with…. this!

awesome blue fan

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TECH SPECS!

• AMD Phenom II X3 720 (2.8GHz)
• ASUS mobo
• 1GB NVidia GeForce GT 220 (nothing radical, but enough to let me play Diablo III)
• 4GB DDR2 RAMZ
• 500GB hard drive (unfortunately no solid state drives and not into the Terrabytes)
• 2 state of the art blue LED lit case fans

Oddity #1: there are actually a total of four  DIMMs for RAM expansion, but as I recently learned, 32-bit Windows7 will only recognize 3.5 GB, and of that 3.5 GB only 3.25 will be available for application use. If we ever upgrade to Windows7 64 we’ll do another upgrade here. The sales guy was confident that I could run two 2GB chips and 21GB chips with no problem as long as I seated them in the correct DIMM.

Oddity #2: the motherboard had HDMI and DVI outputs and – I learned this after purchasing – it has an integrated ATI graphics chipset. Thankfully the integrated chipset is less powerful than the NVIDIA I bought, so I feel ok about this.

Welcome to the family, new computer. I hope the cats don’t knock you over.